The moment is still clear in my mind. About a week before Training Camp, I was leaving the house to go watch some of my favorite kids. Just outside the door, a butterfly rested, stretching his wings. And as I looked at it, admiring the kaleidoscope of colors, I very clearly heard the Spirit say, “I want to transform you, just like this.”
As the New Year rang in, this memory crashed around my head. Transformation. This is my word and prayer for 2014: physical, mental, and spiritual transformation. God wants to work this process in all of us. He has wanted to do this in me for so long, and I have denied it. Refusing to leave the patterns of my life, I rested in complacency and comfort. But I am tired of being comfortable and I no longer want to be complacent. So in 5 days, I am heading out for transformation.
I met a man last week who knew a racer. “People come back changed. They just come back different, in a good way.”
God, make this transformation in me! I want to come back different. This is the prayer I scream from my soul. Transform me! Make me new!
Please do not expect me to come back the same. I will go a step further and ask you to pray that I do not. Pray for transformation – maybe not just mine, but yours as well.
Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.
2 Corinthians 5:17 (ESV)
So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.
Romans 12:1-2 (The Message)
