If You’re Losing More in Your Life Than Gaining

My soul craves the blank canvas. Give me the white journal page with nothing on it, the dry erase board waiting for ideas, the cursor blinking on a new document page. That’s why there’s a six-foot framed chalkboard leaning on the wall in my bedroom and the reason why my desk drawer is always filled with stacks of 3 x 5 cards that are just waiting for something to be written out of thin air. 

No parameters, please. No outlines. No fill-in-the-blanks. Just give me wide open spaces to make something out of my imagination.

See in me a glimpse of our Creator God. (I am made in his image, I’ll remind you.)

In the beginning God created the heavens and earth. Now the earth was formless and empty. Darkness was over the surface of the deep, and what was the Spirit of God doing?

Hovering.

Wisdom, the master craftsman, was there hovering over the blank canvas, in energetic anticipation of creating something never before seen and magnificent. Pulse racing. Whole brain firing. Before God spoke, there was his imagination and pure joy at what he could bring into existence. All of the goodness of the earth was there in his mind’s eye before the hammer and nails of his word made them so.

Has me thinking about all the painful stripping away of the last few years and how I’ve seen this in the lives of others, too. Lost jobs. Lost dreams. Lost sense of purpose. Let me ask you, What if?

What if God is nostalgic about that day of formless and void? What if sometimes, in what one might consider eccentric energy, he reaches out and grabs an eraser and wipes the slate of someone’s life clean on occasion? Not to be mean. 

It could feel mean.

But what if he likes to take a man or woman down to the studs because he has a hankering to do something NEW?  

See, I am doing a new thing! (Isaiah 43:19) Says every creative.

Pruning, a gardner would call it. Sharp shears remove the top of a beautiful, tall zinnia, leaving nothing but a few little leaves and barely a hint of new growth. Watch out. Next thing you know, you’ve got a fuller bush and more zinnias than you can fit in a vase. 

What would a person do, if he were to see that God was erasing, erasing, erasing what was? What would a person do if he were to feel that God had brought him down to nothing? 

Naked, Job called it. Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I will return. 

Well, I’m thinking that maybe we should just hold still. Just hold still, feel the sorrow and exposure of the moment, and wait. Be curious, my friend Katie Westenberg would say. 

Hmmm. 

What is God up to? God who finds it absolutely delightful to create something out of nothing. (And nothing might be right where we are right now.) 

Hold still. Humble yourself under the mighty hand of God, and in due time he will lift you up. 

Lift you up from what, you might ask? Lift you up from void. Lift you up from emptiness. Lift you up from nakedness. 

Sit tight, my dad would say.