I find myself in a contemplative mood tonight. I suppose it could be that it's the eve of the eve of a New Year. It kind of makes one reflect on the events of the current year. As I sit here the words of a song by Plumb come to mind...
"Standing on a road I didn't plan
Wondering how I got to where I am
I'm trying to hear that still small voice
I'm trying to hear above the noise"
It feels like that's been my life this year. Struggling to hear above the noise of my doubts. Struggling to hear the still small voice that is God when everyone around me is trying to advise as to what He is or might be saying about me.
I look back on 2014 and I'm nowhere near where I wanted to be. I should be a semester into a Bachelor's in Biblical Studies. I'm working the job that I thought for sure God was going to phase me out of this year. Instead the job that I felt He wanted me in the most is gone. And so I question, "How did this happen? What did I hear wrong? What's wrong with me that You changed the plan?"
Then I think about all of the thought that went into picking out my word for the year. To be honest I argued with God over my word. It was weird. Everyone else got to pick words like give, fight, love, etc. Not me, God give me Pieces.
Pieces.... Kind of what my year seems like. It feels like the dreams from January are in pieces around me and most of them seem to be lost. Pieces kind of indicates something is broken, right? Who wants to go into the year with a word that hints of brokenness?
Of course God also gave me a really awesome song to go along with my word.
Still, it feels like my brokenness gets put on display for anyone to see. Pieces means vulnerability. It means that people all around me get to see the messiness of my life.
As I reflect on the past year though I start to see the truth in the line that says...
"He knows how to make your pieces fit."
See the beauty of the word pieces means that I am broken, I am messy, I'm emotional and I've hurt a lot this year, but God has taken those pieces and is making a mosaic out of them.
A mosaic by definition is a picture or pattern produced by arranging together small colored pieces of hard material, such as stone, tile or glass. In my case the material is the broken pieces of my hopes and dreams that when God steps in He knows exactly how to take the things that might not have quite worked out the way I had hoped and He makes them something beautiful all the same. The even better part is that they become something far more beautiful than they would have been otherwise because God designed and redesigned the mosaic of my life.
When I'm in pieces that's when God's work shines through the brightest. When I'm in pieces I'm not trying to hold myself together so people see the God I think they should see. They see the God that is designing and redesigning me. I suppose when I look at it through that lens the painful moments where I was being broken in some way have a new beauty and meaning.
So..... What do you think God will do with Reckless Abandon for 2015? Yep, technically it's two words, but it needed the adjective....
Oh, and I have a song for that too...
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