I don’t claim to know how that happens, any more than Paul
can explain it. What I have experienced is that those difficult times are the
ones that often provide the most growth and change. A friend of mine calls
events that are unexpected and disconcerting, “Growth Opportunities”. She says it
tongue in cheek, but in truth that’s what they are. Traumatic experiences
change us, whether they are corporate traumas like 9/11, or individual
disasters like an illness or death, or even just life experiences (job, family,
love) that don’t turn out like we want them to.
The truth is that God takes whatever happens and wherever we
are in our life journey and transforms it to glory. We might not see it right
away. In fact, it’s usually in looking back that we realize how we have grown
and changed because of an experience. Sometimes we don’t know where or when the
seed planted in ‘adversity’ will blossom. Someday…it will and you will see the
result like a beautiful flower sprouting from a plant you thought was dead. (Or
new growth will spring up through the ashes, like in this picture of new life
in a burned over area taken last year in AZ.) 
We are drawn closer to God’s glory when we offer our lives.
That means offering all our lives, not just the parts we think are already
‘holy’, but those we’d really rather keep hidden from God. Paul states (2
Corinthians 3:4-6) “Such is the confidence that we
have through Christ towards God. Not that we are competent of ourselves to
claim anything as coming from us; our competence is from God, who has made us
competent to be ministers of a new covenant, not of letter but of spirit; for
the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.”
We cannot ever make ourselves
‘good enough’ for God. That’s not what God desires anyway. Our God wants to
love us, to be in a relationship with us. The Holy God wants us to trust so
fully that we live even the trials and traumas as bearing the glory of God.
Sounds hard and it does require me giving up my own agenda.
“All of me, why not take all of
me” says the old Louis Armstrong song. Of course that song is about lost love,
but it applies to what we need to offer to God. As the words of the song say, “I’m
no good without you. Take my lips…take my arms…take my heart…”
Through life’s changes we
discover that, paradoxically, it really is when we give all to God that we gain
the glory. With Paul we can say “but when one turns to the Lord, the veil is
removed. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the
Lord is, there is freedom. And all of us, with
unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror,
are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another;
for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.”
(2 Corinthians 3:16-18)
A paraphrase of that citation
might read, “When you turn to the Lord…there is freedom and you will see the
glory of the Lord as you are transformed…to glory.” Take a few minutes to consider
the times in your life that seemed very difficult, heartbreaking, and soul challenging. See
if you can remember when in and through those times, you felt the sustaining Love of
God and were changed, just a bit, into greater glory. I'll bet you'll see life sprouting from the dead branches and burned over ground! Expect new life, new
growth, when God touches your life in “growth opportunities”.
