And we all, with unveiled face, continually seeing as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are progressively being transformed into His image from glory to glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit. 2 Corinthians 3:18 (AMP)

Just the Beginning – The Change Your Mind Series – Part 7

Go to PART 1  |  PART 2  |  PART 3  |  PART 4  |  PART 5  |  PART 6  |  PART 7

The word used for ‘transform’ in Romans 12:2 is “Metamorphó?” which comes from the words: Metá, meaning “change after being with;” and Morphó, meaning “changing form in keeping with inner reality.” It’s where the word “Metamorphosis” comes from.

It’s not a simple change. When we’re driving, and we need to change direction, we don’t say, “I’m just transforming my route…” (google maps, are you listening?). Transformation is the result of a cataclysmic moment. You’ve been with someone or experienced something, and as a result, you are transformed. It changes your form, on a deep level, informing your inner reality.

Sometimes we are transformed into something good, and sometimes not. It’s all part of it. For most of us, our transformations are more like Thomas’s story (yesterday’s devotion) than we care to admit. We dream of being people of stalwart faith (which is a bit of an oxymoron, don’t you think?) and stubborn convictions, but we’re just as human as he was. And more often than not, the deep transformations we experience come from the hand of something that knocks the wind right out of us.

Rainer Maria Rilke wrote:

“So you must not be frightened if a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have ever seen; if a restiveness, like light and cloudshadows, passes over your hands and over all you do. You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any miseries, or any depressions? For after all, you do not know what work these conditions are doing inside you.”

Conformity is what gets us stuck. It wants to put the pain away. Play the part. Put on a show. It stunts our growth, keeps transformation at bay and leaves our spirits exposed to whatever wickedness tries to come at it. Which doesn’t necessarily turn us into bad people who do terrible things.

More often than not conformity is well hidden in our controlled, contrived and safe lives. Always doing the same thing, believing the same thing, never asking why, never following beauty down the rabbit hole of wonder, and never stepping out in faith.

Not the kind of faith that says, “WOW, I needed a carpark, and I got one right out the front of the store – that must have been God!” But faith that asks, “If God isn’t stopping what’s happening in Syria, or rescuing the child down the road from his abusive father, or healing my neighbor of cancer; there’s got to be more going on here that I know.”

Faith isn’t a full stop. It’s just the beginning. It should open us up to possibility, wonder, questions… spiritual archaeology and anthropology.

Perhaps the transformation is less physical – image-driven and popularized – and more a movement of the heart and soul. A return to the love and wholeness that we were created from.

And it’s not a one-time thing.

For some thirty (and more *wink*) years now, God has been showing me how to transform my hate into prayers, my bitterness into forgiveness, my pain into joy, and my blindness into sight. He’s helping me shed the conformity of a zombie-like world chasing the paper thin dream of fame and fortune at the expense of others and be transformed into a person who sees’s faith, hope, and love as the things to give my life to.

And it will continue (I pray) for at least another thirty years and more.

May you, dear friend, shed conformity and seek to live a life of transformations; of being changed from glory to glory, through the good and the bad, so that you can be who you are meant to be in a world that needs you to be the truest you that you can be.

Written by Lizzy Milani
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