Leaving a Slip in the Wind - Transformation
“If you yourself do not cut the lines that tie you to the dock, God will have to use a storm to sever them and to send you out to sea.” Oswald Chambers, Utmost For My Highest Devotional, June 8.
What Oswald is saying here is that we need to pull ourselves away from the dock we consider comfortability and move ourselves on the tide of God or He may do it Himself. God intends to change us into a new creation, but we must release ourselves from the dock to experience this transformation.
The dock can represent many things, but for someone experiencing depression the dock can represent the “old world” they were once used to living in and the world they understood. This undocking can be a pulling away from these things. The old world can be anything from friends, habits, pleasures, experiences, or anything else we placed value on or anything that made us who we are. Ultimately, they represent the old ways we looked at life, but now we are undocking and are coasting out to sea. Unfortunately, we don’t have an itinerary for this trip and we didn’t plan for it, so we couldn’t make preparations to say bye to loved ones or enjoy our favorite food for the very last time. The boat has sailed. As we sit on this boat, the old world becomes fainter and we begin to get scared because we’ve lost touch of ourselves and we don’t know what is on the horizon. As we cast further and further away, nothing is recognizable, and as time goes on, things begin to look bleak, we lose hope and things start to become unbearable.
This is where I believe the actual transformation takes place. It occurs in the hallways of life, between a door closing and the next door opening. It occurs out in sea. If you feel you have drifted out to sea and are beginning to lose hope, please know there are many others on this journey with you drifting in this deep and expansive ocean who feel just like you do and please know you will not drift forever. But when you do finally arrive to shore, you will be thankful you did and everything will become clear as to why the journey was so long and difficult. It was preparing you for the person you were to become and preparing you for your purpose you are to fulfill at this new destination.
