Transformed by the Renewing of Your Mind

It was a cold and rainy morning. The cold was seeping through my layers and into my bones. My mind was running through all of the tasks I needed to complete for work and family. Distracted, I walked briskly toward home from the kids school. As I grew closer my driveway came into sight. It was empty! In the blink of an eye my brain panicked, “my car, someone stole my car.” Almost simultaneously I remember, nope I had driven the kids to school because Audrey was on crutches. I had just walked home in the freezing rain on autopilot. Isn’t it intriguing that because we do something over and over (I have made that walk from school to home thousands of times in the last six years) that we can get fixed thinking or doing the same thing. This is true in our walk with God, too. Often we need the equivalent of a freezing cold walk in the rain and panic about a stolen car to illuminate our stuckness, illuminate autopilot thoughts and transform our mind. 

Have you experienced the equivalent of a cold walk in the rain? For me, my walk in the rain was one little preposition shift. Prepositions defined by Webster are  a word governing, and usually preceding, a noun or pronoun and expressing a relation to another word or element in the clause. They are tiny little words that make a world of difference in the meaning of statement and when changed can really change reality. Just try to picture the difference here. The cat is on me versus the cat is in me.  To totally different scenarios, am I right? I have found that this is true in the shaping of my understanding of who God is and who I am as well. Changing the preposition I used to describe who God is and my relationship with him created huge shifts. This happened to me when I read the book With: Reimagining the Way You Relate to God.  I had been living a life of under or for or from but not with. All of a sudden I had a new way of expressing how I can be walking with God and how He is with me. John puts it this way. “And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be WITH you forever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, for he dwells WITH you and will be in you.”  Next came the challenging rethinking of what Jesus’s life and death mean. Reading Executing God challenged my understanding around the punitive restoration theories. As the Holy Spirit worked in my heart one way he re framed my understanding was to replace “the died for my sins'' to “died because of my sins.” It allowed me to be open to new understandings of scripture and Jesus life and death. What will God use in your life to help you better understand Him, to shape your understanding? 

Thanks for reading Janelle Garman