Surrounded by Water

Sometimes I feel like a flower in the middle of a mud puddle. Whether reality  matches my feelings or not is another story. These are the times I feel like the impossible swampiness of life is about to choke me to death, and the little beauty that I might be showing is about to sink into the abyss of my circumstances? Ah . . . maybe you can relate?

Yesterday, I went fishing with my husband. I fished for a little while, but then I got out my camera and began playing with the settings and the lenses. My husband noticed that when I had one lens on, the pictures seemed  blurry—maybe because I am learning to use it or just plain need my glasses on, but partly because of the instability of the situation. I was holding a telephoto lens on a rocking boat with what seemed like gale-force winds at times. Greg suggested that when I changed lenses, the picture changed and became more focused. Life is rather like that—sometimes we are amateurishly pretending we know what we are doing or are just working our way through what we don’t understand when God is waiting for us to look through His lens—to change our perceptions.

Like changing a lens to take different types of pictures, the lens I choose to look through often affects how I see my circumstances. If I am looking back at life and what has already occurred, it is much easier to see clearly the truth of the situation. I think of Jeremiah prophesying Israel’s return to God after a time of disobedience, rebellion, and suffering in captivity. He tells them to “set up road markers for yourself; make yourselves guideposts; consider well the highway, the road by which you went” (31:21).  He reminds them of the consequences of their sin and encourages them of  the restoration to come that would occur when God set them on the path back to Him. Often, I have grand ideas about how life should go, and I am sometimes discouraged in the middle of facing the hard things that come with this life. The lens I am peering through is often distorted by life’s challenge.

On the way home from fishing, I looked for opportunities to practice and saw this flower in the middle of a mud puddle. I passed it by, reconsidered, and put the car in reverse to go back and take a picture. My life is not a giant mud puddle, but like this flower (what my husband would term a weed), sometimes I am surrounded by circumstances that quickly arise—and it can be quite daunting to try to hold  my head up. (I am sure there’s another post in me somewhere about being a weed—i.e., out of place. . .

But the thing is this: ultimately, God plants me where I am the most useful to Him (I Cor. 7:21-24), and contrary to  my feelings, I am to serve Him there—blooming  where I am planted until He plants me somewhere else (or dries up the mud puddle in which I’ve been living).  I just need to change my lens and practice this thing called living for Him just a little bit more.