Learning to Seek Clarity

So much of my life pulls me away from my Original Design.

So much of my life pulls me away from God.

          I am struck over and over again by the way I can learn something important, something genuinely special, and then live my life in a way that says, "I don't believe this is really true." God has been teaching me so much about the way he specifically designed me this year. So quickly, in fact, that I feel like I am Neo from The Matrix as he opens his eyes after having information uploaded into his brain and states with great surprise and not so great acting, "I know Kung Fu..." And yet, from all the things I feel that I have learned about myself and even about the people that live around me, I just can't seem to shake the feeling of dissonance that comes from not living each day out of that newfound knowledge of my identity.

         I have learned some beautiful things about my God in the past year... and most of them have come from God revealing parts of my Original Design to me. God has been meeting me in ways that I never knew he even wanted to. For a great majority of my life, I ran after the beauty I saw in awesome stories. I love stories. There is something about a great story that fills me with a sense of longing, a sense that I must find something like it but just don't know where to look. As an adolescent, I sought out stories that made my heart leap, and I would attach my heart as much as possible to a story in order to somehow feel as if it could be my story. I knew in my heart, but not my mind, that I was made for what I longed for. But I didn't attribute the quality I searched for to God; God was on one side and my longings and desires were on another, and they stayed distant from one another. 

          Over the past few years, God has taken those two "sides" and smashed them together like two big sticky pieces of Play Dough. He has begun to show me, among other things, that He chose for me to love stories in the way that I do because He loves stories. He is adventurous. And He made me that way on purpose not only because He loves the same thing (I was made in His image), but because God himself wants to connect with me in that specific way. Furthermore, He made each person with a set of things that make his/her heart leap, and that is where God wants to meet us!

          The most exciting part to me is that God is continually showing me more and more about that idea, which I like to call our Original Design. However, far too often, I have not been living out of this knowledge. In my mind, I believe that God is the summation of the longings I have always had. But if I believe that, then why don't I act each day out of that knowledge? I know for a fact that I am not alone when I say that I have observed inconsistent patterns of living out of this truth that I claim to know. Shouldn't I be living how I want to more consistently if I believed these things about myself and about God every day?

          One thing that I have realized is that I don't consistently believe these things about myself. This year, I have become increasingly aware of the struggle for truth that happens every day in every person's heart. If Satan is the father of lies, then surely his plan for foiling God's plan for us is to convince us to perceive ourselves, the world, and God in a completely false way. I have become painfully aware this year of how many lies I have been believing about myself and about God, and the effect each false perception has had on my spiritual life. If I believe I am insufficient, my actions will be automatically based on that perception. If I wake up believing God isn't truly the object of my affections (which unfortunately happens a little too often), then I am going to chase after idols all day. The problem is that most of the time, it isn't a choice... it is a matter of clarity. If I think one of my idols is what my heart truly longs for instead of realizing it is a shadow of something that looks similar to a desirable quality of God (and I am self aware at that moment enough to realize that in the first place), then I will act out of what I perceive to be true. If I truly believe that I am insufficient, then it is hard for me to "choose" to believe something different; the fact remains that the "evidence" seems to stack up to show what the truth is. Thankfully, I have had some great friends this year who have helped me work through the lies from my past that have piled up to make me believe this about myself. But when I hear a condemning voice that is telling me something about who I am, I have to realize what is going on enough to stop and ask God, "What is true?"

Clarity is of paramount importance.
God, what am I believing about myself or about You that isn't true? Well then... what IS true?


          We have to ask this question more often and be ready to listen for the answer! A friend of mine says all the time that God is dying to tell us what is true about us, what our Original Design is, and we just don't stop to listen. I am inclined to believe her...

          It is a travesty that we don't believe what is true about us... that we don't even know that God has made us each with a set of skills and gifts that he plans on growing and teaching us to use for his glory. If the enemy can convince us the opposite is true, then we become no longer a threat to use our gifts to release the hearts of those around us. And each one of us has the capacity to fit like a necessary cog in the machine that is the Body of Christ. The Body needs our gifts, because God made it to need our gifts. Each day we live out of our Original Design is a day that the rest of the Body must live without a set of its necessary parts. So let's run after the truth!

John 8:31-32: "So Jesus said to the Jews who had believed in him, 'If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.'"