In my early days of faith, I was fired up, bright-eyed and absolutely certain because I had “found Jesus.” I remember sitting in a classroom, full of zeal, eager to learn how to walk this new path. The word of the day? “Never trust your feelings.”
There on the board, probably on a flannel-graph, where “Fact” led the way as the engine, “Faith” followed behind, and poor “Feeling” was the caboose, barely hanging on.
The moral? Feelings are flaky. Never let them drive. Honestly, it made a kind of sense back then…But then life happened.
And what I’ve come to see, through experience, hard knocks, and honest conversations, is that real growth comes not through control, strategy, or tightly held diagrams, but through disruption. Through the unraveling of the self I had so carefully constructed.
Take Peter, for example. He was so sure, swore he’d never deny Jesus. But around that charcoal fire, as the rooster crowed, the image he held of himself came crashing down. That was his “and then it happened” moment. Not just failure, but revelation. A painful meeting with the version of Peter he had created.
Or Paul. Charging toward Damascus, letters in hand, absolutely convinced he was doing God’s work. And then, bam: light, voice, blindness. That blinding wasn’t punishment, it was clarity. The first step in letting go of the Paul that Paul had invented.
These moments: Peter’s denial, Paul’s detour, show us something profound. They weren’t gently eased into a better way. They were stopped in their tracks. And not by their own effort, but by something beyond them. Call it grace. Call it mercy. Call it the moment when the mask slips, and something deeper, truer is allowed to emerge.
In my own life, I’ve come to see that something has to die, the me I’ve created, so that something new can live. And here’s the kicker: we don’t orchestrate this. We don’t steer, schedule, or manipulate our way toward transformation.
It comes to us. And I might add, we may not like the wrapping but it arrives as a gift.
Think About:
Where in your life did everything seem clear until it wasn’t? Have you been introduced to “and then it happened”?