Not Who You Were Before

Our journey with God is never about the shortest distance between two points. The goal isn’t to get somewhere faster but to arrive a new creation.  

In my all-time favorite novel, The Paradise War, author Stephen R. Lawhead powerfully describes this process through the thoughts of the main character, Lew.  

“I could neither believe nor understand what had happened to me. For it seemed that something inside me had been awakened, some long-sleeping part of me had been roused to life. And now I could no longer be who I was before. But if I was no longer to be who I was, who was I to be?…How could I ever go back to the world I had known before? Truth to tell, I no longer considered going back a possibility. Here I was, by some miracle, and here I would stay.”

Once that long-sleeping part of us is awakened, we can’t go back to the way things were. The new reality that we enter into pulsates with God’s presence. We hunger for more of him. As my good friend Nancy says, “the deeper our dependence, the deeper God goes with us.”  

That’s the journey we’re after—from who we are to who we’re becoming.

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