Embracing the Ugly Side of Metamorphosis
But what is growth if not an intricate canvas of scars?
For as long as I can remember, I have viewed my life as a tabletop balanced on four legs—my faith, career, academics, and relationships. When one leg gets bent, or part of it breaks off, even in the slightest, the effect is felt in how the table instantly begins to wobble as the other legs become imbalanced.
In extreme cases, the table usually topples over, shattering dishware and spilling food that took ages to prepare all over the floor. When that happens, I end up piecing the broken pieces together and cleaning up the mess, which could take weeks or months, as has been my experience lately.
One advantage of viewing my life this way is that it makes it easy for me to set relevant goals and prioritize them accordingly. So, whenever I want to set short- or long-term life goals, I focus solely—or primarily, as the case may be—on those four crucial areas.
Last year, I set a couple of goals I hoped to have achieved by December—academic goals like “get six credits in the G.C.E.,” relationship goals like“reach out to two friends or acquaintances I haven’t chatted with in a while every weekend,” career goals like “promote my editing services on LinkedIn at least twice a week,” and faith-related goals like “build a more intimate relationship with God.”
Naturally, when you set relevant goals as specific as these, it becomes easier to measure them using the right metrics.
For instance, you can gauge your understanding of the G.C.E curriculum by tracking your performance each time you attempt past exam questions.
You can measure your consistency with the second goal by counting the number of friends or acquaintances you genuinely reconnect with every weekend.
As for promoting your services on LinkedIn, you can easily track your posts’ reach, impressions, click-through rate, and engagement rate.
But how do you measure or quantify a faith-related goal as overwhelming, faith-demanding, self-denying, and God-centralizing as building a more intimate relationship with God?
In fact, how do you measure any faith-related goal when the metrics are your will, heart, motive, repentance, submission, obedience, and so on, all of which you can’t measure nearly as well as God would if you don’t know Him as much as you should?
Or isn’t that why we usually feel unfixable when our track record of always returning to the same chains God set us free from haunts us to the point of numbness—or the overwhelming type of shame that eventually drives us to “accept our fate” and sin shamelessly?
We show more faith in our weaknesses than in God’s ability to save us from them because our weaknesses often feel more tangible and much closer to us than God does.
We forget that this is exactly why grace exists and reject it when we eventually remember because we feel we don’t deserve it.
As if it would be called grace if we indeed deserved it. . . .
They say getting your heart broken turns you into a philosopher—well, so does constantly feeling like the only thing you’re naturally good at is breaking God’s heart.
It makes a man ponder a great many questions, and as you can surely tell by now, I have been pondering a lot lately.
Sometime two weeks ago, amidst my pondering, my half-hearted quest for answers, and setting goals for the new year, some of which relate to reading, I learnt a group of Christians were committing to a reading challenge. The goal was to read twelve strategically selected Christian non-fiction books, one each month, which they would review and discuss afterwards. I thought the books, discussions, and companionship might offer me some clarity, so I joined the group.
This month, we are reading Every Square Inch by Bruce Riley Ashford, and the first chapter of the book struck a chord with me. It explores the idea of faith not as a separate compartment in our lives but as a thread woven through every aspect of life.
As I read that chapter and considered my goals for the year and the ones I set for previous years, it became clear to me that I had been trying to fit God into one area of my life (faith) and not really involving Him in other areas as much as I should.
I shall share the lessons this realization taught me in my next newsletter when I must have unpacked them considerably, especially because I think you might find it useful in how you set your goals and live your daily life as a Christian.
So, where does this leave us?
I wish I could say I am back to my old self, back to dishing out helpful advice every week, and that all is well again, but my current reality is a different story.
Just like a caterpillar, I am dissolving into something new, and while it’s a messy process, it’s still all part of my metamorphosis.
I am embracing the cocoon, both its darkness and its potential for a more lasting dawn. So, expect honest reflections, raw vulnerability, and the messy beauty of becoming in the coming weeks.
I will share with you the ugly parts of this process as much as its beautiful parts because vulnerability is where humanity blossoms.
So, with the year unfolding like a new wingspan, join me as I crawl from the comfort of numbness, wings still damp but eager to take flight.
In the end, we are all butterflies in the making, shedding, and reshaping.
So, let’s embrace our metamorphosis and unfurl our wings together this year.
Happy 2024. 🦋