Bless our God, O peoples! Give him a thunderous welcome! Didn’t he set us on the road to life? Didn’t he keep us out of the ditch? He trained us first, passed us like silver through refining fires, Brought us into hardscrabble country, pushed us to our very limit, Road-tested us inside and out, took us to hell and back; Finally he brought us to this well-watered place.
– Psalm 66:8-12 [MSG]

This past week, we started our Spring Rooted experience. As I talked with people, giving them a picture of what is to come in the next ten weeks, I saw a number of reactions. Some looked right at me with eager excitement. Some nudged each other. Some stared at the floor. Some shuffled their feet and attempted to get comfortable while I described how some of the best “stuff” of Rooted is in the parts that are a bit un-comfortable.

But, everyone’s attention gained focus, unblinking as I talked about the value of each of our stories. We acquire, quite tragically, a belief that only some parts of our stories matter or are worthy of being shared. We learn, through the subtle parlance of social conditioning that our own story, the personal narrative that informs how we live, may not be worth the risk of sharing. Yet, it is God who is working his own redemption narrative through (not in spite of) the story of our lives – every chapter, every page, every sentence of dialogue, in every setting, and in every conflict, God is at work in us.

What I am discovering (often unpleasantly) is that God’s script to intentionally shape me into the kind of person He intended me to become occasionally surpasses my fiercely defended need for comfort. The Psalmist writes that God should be granted a “thunderous welcome” because “He trained us… push[ing] us to our very limit.”  People who push me to my limits are hard-pressed to receive any kind of welcome from me. But limit pushing, it turns out, is how God’s renovation script often meets our story. Someday, I will learn to greet trials with gratitude. Someday, I’ll give God His due applause for taking me to “hell and back.” In the meantime, I’ll learn to thank God that He knows more than I do; that His intention is, in fact, to shape me. In all of it: the discomfort, the conflict, and the being made new, constitute my story.

And that story is a good one – one worth telling.

See you Sunday,

Jeff