Fertile
Ground
“I
had done everything I knew how to do to draw as near to the heart of
God as I could, only to find myself out of gas on a lonely road,
filled with bitterness and self-pity. To suppose that I had ended up
in such a place by the grace of God required a significant leap of
faith.”
Barbara
Brown Taylor (Leaving Church)
Sometimes
God calls us in paths not of our choosing, and we learn this simply
by waking up one morning knowing that our direction has changed.
Sometimes, it comes as a shifting in the bones, a magma movement
deep in the interior chambers of our heart. A knowing of, “I can't
do this anymore,” as surely as if a wall had been constructed
around us while we slept with only one door leading out to a path
both unrecognizable and foreign. Sometimes it comes in the form of a
pink slip, a diagnosis, or the blinding pain of a heart attack.
Sometimes, it issues from the mouth of a spouse, saying, “I want a
divorce.” As our tectonic plates shift, we understand that life as
we have known it is over. Often, it is a terrifying, shattering
moment.
If
you've ever been in an earthquake, you know the feeling of the very
ground beneath you feet shaking, falling away, becoming unstable. For
all your life, you have assumed that you could plant your feet on the
earth and depend on it to be firm and reliable—and now, it isn't.
It is staggeringly confusing. Being given an abrupt change of
direction is like that. We almost always receive the news as
negative, and feel devastated, overwhelmed. But what if we, like
Barbara Brown Taylor, could entertain the possibility that this too
is the movement of God. In Leaving Church, she goes on the
say, “If I could open my hands, then all that fell from them might
flower on the way down. If I could let myself fall, then I too might
land in a fertile place.”
We
don't know the mind of God. We may believe with all our hearts that
our will and God's will are one and the same, which makes unexpected
change even more difficult. But, what if we were to wake up every
morning with open hands. We might say, “It's me, God.
What is your plan for me today?” Who knows what fertile ground we
might fall into.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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