A New Life and Grace

A new life has arrived. You would think I'm talking about marriage, but I'm mostly talking about the career change. I love being married. I love coming home to a fantastic man and working out all the things that living in a very intimate relationship entails. Changing professions at the same time was possibly a really good choice and sometimes an agonizingly hard choice. In this time where it feels like my entire identity is shifting its wonderful to have someone who is always right behind me cheering me on. In another sense it feels as if my entire identity is being shifted and shaken. I am no longer the independent single girl, but married. I am responsible to another human being in a way that I have never been. We now have an identity that we are forming together. Now I am functioning in a career that requires me to move and excel in an entirely different skill set than my previous position. I have been projected into a place of leadership that involves boldness and trust in relationship that was not required of me in the public school. Every day, in order to do this job in the way God has called me to it, I must risk. I have to trust people in a way I have never allowed myself to before.

Out of this I have found three things.

1. When we trust people they come through for us at a much higher rate than they fail us, especially if we are placed in a position where people are rooting for our success.
2. When we trust people we discover grace. We are able to see each others heart. When we see into someone's heart its nearly impossible to dislike them.
3. Often we have to walk as the person God has called us to be before we are actually that person in order to really become that person. Like Abraham.... "We call Abraham "father" not because he got God's attention by living like a saint, but because God made something out of Abraham when he was a nobody. Isn't that what we've always read in Scripture, God saying to Abraham, "I set you up as father of many peoples"? Abraham was first named "father" and then became a father because he dared to trust God to do what only God could do: raise the dead to life, with a word make something out of nothing. When everything was hopeless, Abraham believed anyway, deciding to live not on the basis of what he saw he couldn't do but on what God said he would do. And so he was made father of a multitude of peoples. God himself said to him, "You're going to have a big family, Abraham!"

   Abraham didn't focus on his own impotence and say, "It's hopeless. This hundred-year-old body could never father a child." Nor did he survey Sarah's decades of infertility and give up. He didn't tiptoe around God's promise asking cautiously skeptical questions. He plunged into the promise and came up strong, ready for God, sure that God would make good on what he had said. That's why it is said, "Abraham was declared fit before God by trusting God to set him right." But it's not just Abraham; it's also us! The same thing gets said about us when we embrace and believe the One who brought Jesus to life when the conditions were equally hopeless. The sacrificed Jesus made us fit for God, set us right with God." Romans 4:17-25