Where is God Taking You?

I'm enjoying my new quiet time book, Invitation to a Journey: A Road Map for Spiritual Formation by M. Robert Mulholland, Jr. This book has been expanding my thinking on my spiritual formation.

Early in the book, Mulholland explains how achieving spiritual formation is not about setting out, gathering information, and applying it correctly to our lives to the ways we want to be shaped. But instead, it's more about learning how to 'yield' ourselves to God to discover where God wants to take us. 

To me, this sounds like an adventure (and who doesn't love a good adventure)? But if you were to tell me along this adventure, I would endure many difficulties, challenges, and heartaches, then I would not be so enthusiastic about going. In fact, I would much rather stay in the comfort and predictability of my routine.

However, there comes a time in our lives when staying in the comfort and predictability becomes more difficult and painful than yielding to God and letting Him shape us. This is when we humble ourselves and cry out to God. For we are being transformed into the image he has always had for us. Day by day.  

Here is where we begin living in authenticity, as the clay in the potter's hands, with no apologies for how we were made. Knowing we are going through it together. For we serve a loving God.

Lessons from a Weeping Willow Tree

 

You can learn a lot about life from a weeping willow tree.

When I was a little girl, we had them in the backyard. I enjoyed watching their long elegant branches blow together as one, harmoniously back and forth, usually indicating a summer thunderstorm was brewing in the distance. The willows; they didn't seem to mind a storm was coming. So neither did I. They bent with the breeze. 

Oh, how I love a good thunderstorm on a summer afternoon. The kind that looms in the distance warning us to come inside and take shelter in the safety of our homes.

When we moved into the house we live in now, I was delighted to find a mature weeping willow tree thriving in our backyard. It brought back those wonderful memories of when I was a little girl, safe and sound in my house while I watched the willow tree graciously endure the weather.

Sadly, the branches of the tree at our current house began to break down as it approached its 30-year life span and we had to cut down. I knew I wanted to replace it right away and mail-ordered two more of them; one for the backyard and one for the front yard. 

The trees came as infants, secured with tape to bamboo poles. Somehow they managed to survive year three after planting them in the ground. Honestly, I didn't think they would make it. One year, a deer ran into it nearly uprooting it and almost snapping it in two. But it survived.

Then there were the winters. Between being blown back and forth by windstorms and weighed down by ice until the trunk arched down to the ground, I thought this tree would never stand straight again. And always, after a storm I would stake it, again and again, hoping its weak, deformed trunk would one day stand up straight. 

This evening, after another snowstorm hit our region of the world, I noticed the willow tree. It was standing straighter and firmer than I ever saw before. And it struck me. The demands put on this skinny tree were absolutely necessary for it to learn how to survive. The beating it took, year after year, was what it needed to stand firm, endure, and beautifully thrive. One day when it's mature, it will gently sway to and fro with the wind when the storms come and go. 

Remember this when hard times come your way.