Would you start with once upon a time, a time when things were different? Would you search for large words with multiple meanings so you could please your ambition sector? What plot would you muster, hopefully something that made for hot pages, multiple clicks, re-posts and subscriptions to pay the master of your fame? What picture do you picture on the cover of the book for which you will accept an advance? What if the entire thing being about you is simply narcissistic imagination?

Would you begin with anonymous members, maybe only revealing a little about them to entice the loving acceptance of the viewers? Perhaps, painting yourselves as main character embellishing truths and erasing irascible defects in your projection of greatness? Maybe a love interest too beautiful, wealthy and smart to confess, but we would assure you that it had been pried from your reluctant humility? Would it demonstrate your self release as captive to dangerous enemies of fear and trepidation?

No this one is not going to follow the track of making me a hero. It starts out with a failing marriage, loss of a good job where everyone hated me and moving across the country just to try and save something that I never even had. What’s worse this all happened because I chose a path of my own will instead of listening and waiting upon God’s Direction. Simple conclusion from the outset; never needed to happen. My mistakes would turn to something good but not of my according, only because God promised to turn things to good because I love Him and walk according to His purpose.

There’s no proud fable, no worthy expectation and all the drama surrounding heroic characters, just never happened. I sought attention having determined that the love of God was neither sufficient nor the greatest thing that continued to happen to me every day. I gave up Divine Opportunities to mingle with the loser found in myself and those who needed this emotional cripple to save them from their nightmare. A recipe destined for the trash can at the end of the Kitchen counter.

Exchanged pearls for swine and nearly had to eat the pods I fed them but for God’s timely intervention. He just said, “Let Go”. I understood since this chaos was of my own choosing that I could also choose not to participate and step away. Novel idea to someone who had been trained to stick with things no matter what. This time the best and only answer was retreat, so I listened to God and readied for transition. I didn’t simply choose a different place but having lived through the level 5 hurricane that just hit this place that should not have been my home, I wasn’t forced to leave but the place I was living in was destroyed, so why not?

Start again, over, next iteration, leaving behind the clingy past of my own creation, having never known anything else but rejection, that is what I naturally thought I deserved. The weird thing is the people who I stepped away from held on, that took a while to understand. I hear advice about loving yourself enough not to be in toxic relationships, but this wasn’t that. This was something of the Lord waking me from the unconscious practice of repeating the same insanity because I didn’t know any other script available.

The difference was this time I got to know myself and I didn’t like at all what I saw. Accidental courage, misunderstanding of the measures of Godly character and separation from anything that I loved because nothing loved me. That is not a victims admission just a cold hard fact. No one needed, wanted or absolutely felt compelled to recover me in their lives. That brutal fact was mostly about me and much more about them. The people who had used, berated, bullied, burdened and promised to know love when they were incapable, just as I had been.

Only in the works of God had I found love, real love for the wounded people, the victims, prisoners and vulnerable of this world. Certainly I found them primarily in homeless ministry, but drug, alcohol, family division, bankruptcy, church, every where I went I found people truly in need of healing, forgiveness, love and redemption, me included. For once I didn’t want anything from them and they didn’t have the opportunity to deceive me into believing that they matched the hole in my heart. I cried out to God and met Him, first on my own limited understanding of Sovereign then as I grew I saw His image in me and everyone else.

What would this story be about now that it started out in absolute frailty and the indecision of emotional immaturity? Well, it would be about anything but me or so I thought, because a man cannot escape inclusion in God’s revelation of why he was made. Surrender is a pleasant place when you’ve found even in your most glorious moment the same aspirations and failures that ruined all roads behind. For the longest time it was all I could do to hang on and follow Jesus. I am not saying that I had a clarity of purpose or understanding I only knew that His was the only way to something outside the pains of this existence.

Gradually, that transformed as the healing of God’s hand reshaped me. I began to see ahead of the normal march of this temporary existence. God’s Word, Prayer and the Holy Spirit showed me that I could express the gift of free will choices to navigate the river of my own existence. God let me be part of what He is doing for Creation, because He loves us often more than most people are capable right now of understanding. For years I have been chastised, reconditioned and allowed to make right choices where previously I had no alternative or option.

The loneliness turned to a deeply respectful transformation into a man who was okay by himself. Irony, for that is all I had ever experienced and now it was a strength a peace that came from chatting alone with the Almighty, reading His Word and seeing the people that He allowed me to heal, encourage and bring to the same peace in Jesus. I lost my self defensive posture, designed in desperate times to take out the threats to vulnerability. This man didn’t need them as God fights for me in a spiritual war where carnal weaponry is nothing more than foolish understanding or doubtful faith.

There are heroes in this story, but none emerge from the catacombs of prior need for avatar and escape. Clean, clear and okay with limited resource because there is an internal promise in serving God as anointed. What does Trust in God provide for the human who is always struggling to meet need? Well the Holy Spirit’s patience changes us into people who are rarely wanton. What does that mean the Pharisee said to the centurion. That is what arrives when you believe God’s promises that you find peace in knowing that He will provide all that needs provision, close every wound in exact timing and build in each heart a quest for the eternal. What Story, This One, the One that He is writing in which we are all main characters.