How Was COAT? An Analogy...

The more time I have away from COAT training, the more I think I'll be able to actually process what happened there. When people ask me how it was, I don't know what to say. It was intense. It was hard. It was good. Those three words don't really do it justice. They don't really communicate the magnitude of what happened this summer.

Perhaps a quote from one of the books we read this summer will help you understand. The author found a snapping turtle... "it was grossly deformed due to a plastic bottle top, a ring about an inch-and-a-half in diameter that it had accidentally acquired as a hatchling when it, too, was about an inch-and-a-half in diameter. The ring had fit around its midsection like a belt back then, but now, nearly a foot long weighing about nine pounds, the animal was corseted by the ring so that it looked like a figure eight.

My friends realized that if they left the turtle in itse current stae it would die. The deformity was survivable at nine pounds, but a full-grown snapper can weight 30. At that size the constriction would not be survivable.

So they snipped the ring. And nothing happened. Nothing. Except for one thing: at that moment the turtle had a future. It was rescued. It was saved. it would take years for the animal to gow into more normal proprotions, maybe decades. Perhaps even in old age it would be somewhat guitar-shaped, but it would survive." -Generous Orthodoxy

This summer confirmed over and over again how convinced I am that the bottle top is still on. That I'm un-free. But when Jesus saved me, he cut that bottle top off!!! I don't have to live a restricted, guitar-shaped life! I'm free!!! New thoughts, new actions, new, new new!!!Furthermore, why do I keep trying to put the bottle top back on? How am I allowing things to restrict my growth as a Christian that God has already freed me from? How am I trying to convince God, other people, and myself that I'm still stuck in the bottle top? How can I grasp the magnitude of how God's changed me and freed me when I'm still a funny guitar-shape? Will I ever be able to comprhend just how deadly it would have been if God hadn't snipped off the bottle top? What if He never had freed me, what would me life look like then?

This summer one of my friend said, "I hope I never stop healing." This was a surprising and frustrating statement to me at first because I keep wishing for a time when BOOM! I'm healed and whole and totally free (I think that's called heaven). But the reality is that we're always healing and growing into a less guitar-shaped turtle (aka becoming more like Christ). The story of the turtle reminds me that God not only saves us initially, he continues to save us as we learn to walk in the freedom that He's already given us. That He IS transforming and changing me, even when I don't see it and that process takes time.

I don't think I've fully processed what happened during COAT training this summer or just how freeing it was...but thankfully, "he who began a good work in you [and me] will carry it on until the day of Christ Jesus" -Phillipians 1:4-6.