Let Go of Your Past: Dropping Your Hindrances, Being Transformed, and Standing Strongનમૂનો

It’s Time to Fly!

They say that great people rise in dark times; I think that’s true. But I don’t think it’s necessarily because they have stronger personalities or are dramatically more gifted than the average person (although some are). I think it’s most often because they view life with a different lens, and they relate to their circumstances with a sort of “sixth sense.” This gives them a sense of hope in which they anticipate a positive outcome and position themselves for increase and/or blessing. History testifies to us that adversity is often the mother of invention, innovation, and creativity. Of course, adversity is also the father of disaster, destruction, and failure! So, hard times don’t always build great people, reveal better opportunities, or cause positive outcomes, but they certainly can.

Chaos and Confusion

I understand this well because of the adversity that I’ve navigated. I've done it well at times and not so well during other seasons of my life. But I don’t think I have ever experienced the frequency of challenges that my local community, my church, and I personally have faced over the last six years. Have you ever lived a season so hard that you feared you’d never escape it? It can feel like a nightmare so real that even in the daylight, you can’t shake the shadows off your soul. I certainly have, and one thing I have learned through these tough years is that what the devil calls buried, God calls planted!

I live in Northern California, and let me tell you, the last several years have been anything but easy. We’ve endured the devastation of the Carr Fire, walked through the chaos of a global pandemic, felt the sting of racial tension, and carried the hard work of listening, learning, and pursuing reconciliation. Layered on top of that, I’ve weathered seasons of personal criticism, navigated major staff transitions in our ministry, and grieved deeply as we lost the matriarch of our house, a dear friend of mine, to cancer. That’s just a glimpse of the journey.

It’s hard to describe what it’s like to live in an era of so much chaos and confusion. Words could never do it justice. One of the greatest challenges we were facing during the COVID-19 season was the feeling of uncertainty, which created fear in all of us. The truth is that certainty rooted in circumstances is actually fantasy; it’s not reality. However, the illusion that we are in control of our future, and therefore that life is predictable, brings us a lot of peace. The opposite is true when the circumstances of everyday life change continually, without notice, and especially when you’re facing things you have never experienced before.

Certainty in the Person of Jesus

Yet there is a certainty found in the person of Jesus, an assurance rooted in the nature of a good God who cares for us and causes all things (good things, bad things, everything) to work out in our favor when we trust and serve Him. I’ve believed this truth in my head for decades, but much like the foundational pylons underneath skyscrapers that have been pounded into the ground to support the height and weight of those huge buildings, the intensity of the hour was pounding this truth deep into our souls.

In the midst of those challenges, I gathered together seventy of our leaders to inspire a new resolve and to build a strategy to get us off the proverbial mat. I honestly had no idea what I was going to say, but there was a righteous anger burning in my spirit that needed an outlet. I began with the first few scripted lines of my exhortation: “We are going through a massive….” I was about to say, “a massive transition,” but before I could squeak out the word transition, the Lord interrupted my thoughts. He said, You are not going through a transition; you are going through a metamorphosis. Transition is the process of going from one season to another; metamorphosis is not about changing seasons but changing you.

I personalized the message and shared it with the team as we all sat there sort of shell-shocked. I continued, “The caterpillar is attached to the earth, but we have endured the dark season of the cocoon to be transformed into a butterfly and be attached to the heavens. The caterpillar spends about two weeks in the cocoon before emerging with wings and a passion to fly. We are emerging from this ‘COVID cocoon’ with a passion to attach ourselves to our heavenly calling.”

If you are going through a dark season, I want to encourage you to stick your head out of the cocoon because you are about to fly!

In tomorrow’s devotion, we’ll learn more about what it means to undergo this metamorphosis so we can be transformed, becoming stronger, bolder, and more at peace even in the midst of the difficulties of life.

Thought: There is a certainty found in the person of Jesus, an assurance rooted in the nature of a good God who cares for us and causes all things to work out in our favor when we trust and serve Him.

Prayer: Lord, guide me as I begin to emerge from the cocoon of my dark season, and prepare me to fly in You!