What Were You Made For?

But be glad and rejoice forever in what I create; For behold, I create Jerusalem for rejoicing and her people for gladness. I will also rejoice in Jerusalem and be glad in My people.
~ Isaiah 65: 18-19

For those word picture lovers, imagine that you have a four-legged table with one leg shorter than the other three. Yes, how annoying, every time you sit down at one end you’re playing teeter totter with the person across from you. So just like an intelligent human being you find the perfect size book to prop up under and problem solved. For those of word processing minds, as I tend to be, I can just think of the thousands and thousands of questions I continually come back to with God. God, why am I here? Why did you make me? What purpose to do serve in Your will and in this world? Well, for many of us that are fluent in Christianeze, the “correct” answer is God has a wonderful plan for your life and He has called you to something glorious to reach people and do things that no one else can do. Just because that’s the normal answer doesn’t make it false, however, there is another piece of that answer that I feel gets left out quite a bit. As simply stated in Isaiah, God created us for joy and gladness. Which is disheartening when I feel like the only thing I have really experienced is pain and sorrow. God designed us for a perfect life, for a joyful life with Him. Unfortunately, our reality pushes the boundaries of what we are capable of and not what we were meant to do. We, as a people, can endure pain, can live in despair, can grow up without fathers, and know life without love. We have found that we are capable of sustaining all this but we fail to remember what we were made for and what we were designed for. So we tend to be the book shoved up under the table: sustaining weight, keeping balance, and making life easier instead really fixing the problem. However, a book was not designed for that function, books are meant to be read, to inform, challenge, etc. The irony is that we can take a carpentry book, teaching how to repair a table, and stick it up under the leg of that table and never see fix the table. We end up falling into the world of the “good enough”. If no one bothers to open the book up, all that is missed and is just tucked up under the table to never be discovered. God created us for gladness, for ours and for His. He rejoices and is glad in His people. You were made because you are His joy and yet we can come to believe that we are only good to keep a table propped up. We are a book full of what God has implanted inside us to know Him, love others fully, heal the sick, and conquer Satan and we just use these characteristics to just get through the unpleasantries. We can close that book to God and just use them to prop ourselves up under burdens we were never created to sustain. So take a load off, open yourself up to what God has written in your book.

Returning from Narnia

To share a revelation that has been brought to my attention this last week, I want to suggest how silly yet empowering it is. If you were like and are acquainted with the Chronicles of Narnia, you know the intense moments that are depicted in these stories from the dead shaven Aslan on the stone tablet to Edmund destroying the icy apparition of the White Witch. In returning back to my home after Focus, I have discovered that I was once a queen in a foreign land fighting wars and mysterious powers now only to exit the wardrobe a child in a restless world. At Focus, my fellow Narnians and I had a community like no other, laugh, loved, and cried with all our hearts and saw ourselves and each other grow into these royal statures. Now I’m home and no one knows or understands Narnia and if you try to tell them it is a mere fairy tale. Also, I am once again the child, the real world is unaware of my acquired strength and wisdom, they just restrain me to the shell of my old self.

To my fellow Narnians:
We have seen this dream world. We have experienced great battles, victories and defeats, in this place that no one outside could understand. As we return to the frontlines of the real world, know that you are not alone. AS a past citizen, I have seen you as a royal power, a king/queen fighting and learning in great strength of the Almighty. As you return home, that king/queen has grown and taken residency within yourself, your character and personality, you are not the child others may see. So I remind you, my fellow Narnians, as you face this real world, know of your redeemed nature and developed wisdom and if that is too hard for now: reach out to your brothers and sisters. We will remind you of the king/queen we saw of you in Narnia. For, even though that was not the real world, what we experienced was the real you. And we will stand locked arm in arm to sustain that image in your mind. You do not fit back into that well-sealed box you left in, but a king/queen in His power. Take heart, for soon the real world will see you as the Narnians have seen you.