I’m reading a great book about change. In one choice section the writers assert that you can help people negotiate change when “you grow them.” In that connection, they counsel further that we put three questions to them:
1. Who am I?
2. What are my circumstances?
3. What should someone like me do in such circumstances?
Good food for thought!
Who am I?
Image bearer of God. A work of masterfully creative HANDS, shaping a life that conforms to the ultimate Image—Jesus! Indeed, the beauty and power of that Image that is now forming in me also reach through me toward others and work their way into the stuff of today.
What are my circumstances?
Brokenness all over the place, personal and relational poisons working death here and there. Ugliness masquerades as loveliness; the lie accuses the truth of misrepresentation; and anger determines to set things right, “even if it kills me, or them!” Loneliness seeks companionship with people who aren’t really there. Compulsions promise freedom and peace, only to cycle into new necessities. Image-bearers oblivious to their true identity consume their way to deeper emptiness, entertain themselves to the shallows that numb even as they soothe, gather fullness with bottomless containers, dying to … die.
What should someone like me do in such circumstances?
Embrace the One whose image I bear and am becoming. Seek His way as the right, good, beautiful, healing and whole, peace-making, life-generating, fullness-bringing, hope-enlivening, future-creating way for which all people ache. Seek and live this way in the company of at least a few others, knowing that it’s also in His Company and confident that in such seeking and living the anti-toxins for what poisons a once good world verge on the viral!
In other words, just behave yourself!