Thinking It's Over When It's Not
It’s over…we tell ourselves. It’s over. Whatever it might be (or might have been) it’s gone and there’s no getting it back. The loss is too big. The obstacles are too daunting. Things have changed so much that whatever we lost no longer has a place in the current reality that we’re living in. We’re one person (just one person) trapped in a downward spiral that’s far more powerful than all of us put together. The glass isn’t half empty...
Thinking It's Over When It's Not
It’s over…we tell ourselves. It’s over. Whatever it might be (or might have been) it’s gone and there’s no getting it back. The loss is too big. The obstacles are too daunting. Things have changed so much that whatever we lost no longer has a place in the current reality that we’re living in. We’re one person (just one person) trapped in a downward spiral that’s far more powerful than all of us put together. The glass isn’t half empty. The fact is, there is no glass. We can’t pick up where we left off because where we left off...left. It’s over…so we think.
In processing all of this for myself, I wrote this quote:
“The last time I saw it, its hull was crushed and it laid helpless against the incessant swells that rolled up upon the shallows within which it laid canted and broken. Yet, in the hands of a seasoned sailor who saw potential in the carnage, it was hauled out the swells, lovingly repaired, and the next year it pushed out past the swells that had held it helpless and it sailed again. And although our hulls are crushed beyond hope of repair and we find ourselves helplessly awash in the incessant swells of our sin, with God we too can sail again.”
Sometimes things are ‘over’ only because we believe them to be over. We’ve been told that they’re over. Or everyone around us says that they’re over. Or the cultural climate seems to say that they’re over. Or those without vision have never realized that they lost anything because they never saw what they had in the first place, so they tell us that nothing’s over because nothing was lost to begin with. Or people have chosen to believe that they’re over because that’s easier than hoping that they’re not. We don’t want to look the fool and try to save something that’s no longer there to save, so we tell ourselves and those around us that it’s over…so we think. But we can sail again.
Is something really over? Have we actually lost something that we can’t reclaim? Is it gone forever? Or, is that what we’ve chosen to believe. It’s my sense that most things aren’t over (at all). Rather, it’s our belief that they are (which is a ‘belief,’ but not necessarily a ‘reality’). It’s more our attitude, or our fears, or our unwillingness to challenge popular thinking, or our unwillingness to risk grabbing hold of a vision, or a lack of belief in ourselves, or more importantly, a lack of belief in God. In the Bible, Jesus said, “What is impossible with man is possible with God.” Do you get that? Do you understand what that opens up? Do you understand that our perception that something is over does not take into account that with God, nothing is over? That our families, our communities, our dreams, our relationships, our nation can sail again? That there are always possibilities, even when all we see are massive impossibilities? That what we feel we have to walk away from are things that have a ton of possibilities still living and breathing within them? Is something really over? Really? You might want to think about that because you’d be amazed at all of the things that can sail again.
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