Step outside the box...He's there too

(and other things I'm learning along the way...)

my life has always been pretty tidy...
preacher's kid.
straight laced.
rule follower.

Always weighing choices with consequences,
always thinking of how things reflected on my Dad's vocation,
always considering how my decisions made others think of my God...
always
thinking
pondering
what
others
thought.

Not walking in freedom,
more easily held in chains of do's and do not's.

Having a form of Godliness
but denying the power-
of the liberty of
freedom IN Christ

[and I am in no way saying that grace is there, so sin can abound...don't misread!)

I think there are boundaries,
I think God's Word has rules for living
and I think those rules are for our benefit...
He truly does want us to have LIFE--
he wants our lives to be FULL
FREE
OVERFLOWING
with abundance...

I guess what I am seeing in my own life is the journey is not on course with what I thought ...
my life has taken turns I never (in my do A and B and you get C) imagined it would.
I've had to find God in the middle of all that.
I had Him
in this box
all neat and tidy.
He was fine there, as long as my rules were followed, my 'things' carried out, life following the script...

but what happens when there is a missing page in the play?
what happens when you find yourself
where you never thought you'd be?

did God leave you?
did you leave Him?

or

was He there all along and you just had to see Him...

Contained things are always easy to understand. If you have a box full of Legos, you have chaos controlled.
Pour those babies out and you have a mess.
It's the same mess you had IN the box...only IN the box it appeared organized.

My life was in a box, contained, neat, fixed-- but it was a mess.
It was dumped out and the mess was there for everyone to see.

But the God I held ever so tightly to IN the box, the one that made sense...
I found that HE was holding me
even more tightly
outside the box...

He was in the mess with me...
He was not always making it better,
but making ME better...
He let me rail, whine, cry and ask why...
He let me rant and act ridiculously...
He let me
look for sense in the mess...

He helped me see HIM
in new circumstances,
with new eyes,
in new ways...

because your faith is never stretched so much
as when
you are walking in paths you never imagined...

and it's never restored so much
as when you
you realize (and finally relish the TRUTH of it...)
He loves you, the beautiful mess of dynamic proportions, endlessly.