“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”

Charles Dickens’ opening statement in a Tale of Two Cities very accurately sums up what we often feel during times of transition. Everything changes and continues to change. Sometimes the change is so prolonged that it seems even change is changing: What we thought was supposed to be the end result doesn’t seem to be anymore. Whether it is a forced transition or a voluntary one, there are paradoxical emotions and thoughts that swirl between joy and sadness, hope and discouragement, patience and impatience. Regardless of what precipitated our time of transition, during transition the unexpected becomes the norm.

THE PROBLEM OF FLYING THROUGH CHANGE
So often, we fly through our changes without truly experiencing them, without knowing the Divine’s deeper purpose in allowing them. We keep thinking that if we can just get to where we are going, everything will be okay, or that we will finally be happy when this is over. We may even tell ourselves that this should not be happening to us. Sometimes we simply move numbly through transition, floating through our days, as though not anchored to anything. This is problematic because in all of these states, we remove ourselves from our spiritual anchors.

ANCHORS
In transition we need anchors. Anchors tell us that God is in this change. His hand is working through all things and changing spiritual matter deep within our innermost shadowed caverns. We are somehow alert to the fact that when this transition is completed, our future will emerge — but we can never shortcut it. You see, transitional changes to our lives are actually meant to bring changes in our lives — i.e., the conclusion is not nearly as important as the process.

CLOUDED PERCEPTIONS
We don’t normally realize this truth until we have exited the transition. That being said, when we realize we are entering a transition, or a darkened place, we need to understand that our perceptions will be clouded as well. In these times, it is good to have spiritual anchors, prayer, biblical roots and friends to stabilize us. To God, these times are important enough to our future that they are worth His allowing them. Yes, our today’s are also important to God, but so are our tomorrows, and transition is one of His means of getting us there.

These spiritual anchors allow us to slow down our thoughts, to refocus, to take courage and to release faith in Him who is far more capable of managing our lives than we are. If we too speedily charge ahead, we neglect to live the life we have, the life He has given us. We become so intent on tomorrow, we lose all recognition of the preciousness of today; if we continue to speed ahead for too long, we risk missing what God has for us to learn. In such cases, we have to go through the process all over again, and that can turn pretty ugly as self-doubt and self-worth constantly lord over us and the darkness seems to thicken.

TRYING TO CHANGE CHANGE
What we will eventually understand is that the one thing we cannot change is change itself. No moment, no echo system, no ethos, however perfect it seems, can be maintained forever. Life moves on, and we are swept along with it. Life is a process, and we are all works of God in His process. It is only through surrender to our unknown future that we find stability and peace. It is through this process that true life actually becomes a stabilizing current that moves us toward the purpose for which we were created.

THE CYCLE OF PROGRESS
It is in accepting life’s processes that we become free to experience these bittersweet glories of transition. No matter how difficult, life is beautiful; no matter how beautiful, life is difficult. It is this paradox that releases compassion. It is through compassion that individuals are touched, lives are changed and others are provoked toward their destinies.

Everything in life has cycles: the Earth, the trees, the crops, even our daily lives. Our lives impact others, and our lives are impacted by others. In the end, it is that impact that determines our everlasting residence with God. I find that so much of my frustration with transition comes from my refusal to accept life’s seasons as they come. Without knowing it, I am trying to play God by determining how, when, where and what I am going to do. And so, as we mature, we find that beneath the turbulence of daily living, there is a longer, slower rhythm and timing to life. If we listen and catch our breath, we can come into a firmer union with that aspect of creation. When we do, we gain assurance, peace and the strength to recognize that God’s timing is better than our own, and it always serves our well-being. In this state of existence, the world does not control our daily lives. We abide in Him, He abides in us, and others notice it. Here we can ask what we want, and it will be granted to us.

It matters little whether we have volunteered for the transition that we are swimming through or whether we were forced into it. It is in God and His spiritual atmosphere that we live and move and have our being. He alone sets the stage for the purpose of our lives. With purposeful intent, He placed us here on this planet. He perfectly timed our existence for this very hour.

GOD’S GUIDANCE
God’s Spirit runs through His children and is an inner river that is accessible at any time. We are constantly guided by that Spirit, and that inner Voice gives us focus and knowledge about the circumstances and situations we find ourselves in. It is during the turbulence of transition that we must actively, and passionately, stir ourselves to seek deeper meaning, higher perceptions and fullness of life in Him. It is here in transitional states that we grow in Him in leaps and bounds, more than we might have been able to grow in the past 10 years. We often learn more from 10 days of agony than 10 years of contentment.

Finally, when we experience a greater and “fiercer” transition, perhaps one that lasts longer than any other has, we can be sure of one thing — career changes are in store. By career changes, I do not necessarily mean changing types of employment, but that what is happening is meant to change the way we approach and perceive all matters of life. To those who are children of the Most High, life perception changes will always result in promotion, financial increase, deeper relationships and/or an abiding peace that all is well in God’s hand.

God does not trumpet when we are about to make these important life decisions. Why? because, He wants those decisions to be made from the fruit of our heart toward Him. The closer we are to Him, the better the fruit and the clearer the decision. Truly as we commit our ways to Him, our thoughts are established and through those thoughts the future becomes far brighter.

In my times of transition, I have found that it is great to have an end to journey toward, but in retrospect, it is actually the journey that matters in the end.

We know delight has been found when we look back and with deep heart felt passion, look God in the eyes and say, “The price was worth it.”

In my next post I’ll start to write on the Three Phases of the Dark Night of … .

Blessings,
John Paul

Sometimes, transition requires us to go someplace or do something so undefined that we are clueless to the next step we are to take. Much like Abraham in Genesis we have to go someplace that we don’t know. In the midst of the journey, it is easy to feel lost and perhaps alone. Once in a while we know what the end goal might be, but we don’t know where it is or how to get there. Just imagine that God told you to pack your bags, gather your belongings and go — just go.

We might be justified in asking, “Where do I go?” But God simply replies, “Go!” So we press again, “Okay, but at least tell me what direction to go. North, south, east or west?” Again God simply says, “Go!” We answer, “O Lord, please tell me so at least I can tell my family where we are going and my friends won’t think I loony.” Once again we hear that heavenly voice: “They’re going to think that no matter what you tell them — go!”

ABRAHAM’S JOURNEY: FINDING YOUR PROMISED LAND
Little do we know how important that first step of faith is. One day, we will transition from being dependent on others to being the leader of others, all because of this first step. But we don’t know that today. We just know that we want to obey God, and He said to GO! So we do it.

However, how do we balance obedience and responsibility? We have a family and responsibilities. Abraham even had livestock that somehow must be fed. Since we don’t know the path, we end up doing as Abraham did and let the livestock follow the grass trail — we simply try to handle each day as it comes. We don’t know the destination or how to get there, so every day the flock moves slowly, in seemingly random ways.

Months go by like this; the herd meanders from one pasture to the next, and we have not heard from God in a long time. In fact He has not spoken since we heard Him say, “GO.” Our friends are now looking at us with querying eyes, and even we are wondering, Was it just a dream?

To make matters worse, some family members lose faith in us and our ability to hear God speak. Some of those in our charge decide they can do better by themselves and run off to find their own destiny, as Lot did. In many ways, we don’t blame them, because the reality is we still don’t know where we are going! At least we’re surviving, and the grass trail before us continues to be plentiful.

A few more weeks go by, and we are pretty much at the lowest point of our journey. We start to tell our family that we’re rethinking our options, weighing their advice, waiting on God — but, deep inside, we are trying to decide if this is worth it. In a conundrum, we climb one, last mountain to look for the next pasture and tired on multiple levels we slump on a boulder to rest — exhausted, weary and oppressed. What are we going to do?

Then it happens. Without warning, we hear His voice again. “Lift your eyes up — now! Look to the north, south, east and west! All the land you see is yours. This is the land to which I told you to go. I will bless you here. Not only that, but I will bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you. And all your descendants will inherit this land.”

Overcome with emotion, our eyes fill with tears, and we collapse on the boulder and openly weep. We now understand that He had been guiding us all the time — but why didn’t it seem like it?

This is the agony and the awe of transition. We know we are called to do something, but we are totally incapable of getting ourselves there. Sometimes it seems even the beasts of the field know more than we do. Yet, we eventually arrive at our destinies. Looking back, we see God’s hand was quite active, but we recognized little of it while on the journey.

THE THREE-PART SECRET OF TRANSITION
Herein lies the secret to transition that Abraham discovered. This is why God changed Abram’s name. All three parts of this secret synergize with one another and must be consummated before we will achieve God’s purpose for our lives. Without the three parts in place, our understanding will not be complete and our destinies will not be reached.

Part One
The first part of the secret is simply this: Where God guides He provides. In Abraham’s case, God grew the grass that the livestock ate. God knew that the livestock would follow the food source and that Abraham would follow his livestock to the Promised Land.

Part Two
The second part of the secret is this: What God births He protects. This allows us to know that beyond a shadow of doubt, God has directed us to do what we are doing. We will need this confidence and this faith on multiple occasions before we reach the end of the journey. If the Lord told us to go, we will get there.

Part Three
Finally, the last part is realizing that if we expect God to guide only through the overt and the obvious, we will be blind to most of His guidance. God wanted Abraham to know that all of creation will be used by God to help him on his journey. As the apostle Paul wrote, “We do not look at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen” (2 Corinthians 4:18). In other words, God causes the grass to grow even when we do not hear Him speaking; He leads even when we don’t realize we’re being led. (Can I hear an amen?)

When grasped, and trusted, these three facets of the Secret of Transition will become huge anchors that will allow many other divine elements to come to light and help you reach the purpose for which God created you – here lies the zenith of delight.

There’s more on delight in the next post.

Blessings,
John Paul

Perhaps one of the ways to understand the third phase of transition is to understand the passage of Scripture where Jesus uses the analogy of the branches, the grapes, and the effect that pruning has on fruit production (John 15).

The whole idea of our lives on Earth is fruit production in all its forms. It is through fruit production that the Father is glorified (vs. 8). The way branches produce more fruit is through pruning and you guessed it – pruning is TRANSITION! The old is loped off or removed and the new is yet to come.

We may have been fruitful in our old life, career, house, ministry or any other endeavor we were involved in, but branches without the transition of pruning have decreasing yields of fruit. So the Father wants more fruit and rewards those who produce fruit with “Crowns”, but that is another story. Anyway, fruit is the idea, and I mean lots and lots of it! Why? Well let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. One step at a time, line upon line.

So how does desire, discipline and delight equate to grapes and pruning? Easy, you see transition begins right where we are - whack, we feel the uncomfortable sting of the vine dresser’s pruning shear. Cut to the nub, we are stuck where we are and hope something is coming. Slowly we begin to grow and we wonder what is going on. Weren’t we to move on? Why are we still here? Grapes may now begin to bud and even ripen. But, to our surprise, we will soon find this is simply the preparation for Transition.

DESIRE
Desire is displayed when the grapes are picked. You see the goal is not the grapes after all, it’s the taste, actually it is something far more precious than that. It’s Desire that stimulates our wanting to pick the grapes in hope of something fine and robust coming. It is desire for something more.

DISCIPLINE
The next thing we know we are thrown into a vat, a colander, or a wine press and the pressure begins. This is discipline and here we want with all our heart to escape from that which seems to be crushing the very life out of us. We seem to be losing the identity of our fruit. The grapes we worked so hard to produce, now have no identity of their own. And there in is the secret … God is more into wine than grapes!

DELIGHT
Delight comes in the drinking of the wine. Wine is not only the result of a loss of identity, it is the result of fermentation and that comes only after a very “smelly” time of hiddenness. We are not to be drunk or proud of our fermentation process as if this makes us more valuable, but with sober moderation we are to become the best wine in the feast! This is spiritual life at its best. It is the wine of the Passover, where God’s hand passes over us; a place where we become impervious to the attack of the evil one.

If we do not grasp hold of transition and embrace it, we are left a little more vulnerable to attack, and a little less confident of the nearness of God’s hand. We become a little dimmer light, and we lose a little of the salty savor that so spices up and preserves the world.

Few sights are as pitiful as branches that resist transition and are struggling to grow larger rather than to produce more fruit. The only thing worse is to see someone content to be “mash” in the bottom of the colander rather than wine in the glass. These are those who are content with the old wine for it is good enough.

We’ll talk more of the Delight of Transition in the next post.

Blessings,
John Paul

Discipline, the second phase of Transition is the most difficult phase and, like it or not, can last months or even years. That is precisely why it takes discipline. Not only will you have to keep your eyes on the vision ahead, you will have to navigate through the land mines of discouragement the enemy will lob your way. Consequently, you will actually determine the length of the delay. Few there are who will go through this phase unscathed. Fewer still who do not end up blaming someone or something else for the delay.

The courageous will look toward themselves before they blame others and realize the peripheral issues were not the problem. The thread of truth that God is addressing lies within ourselves; no matter what the external problem might seem to be.

THE MAGNETIC PULL
In this phase the magnetic pull of our “tomorrow” seems to be contrary to the circumstances of our life and/or the situations we find our self in. These outside events may even seem to war against God’s call, but it is all a part of God’s preparation for our transition. During the Discipline stage we are taught to overcome the last of our weaknesses that will limit our success on the other side of transition. We cannot become what God created us to become if we do not let go of the baggage that will drown us in the waters ahead.

Even if we are not overjoyed at the thought of transition, we eventually begin to feel like we just want to get it over with. So many matters seem out of our control. This is just where God wants us to be – out of our control. Once we give up the need to control our destiny, God looses us to go there.

THE DISCIPLINE OF “BEING”
Here we also learn the discipline of “being” where we are. The act of “being” keeps our focus on today. In “being” we learn not to overlook the mundane of today for the supposed joy of tomorrow. The Bible calls this “occupy,” and it is hard to keep doing, but it does build leadership in us.

WHEN GOD IS SILENT
Yes, as is often the case, in the discipline phase God does seem to be silent – why? Because, we have yet to fulfill the last thing He directed us to do. It is not necessarily disobedience; it is usually a matter of timing or finishing the process needed for the transition to occur. In either case, here we learn a major attribute of broad leadership – a double dose of patience!

For the prophetically gifted – this is a true “death to self” process and there are no short cuts. For those so gifted, I empathize, it is hard to see the future and then have to wait for it to come.

The next post will be on “The Delight of Transition”

Blessings,
John Paul

As the years have passed in my life and ministry I have gone through several times of “transition” I have noticed three distinct phases to transition, Desire, Discipline, and Delight. I’ll address the first, Desire, below and the other two in the next posts.

DESIRE
The first phase, Desire requires a very intense time of mental and spiritual reorientation. Here you experience one of two types of deep felt emotion, either elation or sorrow, as the reorientation becomes more defined.

Some, at first, experience elation only and with it a false sense of euphoria. I say “false” because at this time you sense the excitement of the future and seldom consider that hardship will eventually be mixed with destiny. You just want to get there - now - and like a bad penny, you cast any flickering thought that there might be a coming cost to your newfound destiny aside.

Some will experience sorrow because you are being directed to leave a place you have come to love. Others will have sorrow with the leaving of family. This might mean cutting the strings they have to you and/or you have to them. That cutting is often emotional and painful, but you cannot become a leader if strings of control are attached to you. In addition, you cannot follow the wind of the Holy Spirit if you are anchored to your friends or your family.

At this juncture in transition, it is as if God is taking you away from the desire of your heart and that departure often creates a spiritual quandary. So the Lord begins the process of making you uncomfortable where you are. Some might say, “He stirs the nest.”

Sometimes one feels both sets of emotions within minutes of each other as your desire for the location, job, or career to another location, job, or career.

One thing you can count on - when God orders you to go through a time of transition, regardless which emotion you have, God is bound to make you restless and uncomfortable to insure you become willing to leave where you are so you can become what He has created you to be. He is simply waiting for our “yes” to His direction and for our desire to become His desire. It is here that He gives us the “desires of our heart.”

Blessings,
John Paul Jackson

Sorry it has been a few days since my last post. Transition is a process it is seldom instantaneous and I have been in a process of transition, one of many I have experienced over thirty years of ministry. Some of them have been easy, others have been difficult and some, like this one, have taken a long time, five years to be exact.

I’ve discovered that the longer and/or the more difficult the transition, the greater the impact to others on the other side. It’s as if God is saying, “Justice is served if difficulty precedes victory.”

Personally, I am at the end of a five-year period of transition. Two years through the dark night of the spirit, one year to reorient and recover and two years to pull the change off. So for those of you who are “on the tarmac waiting for the plane to take off,” I have great empathy and remember “tribulation works patience in us.” UGH!

I’ve seen that often when the transition takes a prolonged length of time it is so two things can come into alignment; the first is preparation and the second is timing. Preparation also has two facets; your preparation and the preparation of those who you will impact and who will impact you. For either party most of the time preparation is not educational acquisition, but spiritual acquisition.

The second, timing, comes into play as God’s purpose for taking you where He is taking you – be it geographical or otherwise - and your preparation converge. The result of this convergence hallmarks the end of transition and the beginning of hope and fruitfulness. Proverbs tells us that he who rules his spirit is greater than he who takes a city. Sometimes we have to learn to rule ourselves before we can have rule where we are going.

I do have something very important to say about the process of transition, especially when it takes a long time for convergence to happen. Always leave the place where you are better than when you arrived. This is part of the reason God placed you where you are, even if it is temporary step on your road to your destiny. It is your part in God’s original mandate of subduing the Earth and learning to rule. Leave it better off for knowing you.

There are prophetic buzz words for transition and when you hear them you’d better understand that on the other side of that buzz word life as you know it will be irrevocably altered. Some of those buzz words are, “new thing,” “cocoon,” “different path,” “your chosen to…,” “change, change, change,” and “you’ve not gone this way before.” Perhaps you have some buzz words for transition that you’ve heard?

I have noticed three phases to transition, I’ll write about them next post.

Blessings,
John Paul

I see the analogy between “Transition” and Gideon giving God his future puzzled some of you. Here are the core elements of the analogy. Gideon underwent an enormous transition – from coward to hero in just a matter of weeks. More than a dozen times in the Biblical account of Gideon he refers to himself as being afraid and went on to state he was the least in all of his clan and in all of Israel.

In fact, as the story opens we find Gideon hiding behind the walls of the wine press grinding the little grain that the Mideonites had not taken. How did Gideon give God his future? He did it when he sacrificed the second bull of the herd. You see the first bull was already offered to the Lord. The second bull was to propagate the herd and produce new calves, thus the size of the herd would increase. If you kill the second bull, in effect you kill your future.

Gideon’s transition was to learn to trust the Lord and not fear the future. This is the first step in any transition, learning to trust and not fear. For those who love change it is easy, for the more stable ones who do not like change, this becomes more difficult. Keep in mind that all of us, at some point in our lives do not like change. If you have not discovered your own resistance to change, just wait, it is coming.

I agree, saying yes to God’s direction is not always that simple. Most of the time we are saying yes to a future that we have no clue as to what it will look like. The key here is to recognize that what we are seeing or perceiving actually is God’s direction for our life and say yes to what we know. I repeat, “Say yes to what you know is from God.”

You will know it is God’s plan by the peace you feel. Until you have that peace you have no responsibility to say yes. The most important sign that the next step is God’s plan for you is this deep seeded peace. Keep in mind peace does not equate to knowing all the answers. It does equate to the realization that after the transition all will be better.

Transition is a good topic because I suspect that as this year progresses, many of you will experience the most intense time of transition you have faced up to this point in your life and you’ll need to know this topic well.

Blessings,
John Paul

Transition is a difficult time for, most of us. To some it signals the chance for things to get worse. For others, it heralds that times are going to become better. There is one thing about transition, it signals it is time for us to change places. It is important to be where God wants us to be. I have often stated that God will move Heaven and Earth to get you where He wants you to be - if you are where He wants you to be. Transition changes who we impact, who impacts us and eventually how we decide what we decide.

One cannot make “right choices” from “wrong places.” When we step into a job, church, town, state or even a nation where God has not sent us we lose something. Perhaps it is just a little loss of God’s hedge of protection. One might say, “God’s greatest blessings can be found where He want us to be.” Perhaps we lose a little of ours spiritual perception and decision making ability, because we do not have the fullness of His insight with us. Perhaps we simply fail to recognize forces that might come against us, because we are a little less spiritually intuitive.

What do we do when we find we are not where God wants us? The answer? Godly sorrow and repentance for resisting His plan for our lives. God will take you where He wants, you just have to say yes and go - when He says and not overreact. What if one has a history of wrong choices? Then there are two things to remember: First, Godly sorrow and repentance erases the past. Second, and very important things to remember is not take the past with you into the future! Leave it there. God wants to be able to start all over with you. Let Him.

The balance of 2008 will be the “best of times and the worst of times” for many of you. For those who do not take the past with them it will become the best of times. For those who live in the past, and take it with them it could be the worst of times. Lot’s wife looked back to the past and it cost her dearly. Look to the future and what God’s desire for your life might actually be. Give the Lord your future, you could be a Gideon who had to slay his future to get to his destiny.

Join me in the “best of times” with the Lord. I’ll talk more about “Transition” in my next posting.

Blessings,
John Paul

In reading some of your responses it is evident that some of you have been deeply hurt and disillusioned. To reiterate, disillusionment is good in this sense, it is the end of the belief in something that does not exist and therefore will not lead you to your destiny. However, there is another form of a lie that God loves us too much to let go on and that is “delusion.”

Illusions come from our own conclusions as we assess our surroundings or circumstances. They are formed by faulty conclusions as we errantly perceive we are headed towards a destination or a direction we envision when are not actually headed there. Therefore illusions are of our own making and tend to be focused more on what the future might be than about the present.

Delusions resemble illusions, but there are subtle differences. Delusions may springboard off of things others say about us or what we think about ourselves. Delusions occur when we think we are someplace but we are not really there, or we see ourselves as having abilities that we actually do not have. In either case, delusions are more about our thoughts of the present than about the future.

Delusions are more painful and subsequently more difficult to recover from. Disillusionment is caused by expectations that do not happen, but delusions are beliefs and those beliefs are rooted deeply within us. You might say illusions are skin deep and delusions go clear to the bone.

No one really wants to think they have been deluded in their thinking, yet I have to bring this up because it is part of the healing process – it is the final ending of a belief in something that does not exist. Until we admit where we have been we will never get to where we will be. We will remain mired in the muck of circumstances and situations that we create and the lie continues. We will live in despair or hopelessness until this lie is broken. Once broken, the spiritual shift will begin and slowly, as new fruit blossoms, our circumstances and situations change and life becomes vastly different!

After the posting on Illusions, one of the Partner’s of this ministry recently wrote to me and stated something that is quite enlightening, and with editorial license I will paraphrase.

“Despair and disillusionment or despair and delusion are a deadly cocktail when one is going through a crisis in their life…the depth of which can keep one from finishing their destiny in God…”D’s” on God’s report card are not “F’s”…He merely points out the things that need improvement and may delay our future until changes are made.

Trust is a hard thing for me & what I’ve lived thru the last 20 yrs on my own…especially when people who are the closest to you lie…cheat & steal in one form or another…then you find yourself in the position of having to make a hard decisions. Overall what you will find is 80% of the time human error is in play, people may have meant well of how they handled things but the result is the same…changes have to be made.”

If you need a jump start, I have a free “Declarative Prayer” on my website that you can copy and pray daily. The Lord gave me this prayer and it really helped me a few years ago. I believe it will really help you as well. It is at the top right of the page under “News.” Scriptures says that the truth sets us free, isn’t it time to believe God has a pure truth about your life and what He created you be become and do.

Blessings,
John Paul

Have you ever been disillusioned? Walking with God is saturated in as much mystery as it is in knowledge. In neither case do we ever experience or understand it all. About the time we think we have a handle on any issue, God obliterates that handle and we crash back to Earth to regroup and find a fuller, more complete meaning to His ways. Sometime the crash is so hard we are grateful to walk away alive.

God has to allow this to happen to end our illusions - like when we think that we think like Him. Illusions are limitations we form from unrealistic expectations. These become a limitation, because we expect God will do things in certain ways. Without knowing it these illusions actually limit our understanding of God.

For those of you, who like me, have asked God to let you deeply know Him, we have in effect asked for all of our illusions to be broken – whew - that is painful. I do not think God enjoys our pain, but He loves us too much to allow our life to be shaped by choices we make from illusions.

I’ll admit I do not like my illusions coming to an end. Here I am thinking I am ready to “lock and load” and instead I “crash and burn.” It is humbling and sometimes humiliating, my self-worth is often shattered, and I want to crawl into some hole and spend the rest of my life there. Here, in the crash and burn of disillusionment He reminds us once again that His ways are far above ours.

One cannot be disillusioned without having an illusion. Illusions are mirages, and are never real, though we act like they are. It is for this reason He has to allow the crash. It ends our way of errant thinking, and starts an entirely new, and more accurate way of thinking. One that will lead us to our life’s purpose.

The reason the crash is so painful is that in our mind, illusions are perfect and because we understand that which is perfect we are one step closer to perfection ourselves. Further, in illusions we have a sense of control and power after all we understand some facet of the mystery of God. With the crash, our utopian illusion has reached its end and we are faced with the uncertainty of what we are yet to know, and yet to understand. In one moment of time, God reveals just how high His ways are above ours.

Actually this is a great moment. Truth can now make its way into our lives and we are free to find it as we search for it with all our hearts. I have found that I am never too old to have an illusion and to be disillusioned. I have also found that wisdom awaits us on the other side.

Perhaps something or somebody has disillusioned you. You may even feel God has. If so, then it is good that perception came to an end. God wants to reveal the truth so the rest of your life can be built on something tangible and not the illusion you built and you thought you could trust.

There is no illusion in Him to be disillusioned with. He is absolute in all His ways.

Blessings,
John Paul