God Says You Can Still Transform

transform: to make it through a dramatic change in appearance or character. 

On the very first day, God transformed nothing into Something.

Something good.

A world, a universe, an existence,

created to flourish, bear fruit, live.

God created people to live in that flourishing,

and just to help us understand

our own promise to transform,

we watched leaves fall from trees,

flowers die and blossom again.

Transformation was the very metaphor of our laboring,

our living,

our enduring.

It was the over and over again lesson of God.

At some point, transformation meant entering into seasons of pain

and injustice.

At some point, things got really complicated,

and we lost sight of what it means

to transform in the way we once could.

But still, all these years later,

we transform.

We still work back and forth,

in and out of our pain,

still go from who we were to who we are to who we will be.

Perhaps one of the greatest acts of injustice we can commit

is to say that transformation is impossible,

that God does not see us shifting from there to here to

where we are going tomorrow.

The greatest injustice is to look each other in the eyes

and say that change is impossible.

Because transformation is our very breathing,

and in our laboring to become

not just someone else but a more real version of ourselves,

to break ourselves from whatever chains bind us,

we are still putting on the cloak of transformation.

We are still asking to be made new–

to remember ourselves from before,

from a deep place of belonging.

We are still begging for Eden.

But still, the leaves change.

Still, we have fire in the winter

and hummingbirds in the summer.

Still, the world reminds us that we are called to transform,

little by little, into something that we are supposed to be.

Still, God calls us from our first form

into our cocoons, where we wait and listen,

and in that moment when we break out

and fly,

we are called there, too.

We are told,

“This is today’s Eden,

you in your flight,

you in everything you were yesterday

and in everything you’ll be tomorrow.

This is what I created

out of a breath and a call.

This is transformation as

it was always meant to be.”

And we change and we fly,

tethered to the reality

that we are never alone,

even,

and especially when,

the transformation

takes a lot of work

and discomfort here and there.

Because even the leaf holds on

to the branch

as long as she can

before she whispers,

“Take my life and let it be

consecrated, Lord, to thee.”