The empty white screen before me accurately reflects the vacancy of my mind as it turns over, over, and over again, potential themes, topics, or lessons I could address in a final blog. Is there some culminating message, subject, or overarching point whose story is begging to be told? Repeatedly, month after month, over the course of this year, I have gained exposure to uncharted territories of my faith and relationship with God, resulting in a spiritual map littered with dotted lines occasionally overlapping, or other times leading away from each other, identifying thematic connections and distinctions. The map plots my walk with Christ this year. To proceed with the analogy before it becomes overdone, notable territories I have discovered this year include identity, control, personal passions and gifts, and the undying and unending grace of God, to highlight a few. These places — these themes vast in depth and application — serve together as a testimony of where I have been this year. Where God led me. However, some were far more stimulating than others, offering the exciting benefits of an untrodden place, while others burst forth as landmines of pain, holding greater measures of resistance and struggle than I was prepared to discover. Yet each place is responsible for contributing to the outline. The uniquely dissimilar and more often significantly similar themes of the past year combine to create what became the most purposeful year of my life. I can boldly claim the undoubtable intentionality of this year due to the nature of the past eleven months — what this year evolved into. In the most curt depiction possible, this was the year I no longer perceived my life as a wholly solo venture, an individual embark into that which is unknown. The understood reality of the singleness of life began to slowly evaporate throughout the year as the truthful reality of Jesus’ presence became undeniable. The Christian walk is not an experience in which we are alone, rather, someone commits to walking with us — at our pace, at our speed, where we go — immediately following our moments of conversion. As we fully accept the call to walk with Him, His invisibility becomes impossible to defend. This year was the year I looked over and saw Jesus walking with me. Not only did I notice His tangibility — I recognized He has always been there.
As I attempt to sift through my seemingly contradictory feelings and unidentifiable emotions that cause the sudden and unforeseen outbursts of selfishness, irritation, or insecurity (my apologies to Jaclyn who has been a recipient of all three) I experience in the present, I question how words I now write could ring with any sense of uniformity, finality, and truth if every fiber of my inner self merely sits in a state of confusion. While I trust the solidity of the previous paragraph, it regrets to resonate within how I am currently experiencing reality. Yet, if there is one pithy Christanese phrase that resounds in its authenticity: faith is triumphant over feeling. When feelings prove unreliable, faith is not only trustworthy, but also required. In the tumult of homecomings and an unknown future trajectory, I am called to look to what I know, what is true, what God has done and for what purpose.
This I can say with absolute certainty. This year was a year of purpose.
What was just stated becomes the thesis of my final blog. Purpose. Perhaps this month more than any other, I have spoken this word consistently. For reasons beautiful in their plurality, August has stood as a month of immense purpose. Living each day as finite human beings with quite restricted foresight, we rely on our comparably larger hindsight to inform. We cannot place confidence in the promise that we will always observe the purpose within a situation, a person, or a year’s events. The privilege of recognizing the innate purpose in anything — in the moment — is a gift from God. This gift was so liberally and generously bestowed upon me this month, as I was able to recognize the poignant significance of instances on smaller and larger scales. In response to the thematic nature of this month’s purpose, I have been granted the ability to trust that every individual month, experience, and relationship exists as a piece of the mosaic of purpose. I must admit that it is not because I have been received revelatory insight into each unique moment of this past year, but because the gift of purpose this month has illuminated the extension of this idea to the year as a whole. God has highlighted the widespread application of this truth, as I can now recognize the immense purpose of it all.
Upon reflection of the past eleven months, a specific psalm that has become a tune of the year comes to mind — one I have already quoted in a blog — “The Lord leads with unfailing love and faithfulness” (Psalm 25:10).
This is where I have seen purpose. The Lord’s leading is indeed purposeful, and wholehearted submission to Him through seeking Him every day reveals this purpose. There has existed a gradual progression throughout this year, exposing the reality that the journey has not been forged through my own strength, rather I have been led through it. It is God who has used every conversation, ministry, struggle, and victory for a specific purpose. There is a reason behind the fact that at launch, at the start of the race, I expressed to the team my desire to have a role, and after months of being presented opportunities and seizing the opportunities to accept greater roles of leadership, I finish the race as a team leader. There is a reason I was not a team leader at the beginning of the race. There is a reason God placed specific people in my life, continuing to break down my walls, and a reason those specific people entered my life at the time in which they did. There is a reason why it was not until one week ago that I fully grasped the meaning of my key. It was not until after I gave a teammate my key (free), and after Jaclyn also felt as if she needed to give the same teammate her key (grace), that I realized the beautiful coordination of the two keys.
One warm morning in Uganda I sat in the corner of a church silently praying during worship while the song, “Lord I Need You,” played in the background. This song holds significant personal value, transporting me to a desperate time in my life during which my mom had been diagnosed with cancer deemed both aggressive and fatal cancer. It has, on countless occasions, melodized my distress and fraught cry to God, and the words of the song have been memorized for years. However, it was the Lord’s leading and purpose that it was not until that morning in August 2018, in the back of a Ugandan church, sitting in a plastic chair on a dirt floor covered by a tin roof, that I finally realized the significance of the second verse.
Where sin runs deep, Your grace is more.
Where grace is found is where You are.
Where You are, Lord, I am free.
Holiness is Christ in me.
As I reactively sang the second verse, as each word escaped my mouth, it was as if I were singing them for the first time. By the end of the four-lined verse, tears streamed down my face in a moment of relieving realization. I had been wearing both keys throughout the entire month. I had been wrestling with the combined message I had not yet fully understood. The knowledge remained trapped in my head, yet refused to invade my heart. There was a reason why that very day I reached Galatians 5 in my Bible reading, and the words soaked my soul in a way they never had before. The line so clearly drawn from sin to grace to freedom in the song rang with validation in the context of this chapter.
And in that moment I finally understood. And in that moment I finally felt free.
I encountered the truth in my heart. This was the truth that the story begins with grace and ends with freedom — not the other way around. God’s favor could not be earned through my obsessive fixation with overcoming my issue, my thorn, nor could His favor be earned by achieving perfection in this one area of my life. In actuality, such accomplishment would only result in even more restricted freedom, bounding me to complete perfection in all things, creating an impossibly achievable standard. Freedom did not reside in conquering an issue nor did God’s special favor. Even if I had overcome my thorn, I still would not be free. The story begins with grace. I am free, not due to my own work, but because of God’s abundant grace. In the areas in which sin abounds, grace is triumphant through God’s presence in my life, and through Him I am set free.
This message is an integral component of the Gospel message I have heard and professed for twenty years. Yet there is a reason I did not begin to understand its meaning until that moment. There was purpose in the year of identification, struggle, and obsession to overcome, culminating in God’s reminder of an eternal truth by allowing me to begin to feel and understand its implication. There was purpose in the significance behind the keys, the month I wore them, and the unanimous yet individual decision Jaclyn and I made to give our keys to the same person before I had even fully understood their powerful coordination.
He grants all of us who are in Him and who He is in the gift — the promise — of the intentionality behind every year, month, day, and moment of life. For those living a life in active pursuit of the Lord, seeking Him and all He wishes to reveal, they will experience not only transformative growth along the path of sanctification, but also grand, undeniable purpose. When the reality of God’s unswerving presence becomes realized in a believer or nonbeliever’s life, when we turn our heads to the right and see that He is truly walking beside us, we see it. We understand that while He is directly beside, He — simultaneously in His divinity and omnipotence — is paces ahead of us, leading us to the point at which we allow and submit to His leading. Then we will recognize it. We encounter the purpose.
After paragraphs of rambling, I am led to the ultimately overarching message of the year. Within the analogy of the map of dotted lines and varied territories, it would be the paper itself —the canvas that allows all such lessons and realizations to exist. Stripped down, in its barest sense, it is the Lord that has held the year’s events in motion. It is the perfect orchestration of all things that yields the undeniable unveiling of God as the masterful conductor. The unique individuality of all fifty racers’ years and revelatory experiences proves the creativity of our Father and ultimately the fact that true purpose — God’s purpose — is guaranteed for all who seek Him.
I close a known chapter to embark on an unknown venture whose events are unpredictable. Prevailing within the variables wholly mysterious, the promise of predictability resides in the guarantee of the purposeful leading of our Lord.
