If you have been blessed or just plain lucky for most of your life, (like me) you can read all sorts of good advice and it makes little long term difference. I am reading a book I first read in the year 2001, at the turn of the new millennium. Thirteen years later I am reading the same book with a different set of eyes. The book is in no way different to the book I first read, however my life experience is very different from the first time I read it.
The last four and a half years have been very different. I have always had a safe secure job through most of my career. I left one job to move to another, usually a promotion. Then 3 years ago God and circumstances dictated that I was required to just walk away from my job, with nowhere to go other than home. This brought with it a journey of pain, renewal and healing. God has used this time to rebuild my foundations in a way that could not have happened had these events not occurred. Painful and difficult yes' but absolutely necessary to bring me into a place where something different can happen. It is said that repeating the same things over and over and expecting a different result is in fact a definition for insanity!
I am not insane! ( Probably a little crazy, but not insane). As I stand looking toward the promise of a new year, it is with renewed hope. Although in some senses I have no more security than I did when I walked away from my job 3 years ago. This year will be different because I am different. The experience of the faithfulness of God and my own growth means that I am better equipped than I was to take the same situation and look at a much bigger picture in 2014.
God has walked an journey with me that I could not have experienced any other way. I look forward to a brave new world where I will be forced to go beyond myself and into the realm of faith and for that I am duly grateful. I had not previously led a life without difficulty or challenge, but it was not at the level of personal struggle that rocked me to my core. Who am I? What does it mean if I can't what I have always done? Who will I be at the end of this?
So as I reread this book about life and being creative in life, I do so with a vastly different experience base. I have become "long sighted" rather than "near sighted" ( which comes from paying to much attention to myself rather what God might be up to in this process, "navel gazing" by any other name) I can take on board the author's shared experience of pain, failure and renewal without the response "Oh that would never happen to me."
It can and it possibly will!
Until next time.
As Trevor Yaxley once said to me " Never waste a good Trial!!"
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