In Pursuit 

At this moment I’m sitting in an emergency room.  To be honest, I suspected that this was coming.  The impending doom seemed sure enough, but the activity… it was oh-so enticing!  Who doesn’t enjoy jumping on a trampoline?  My handful of future Olympians loved the idea.  All 4 daughters were in agreement.  A trampoline would be the perfect addition to the Montgomery homestead.

Of course, Craigslist made the purchase all too easy.  My initial investment was small enough.  The back-end investment, after two surgeries and a two night stay at Wood County Hospital is likely to be slightly more.

My 3-year-old, Eowyn, broke her right arm while playing on my small initial investment.  To make matters worse, she was playing with me when it happened.  I’m pretty sure that I wasn’t in contention for the “father of the year award.”  Now I expect the judges to review my application and laugh themselves out of their chairs.

As the doctors went over Eowyn’s situation with me, they pointed to X-ray results that they used to see inside of her.  They noted exactly what was out of place and then they told me how they were going to fix it. That was good news, because all that I initially knew about the situation was that something in her arm clearly wasn’t right and it was causing significant pain.

I’ve spoken with people who have told me that they “just don’t feel right.”  Essentially, they know that something isn’t right with their lives, but they don’t know exactly what “it” is… and it’s causing pain and frustration.  They aren’t practicing flagrant wrongdoing.  That would be easily identifiable and easy to change.  They just know that something isn’t right.

The Bible proposes this interesting concept: that God has created us with a specific identity in mind.  In other words He designed us in such a way that when we seek Him and His will for our lives, we will “find ourselves.”  The decision to pursue God aligns us to the reason we were created.  Pursuit of God becomes pursuit of our perfect selves.

God can see inside of us.  He knows how things should be and He knows what it will take to make things right.  He knows our place inside of the diversity of God’s people.  It’s up to us to decide to come to Him and allow Him to heal the differences between what we are and what we were meant to be.  These are things only our Creator would know.

May we seek for our perfect selves inside of God.  I would not be surprised if God the Father wins our hearts as His reward in the end.

Pastor Travis