Complicated Hope

My favorite season is fall.  It holds so many memories of football games, marching bands and bonfires with hayrides.  I love the vibrant colors and the crispness of the air.  It’s as if the world sighs and celebrates for surviving the bleakness of winter,  the exhaustion of spring’s growth and the languishing heat of summer to bask in the crisp, refreshing days of autumn.

As this November arrives, I too sigh.  My son’s senior year of college soccer comes to an end.  My daughter is on a count-down for leaving the house to join Youth With A Mission. Students are making plans for their Senior Internships and life after graduation.  Change is all around me and it’s glorious yet also leaves me melancoly.

Out my office window, I few the yellow leaves of a giant tree, framed against the cloudy sky of Illinois in Autumn.   Their brightness seems to laugh at the gloom around them.  The orange and red leaves down the road wave in glorious ripples of joy.  Their colors seems to scream life.  Yet, that is not the case.  The vibrancy of the tree leaves are caused from death.  Those gorgeous colors that we drive miles and miles to see are actually caused from the tree starving the leaves of nutrients so that they die and fall off the tree, allowing the tree to rest during winter and new growth to sprout again in spring.

Fall is the ultimate reminder that life is a constant cycle of change.  

This November, I am choosing to participate in “It’s Not About Me November.”  A challenge to remember that life in Christ is about Knowing Him and Making Him Known. It’s living in service and focusing on  others above us.  It’s to remember the “Why”  and examine the “How” of our service.

Honestly, writing this year has not been easy.  I’ve barely put words on a page.  Where they once flowed easily, I struggle for structure and syntax and rhthym.  The ideas exist yet the knowledge that writing requires self-examination and time have caused me to shy away from the keyboard.  It’s painful.

Writing is not about me.  

It is Christ working through me.  It’s taking my experience with Jesus and putting it on paper for others to see.  It’s honest and raw and sometimes it forces to revisist places in our heart and minds that we would rather reliniquish to the past.   It’s an act of obedience for me.

Where is God calling you to serve that is not about you?  That little thought that won’t go away – that’s the Holy Spirit nudging you to obedience.  Someone needs you.  Your neighbor may need a meal.  A college student may need a room.  A family member may need an encouraging note.  Classes need teachers.  Friends need a listening ear.

Will you join me this November?  Living Intentionally requires us to accept the challange of living beyond ourselves in uncomfortable sistuations.   Remember —

It’s Not About You – It’s about Him.