One of my good friends asked me, "Why did your breakup with Julie hurt you so much? Do you think it's because you liked the girl so much or is it because she symbolized something greater?" As I contemplated his question, I replied, "I think it's that she symbolized something greater. She symbolized hope. Hope that I wouldn't always be a hopeless romantic. Hope that things would begin to fall together. Hope that my life had the possibility of change. When she broke up with me, hope broke up with me. Feelings of hopelessness invaded me, and I found myself struggling to believe that my days of being a hopeless romantic would ever change." Don't get me wrong, Julie is a great girl; but I know now that we were not as compatible as I thought we were. She was everything I always wanted in a girl, and when she broke up with me I felt as if my dreams were smashed upon the rocks. I thought now that I had been with the "girl of my dreams," I would have to settle for less. Now I am realizing that is not true at all.

At times the feelings of hopelessness begin to crowd me, and I feel as if change is nothing I will ever experience. My life will always remain how it is now: unsatisfied, discontent, and yearning for something more. Yesterday evening was one of those times. I opened up one of the devotionals I have lying around, praying that God would tell me something I needed to hear. The excerpt I opened up to had the words of Anne Ortlund:

God is at work in all the kaleidoscoping family transitions; not only in the high points but in the endings, beginnings, detours, dead ends, and in-between times. His powerful tools are not just the promotions and graduations but the failures and firings and losses and sicknesses and shocks and periods of boredom. In them all He's silently, busily, unceasingly encouraging, punishing, shaping...

...And during all His working--all God's silent activity in the disappointments, surprises, delights, irritations--transformations are taking place...

Do you feel as if nothing is happening...? I guess so does a lobster, encased in that ridiculous armor. As he grows it even get crowded inside. But he sheds it fourteen times during his first year of life. Each shedding takes ten days, and each time in the period between shells--when he's naked, exposed, vulnerable--he grows about seven percent.

You feel stifled, unfulfilled? You don't know when you'll break into change?

Wait for God.
Wait on God.
Wait with God.

Life is not fixed. Let it happen; don't rush it. "It is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose. Do everything without complaining or arguing." (Phil 2.13,14) Keep your eyes fixed on Him, live in obedience as you see it, and then just be there.

I identify with the lobster. I liked my last shell, but it has been shed. Now I feel naked, exposed, and vulnerable. But even in this time, a new shell is growing. A bigger, better, grander, and more beautiful shell than the first. Eventually I will be encased in this new shell. Just not yet. And eventually that shell will be shed, I will be naked, exposed, and vulnerable again... And then a bigger and better shell will grow in its place. God is doing something great in my life. He is training me to be the person whom He wants me to be. This training is difficult and painful at times, but transformation takes place.

Oh, and the title of the devotional page was "God Has Plans For Those He Has Chosen." Ironic, eh?