The ladies trickled into the conference room. One by one the seats filled up as the chords of the piano drifted through the air and hovered in my mind. Even yesterday I wasn’t sure if I would share the three months that shaped me the most, but this morning I knew that I should. My heart pounded, but conviction helped me push the nerves aside. I needed no notes for this talk, only bravery and obedience. “Take off your shoes…for this is holy ground.” Initially I thought the Voice I heard speaking to my heart over the past month was meant for my main teaching scheduled for later that day, but I sensed it should be much earlier. “This is it. This is what I was talking about. Your story is My holy ground.” So, I stepped forward and shared how God picked up my broken pieces and transformed me to create something beautiful for His glory.
My life story, like everyone else’s, is written on the inside of my heart and recorded in the pathways in my brain. It is marked with all the seasons of life, with growth spurts and hardships and events that helped me gain strength and resilience in challenging times and flourish when the season turned. Sometimes, however, the challenge we face is not the hardship of winter, but rather trial by fire, drawn out draught or a tenacious tempest attempting to uproot us. It may be because of your own or someone else’s mistakes, like Moses escaping the Pharaoh’s wrath and finding himself in the desert with a flock of sheep, but it could well be heartache that came through nobody’s fault.
I wonder if God lets us go through calamities to break the mould our habits shaped for us, that His intended creation can be unveiled instead. I wonder if we would ever break problematic patterns, or even realize that they exist, if we don’t have to face tragedy that forces us to rethink our way of life. Through trial and error, you and I learned behaviours to help us build relationships and cope with life and over time those behaviours were entrenched in our neural pathways to such an extent that we don’t necessarily realize our instinctive responses. The pathways in our brains become stronger and more efficient year after year, resulting in habits and requires significant determination and conscious effort to change, but it is possible if you have the right incentive.
If we are to be transformed by the renewal of our minds and the healing of our hearts, we must make the conscious effort to change the pathways in our brains to something that honours our Creator and draw closer to the One that covers us with His unrelentless love. If we have the roots of our being firmly planted in Christ (Col 2:7), if we entrust ourselves completely to Him, He will build us up and renew us day by day. Paul explains that it simply makes sense that we give ourselves as a living sacrifice to Christ (Rom 12:1) and let Him transform us. I think it means that we must choose every day to lay ourselves down at His feet – our thoughts, our feelings and our actions – and in so doing align our lives to God’s will and purpose.
This means that, first of all, we tell Jesus the truth. We tell Him the things we don’t comprehend, the things in the Bible that doesn’t seem to make sense, we share our insecurities, how hard it is to forgive the person that has wronged you, how much you hurt, how angry you are, or that you don’t know how to risk sharing your heart again. Jesus has capacity for all our emotional displays and unmet expectations. He knows the secret struggles of our hearts and the obstacles we face. He can heal wounds and open doors and make a way. If you are forced to navigate through the emotional turmoil of identity crisis or loss, drawing close to Jesus at the foot of the cross in the Father’s loving embrace is where the healing and transformation start. In that place of intimacy with Jesus, you can discover who the woman in that embrace truly is and who she is called to be.
Secondly, we choose to align our lives to God’s truth as it is written in the Living Word. Beth Moore said that our reality, combined with God’s truth leads to freedom, but our reality combined with Satan’s lies, leads to bondage. If we choose to believe what Jesus says to be true about who we are – that we are designed uniquely and called according to His plan – we can live with purpose. If we choose to believe that His love for you and me is greater than our wildest imaginations, it can free us from debilitating perfectionism and self-deprecation. If we choose to believe that God is fitting everything into a plan for good, we can trust Him, even when the circumstances seem dire and far from our perception of ‘good’. We can then also let go of the desire to avenge offenses and forgive instead.
The day that Moses removed his shoes at the burning bush, God announced freedom for the Israelites, but it required tough negotiations with Pharaoh and 40 years wandering in the desert to break habits and learn to trust the only God that could lead them into abundance. But God was in the centre of the entire process and all throughout their wanderings they lacked nothing (Deut 2:7). God provided for all their needs. God, using Moses first and then Joshua to lead, gave the Israelites victories over powerful kings and they inherited fruitful land where they didn’t plant the seed or tended the crops, they could simply enjoy God’s blessings.
One thing, however, God asked of them and of us: “Will you serve Me and forsake all else?”
When the Israelites said yes, Joshua took a great stone and set it up under an oak tree in the sanctuary of the Lord as a reminder of their promise (Jos 24), a symbol of their lives laid down for God’s glory, and that generation served the Lord wholeheartedly.
I think this is what God is also asking from us. Will we trust Him with our life stories? Will we trust Him with the journey filled with seasonal change and sometime disaster? Will we let Him perform heart surgery on us and use the process to display His splendour? Will we let our entire being and our defining moments be the holy ground that God uses for good? I believe God’s gifts and His call are irrevocable. He never withdraws them when once they are given and He doesn’t change His mind about it (Rom 11:29). His grace and His call on your life stand forever.
Jesus came to offer consolation and joy in the place of mourning, to give beauty instead of ashes and a garment of praise instead of a heavy, burdened and failing spirit (Is 61:3a). He came to take our life stories with all its hurts and joys and events and turn it into something magnificent by moulding us into the image of Christ. In the safety of His arms, under the shadow of His wings, as we are rooted in Christ, God transforms us into strong, magnificent oaks of righteousness, distinguished for uprightness and right standing with God so that He may be glorified (Is 61:3b).
