Friday, August 23, 2019

One keystroke from brokenness to wholeness

Most of our lives we make our best of efforts in the direction of effort. In giving all of ourselves to the quest for change, we tend to make a meal of what could otherwise be a powerful work of God.
Like everything in life, we make the path straight for ourselves when we get out of God’s way and allow divine forces for good to have their way in and through us to the glory of the Lord.
But such things are interminably difficult for us because we’re all, of a sense, control freaks when it comes to our own lives. We want change and the things that we feel God is calling for us to do to get there, but at various points along the journey we fail to trust, fear gets in the way, and our love for not-so-good things besmirches our opportunities to redeem wholeness from areas of brokenness in our lives.
Just as God’s plan for our lives is just and wholly good, our Lord gives us the simplest of cues for how to step forward; from whatever position of life we find ourselves.
Take the symbol of a keystroke. The simplest of figures that is literally typed billions of times every day.
You know the keystroke! It’s the semi-colon. It depicts an incomplete sentence. What comes after the semi-colon further defines the previous section of the sentence. Indeed, the semi-colon clarifies the previous part of the sentence and gives the whole sentence meaning. And the most inspiring life stories are come-from-behind, against-the-odds stories motion pictures are made of. Such stories make us believe what is the very best about life. And all of us want such a life story.
The semi-colon literally means that the future is open, that the past has only certain relevance, and that everything turns on how we use the present.
We all need hope. But some need more hope than others. Or, better put, there are times in all our lives when we seem to need hope more desperately than at other times.
The symbol of the semi-colon suggests that we transcend the past, the reputation, the limits, and the barriers that would otherwise hold us away from achieving what would give us hope for change.
And if we seek with all our heart to convert our brokenness into wholeness, acknowledging that reliance on God will lead us all the way there, with the concept of the semi-colon, we have the belief that we have both the method and the vision to get there.
No matter what you’ve been through, no matter what plagues you, no matter what your internal scripts are, and no matter how arduous the way forward is, you can do it. God can be read in the Scriptures as saying, “Look to me! Rely on me! Do not rely on your own understanding.” (For instance, Proverbs 3:5-6)
God is calling each of us at every point in our lives to live a semi-colon kind of life. Nothing speaks to the purposes of life itself amid the context of each of our lives better than the concept of the semi-colon. What is now and what is coming is all that is relevant.
The past, more and more as time goes on, has less and less relevance. God calls us constantly to transcend the ‘pasts’ that hold us apart from our potential.
Do you see how GOOD God is?

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