I am in a season of transition and it bears a weight. Leaving a school where I had been building up a reputation for my entire life, I am now thrown headlong into raging waters. Call it confidence, call it ignorance, but I was eager for this season. I thought I had it all mapped out. I would spend the summer preparing, getting better at writing, and doing life well, then I would move to Haiti and start my ministry. Somehow, that seemed too easy.

My confident ignorance was slowly, but surely exchanged for a humble, more quiet version of myself. In just three months I had gone from a teenager who was setting out to change the world to a young adult who no longer had anything important to say.

At the same time, summer is being exchanged for fall, and I am reminded that we must always be changing too. We have to leave home in order to pursue a career, have to change from being an employee into a husband, and from a husband into a father. We are always growing, but we have these huge moments of transition in our lives, where we shed who we once were in exchange for the person we will be, or the person we have to become.

So this summer has been one of rapid change, as any one who left high school could agree. I guess I felt that if I didn’t have a platform to build a reputation on, then nothing I said held any weight. In shedding off the skin of who I once was, I was afraid to put on the suit of who I am becoming. Through meaningless efforts, I tried to slow down or even stop time, but time never stops, and it never slows.

So today I sit and I write, not because I feel my words are meaningful, or because they hold any weight. I have a blog thing, sure, but not because I feel like I “meet the requirements”. In all honesty, it will probably come down at some point in the future, maybe when time stops moving so fast. For now, I write because it makes sense, it helps me keep track of who I once was and will maybe help give some insight into who I am becoming.

This life is new to all of us, none of us have done it before and I believe none of us are experts. But the God who invented life is extending his hand to us, asking us to let him shape us in those transition periods. So in that moment when we shed our old selves and haven’t yet found who we are supposed to be, God is there, waiting for you to ask his opinion, because he loves you.

We all have something important to say. Our lives are important, and everyday we are given the chance to make something great happen.

Just my thought of the day,

-Hank