Planted with a Purpose Page 5

  I’ll never forget coming home from church one night and finding that Appalachian Power had turned off the power in our house. I couldn’t bear to tell our kids, so young at the time, why we were in the dark, so instead I improvised on the spot and told them it was a game. I had turned off all the lights and whoever could get into bed without stubbing their toes would win. I didn’t want my children to grow up poor and feel limited by that awareness. I wanted them to know it was possible to be people of color and have more than what I was able to show them at that time. I didn’t know how, but I knew I had to endure beyond the crushing and trust there was life beyond this tomb.

  A few years later, when I wrote my first book and my ministry was taking off, I bought a beautiful home with an indoor swimming pool, which was ironic because I couldn’t swim. But I would pull up a chair and watch my kids splash and play, and it gave me the greatest joy to show them there was more. I wished my father could have lived long enough to witness such a sight and enjoy the wine now being opened from the crushing he had endured for my sake. He used to take our family for rides on Sunday afternoons, cruising through posh white neighborhoods to point out the houses that he cleaned during the week. He would describe the particular rugs and drapes of each one, the furniture and color of the rooms. Many of them often had the little black jockey statues near the driveway or in the manicured gardens.

  I’m not the only one who struggles to see life beyond the tomb. I remember visiting Coretta Scott King once and admiring her plush apartment in Atlanta. When her house blew up decades before and the force of it knocked her back against the kitchen wall, she could not have known that one day she would be sharing the trauma as a story of survival from a luxurious home high above the city where her life was once endangered. But as her crushing fermented into the wine of experience, wisdom, and influence, she discovered a flavor she could not have anticipated at the time of her crushing.

  Even after your pain has fermented and you find yourself in a new location, a new job, a new relationship, or a new lifestyle, you will still struggle. Like wine being poured from the vat into the bottles in order to be shipped and purchased and consumed, we must learn to be contained by new shapes. It’s a part of the process.

  Jesus said, “No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment, for the patch will pull away from the garment, making the tear worse. Neither do people pour new wine into old wineskins. If they do, the skins will burst; the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, they pour new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved” (Matt. 9:16–17).

  The process of transformation for all of us begins with each of us. After we have endured our crushing, after some time has passed and we have experienced a different perspective that ferments our pain into personal power, we must then begin our life as new wine. We must accept that nothing will ever be the same again. We cannot reclaim, repair, or recycle that which has been lost or broken. We must begin again knowing that we have new wine to offer. Like Lazarus returned to life and leaving the tomb, we must unwrap the burial cloths from our bodies.

  It’s time to stop living in the past. It’s time to leave your tomb behind. It’s time to taste the new wine God is producing in your life.

  Write a journal entry celebrating your transformation. What are you leaving behind? What are you looking forward to as a part of your new life?

  CHAPTER 8

  God Is with You

  I had an amazing opportunity to visit the Western Wall, the only remaining structure of what used to be Herod’s temple in Jerusalem. The Wailing Wall stands over sixty feet high and is sixteen hundred feet long. The entire area was filled with tourists taking pictures and observing the holiest site in Judaism.

  I noticed something that piqued my curiosity. Many people were writing their prayers on paper and slipping them into the cracks of the wall. I, too, joined in this exercise and placed my written prayer in the wall. But, as I stepped away, I noticed the Orthodox Jews who visited the wall placed their prayers in a fissure. However, they moved their bodies in a certain way. As they prayed, each of them rocked back and forth, continuously moving. My keen guide noticed me looking at the Jews moving and quickly filled me in. He said, “They rock as an homage to how God moved with them in the wilderness. Wherever the people of Israel went, Yahweh went with them.”

  In a few moments, within my own mind and heart, I had a powerful sermon about this ritual already prepared. God, the Almighty Creator of the universe, traveled with Israel. He lived and moved among His children in the midst of the wilderness, guiding them in their wandering. What intrigues me most about the Lord’s characteristics is His willingness to not only move with His people, but His penchant for relocating His chosen ones before He puts His plan into effect.

  Can you see why this matters? God’s hand and presence are standing front and center in any and every stage of our crushing. To not see He who has promised to never leave you or forsake you during your days of calamity is enough to cause you to abandon hope that life will get any better. So if we see the Orthodox Jews in constant motion while in the midst of their prayers to pay respect to the fact that God was moving with Israel in the wilderness, don’t their actions beg us to pay attention? Shouldn’t we look for God’s presence in our own movements and transitions in life? And if we look for Him, how can we find Him?

  One of the ways to answer this question, I believe, requires that we consider what it means to spend time with God, to get to know Him and to communicate with Him. Though time given to our numerous responsibilities requires our full attention, I quickly learned as an adult that I also need to set aside time for myself and my family. To give all of yourself to everyone and everything else and leave little, if any, of you to your family and yourself is to do your future and your destiny a grave disservice. There is something to be said for the value of being alone and taking a break from it all. It makes no sense to arrive at the fruition of your destiny and have little to no strength to walk in it.

  Everyone must learn the value, healing qualities, and even necessity of being alone to rest, recharge, receive divine insight, and purge what has been affecting them. Always being surrounded by people and standing in the presence of others prevents one from experiencing the blessings found only in solitude.

  You must make time for rest a priority. Even more to the point, you must discover that certain blessings and assets are found only in rest. Better still, some advantages emerge exclusively in and while being alone. I think my best thoughts when I’m alone, and I move faster without the weight of other responsibilities and distractions. Plus, the Father loves to speak, especially when there are no distractions between the two of us.

  The Husbandman recognizes the value of seclusion because He values the harvest and wine His fruit will produce. I have noticed that He has the propensity to remove and relocate individuals chosen to complete tasks for His Kingdom from among crowds or familiar environments. It is rare to see God calling someone to a unique destiny and allowing them to remain where they’ve always been. I’m hard-pressed to think of a single instance. It’s almost as if He wishes to cultivate something within them.

  We see this pattern throughout Scripture. Noah, the first vintner, experienced his own loneliness when he was called away to build the Ark. Abraham was told to leave the land of his fathers for a place that God would show him before He brought Abraham into covenant with Him. Joseph was sold into slavery by his own brothers and, while he was away from his family, God trained him to run Egypt. Moses, after having become a murderer, was driven to the wilderness, where he meets God and receives His orders to be the voice and deliverer to free the children of Israel. David, considered to be the runt of his family, was alone during his on-the-job training that prepared him to be Saul’s successor as the king of Israel. The gospels are replete with instances of Jesus withdrawing to be alone and pray.

  To the untrained eye, all of this would seem like wandering and meandering without a purpose.
Could there be more to it, though?

  We see that being alone for a season is valuable in God’s sight, but I don’t want you to harp on the aloneness we have previously discussed. I’m calling your attention to God’s penchant to move you into the position and place that is most strategic for His will while you experience a feeling of being lost. He doesn’t do this just to prepare you. He does this because the first thing we see God doing when we initially meet Him in the first chapter of Genesis is hovering, brooding, breathing, and moving over the darkness and void that existed before He called the wandering, formless, nothingness to order and commanded light to explode onto the scene.

  So what does this tell us?

  Quite simply, we do not serve a stagnant, motionless, dormant, inactive, or idle God. From the first time we meet Him, we see that God is always on the move. God’s movement suggests progress and purpose. And though He may be silent during certain seasons, we must accept the fact that our God is a perpetually moving God. Now, if we see that God is always moving with purpose, who are we to think that we would be different from the Master who created us? God will move us to accomplish His ultimate goal and purpose in and for our lives.

  Time with God

  If you’re looking around at the various aspects of your life and see ubiquitous isolation or seclusion, know that you are being groomed for something special, and the Master wants to interfere in the process. Unfortunately, detachment often carries with it a certain degree of pain because each of us, on some level, requires interaction with another human being. After all, even the Master says it’s not good for man to be permanently alone. Thankfully, in those moments when we are by ourselves, God’s habit of communicating with us shows itself.

  I’ve already shared some of my personal instances of being up at night, trying to wrap my head around challenging circumstances. But in addition to thinking, feeling, and grieving over the situations that resulted in my restless, sleepless night, I also experienced something else. After getting tired of pacing, I would quiet myself and listen out for God’s still, small voice of direction or correction.

  God never failed to speak to me. Oh, He might have waited to do so, but He has never stopped communicating with me. Rather, I discovered that I had to allow God to be God and communicate with me in the manner He thought best for the moment. After silencing the loud angst of my mind, I would hear Him speak words of peace to my troubled soul and provide steps that, once executed, would cause me to wonder why I had worried so much in the first place. I’m telling you that there is something about God’s presence and His ability to impart wisdom, identity, and peace in those times of uncertainty.

  It’s like going on a date. When was the last time you went out on a date? I’m not talking about simply meeting up with someone new. I speak of going all out and setting the stage for an experience with and for the one you love—creating a moment they will never forget. I don’t ask in order to foster feelings of embarrassment for those who haven’t dated in some time, and neither am I asking to further vaunt feelings of accomplishment for those who have. My question highlights the reason behind dating.

  Though our contemporary society has changed what it means to date someone, the impetus behind dating and courting an individual is to woo them. When viewed in that light, the wooer calls out the one he or she is pursuing, the one he or she wants to love, and to whom he or she wishes to show him- or herself. Remember the value we discovered in being alone and how the Master delivered Israel out of the hands of its oppressor? From there, Israel goes directly to the wilderness, and God’s design for them was that they worship Him and come into relationship with Him. God did this with His mighty arm, and showed even more of Himself to them.

  He fed them bread and quail directly from His table while giving them water from His rock, effectively treating His people to a five-star dinner. All of this happened as He cooled Israel during the day with His cloud that guided them and His romantic fire that warmed them at night. God courted Israel in the wilderness, showing them a scant measure of His capabilities in loving them every day. And, when He wanted to be close to them, God gave them the specifications of the setting in which He would meet them: El Moed, the tent of meeting, or Moses’ tabernacle.

  The tent of meeting was portable and would move with the entire camp. There, sacrifices would be offered up by the priests on a daily basis, and the high priest would enter the most holy place of the tent once a year on Israel’s behalf.

  Understand, though, the forty years of Israel’s wandering in the wilderness was more than a form of punishment for their unbelief in their Deliverer-God, which Scripture points out (Num. 14:34). Yes, Israel’s unbelief doomed them to wander a year for every day they were allowed to examine the vastness and beauty of the blessed Promised Land God had sworn to give them. But consider what led God to call Abraham His friend—the fact that Abraham believed God. If Abraham’s belief in God caused God to want to enter into a covenant relationship with Him, then Israel’s wandering in the wilderness because of their unbelief wasn’t something God issued simply because He likes torturing people. Proverbs reminds us of a greater motive: “For whom the LORD loves He corrects, Even as a father corrects the son in whom He delights” (Prov. 3:12 AMP).

  And just as God did with Israel, He is calling you out of the land of your oppression, your addiction, your pain, and the circumstances that have you believing that you will never get back up again. He has opened the door for you to begin your exodus, but you must put every ounce of your faith and trust in Him to do only what He can do, which is take care of you. He is calling you out so that you might worship Him and so that He might be given the opportunity to develop a relationship with you outside the purview of your abusers and your deadly habits. And, though He has called you to be with Him in the wilderness and witness how much He loves you, I will not ignore the overwhelming feeling that many experience when they are freed from any oppression.

  They experience the sensation of being disoriented in the midst of their straggling.

  We wander because we long for the days of familiarity, even when those days brought horrendous moments of pain, anguish, and a complete lack of hope. Because the first thing a person does when they are brought into a new space is to begin seeking out a way to stabilize themselves in the unfamiliar. Seeing that they can find no recognizable handle to hold on to in a new season, they look backward to something commonplace in order to receive comfort. For many, their comfort is pornography, even when it caused the end of their marriage. For others, it’s alcohol abuse, though their liver is so hard and kidneys so shriveled that they’ve found themselves on a transplant list. For some, it’s the warmth of the arms of a previous lover, even though the hands attached to those arms have left marks and bruises on their faces that have forced them to lie in order to explain away their existence.

  You would be surprised at what people do just to put themselves at ease during their season of wandering—that season when you look to something else in place of the God that freed you because even your Deliverer looks so strange to you that you would opt for destruction. After all, you’re unable to tell the difference between the safe harbor of His presence and the rocky shores of destitution. The coping mechanisms you’ve employed during your wandering have caused you to become spatially disoriented.

  Like we see in the lives of the children of Israel and those who have suffered at the hands of abusers, could it be that our real problem of unbelief stems from the reality that we have put more of our faith in what and who has traumatized us than we have in the God who loves us? Is it possible, then, that our wandering because of our disbelief in the truth of God is a tool the Master uses to get “Egypt” out of us?

  What if the final stage of the crushing process is meant to ensure an eternal cohabitation between God and His people, both of them being forever reconnected? What if having God inside us is the agent of spiritual fermentation needed to transform us into wine?

  Answer the ques
tions asked in this chapter and reflect on how time with God can help you transform.

  CHAPTER 9

  The Pairing

  Wine pairing brings out a new dimension to the taste of wines. In wine pairing, you learn that red wines pair best with bolder-flavored red meats and savory dishes, while white wines go well with fish, seafood, and chicken. You want a wine that complements and even enhances the food while possessing its own intensity and flavor.

  While wine pairing is enjoyable and gives you a new appreciation for fine dining, there is another pairing that yields even more benefits. It’s the relationship between you and the Master. Your relationship with God exhausts the length of all time because an eternal God cannot produce anything less than an eternal seed. Therefore, each of us is intended for the ever after. We are eternal spirits temporarily in earthly bodies.

  You and God have been locked into a timeless relationship that only paused when you were born into the earth. Eternity past and eternity future are separated only by the slender sliver of time in which you and I now exist in this lifetime on earth. Before time began, you were with God, and when time ends, you will be with Him again. Simply put, you and God were meant for each other.

  No matter how hard you might try, you can’t escape the spiritual bond between you and your Maker. You can’t drink it away. You can’t smoke it away. You can’t sex it away. You can attempt to walk away from God and live your life as you see fit, but the Master has placed a hook in you that prevents you from doing anything that would spoil the future wine He is laboring to produce in you. In other words, He remains faithful even when we don’t. Despite our attempts to escape our crushing, God is intent on converting us from one level of life to another one. What He is doing with you is not built on your finished work. Your salvation and new identity are built on the finished work of Christ, and that finished work was done with everlasting effect just as He is God forever. As we have seen, we can look throughout all the Old Testament until now and see the Master’s blood-red wine seeping out of eternity and into this present moment.