The journey of a lifetime

As my eyes swept the monochromatic landscape of sunbaked earth and ancient ruins, a splash of color caught my eye. I moved closer to find a scarlet poppy sprouting from a block of marble.

Photo credit: Rosalyn Otto

Peering down, I focused my camera and silently queried the incongruous bloom, “How are you even here? Don’t you know that you shouldn’t be able to grow here?” I snapped the picture, relishing its simple beauty, and rejoined my family. Throughout the next twenty years, as I captured photos of the marvelous and mundane, God often drew my attention to flowers growing in unlikely places: a carefree daisy sprouting from the ruins of a tumbled-down castle, a foxglove clinging to Hadrian’s Wall with joyful defiance, a dandelion splashing its sunshine in the ashy midst of a fire pit. I marveled at what I came to call my “flowers from stone,” and then moved on.

It wasn’t until I found myself back in counseling for wounds incurred as a little girl that I really began engaging my story. My godly counselor asked wise and gritty questions that invited me to get compassionately curious about the trauma’s impact on me, but more so the devastating consequences of my reactionary survival strategies and attempts at self-protection. The work was painful and profitable, as I came to understand myself better, to repent of the ways I had further harmed myself, and to extend grace and gratitude to a little girl - now grown woman and mother of her own little girl - who had done the best she could. The Spirit was so evidently involved throughout the process, but most unexpectedly when He resurfaced those images of “flowers from stone” and revealed, “Rosalyn, that is you; you are like those blooms... vibrant life out of barren places, beauty from ashes.” I wept, as I came to understand that for two decades God had been weaving a visual parable of redemption throughout my story, waiting to reveal it to me when I was ready to receive its subversive message. I fell more in love with Jesus, as I recognized Him as the One who had been wooing me, even as He had said He would woo His wayward people millenia ago,

I will win her back once again.
    I will lead her into the desert
    and speak tenderly to her there.
I will return her vineyards to her
    and transform the Valley of Trouble into a gateway of hope.
She will give herself to me there,
    as she did long ago when she was young...

  from Hosea 2:14-15

God had taken me into a wilderness to show me Himself, and to invite me to know myself as well as Him more deeply. He drew me to a place I never would have chosen, then spoke tenderly to me, brought renewed fruitfulness, and assured me that He would be continuing to transform my personal “Valley of Trouble” into a “gateway of hope.” How very grateful I am that the Lover of my soul invited me to step into a journey with Him, a journey deeper into His heart and into becoming more fully the woman He always has intended me to be, the journey of engaging my story.

John Calvin once observed, “Without knowledge of self there is no knowledge of God. Our wisdom, in so far as it ought to be deemed true and solid Wisdom, consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves” (Institutes of the Christian Religion). Or, as it has been paraphrased,

There is no deep knowing of God without a deep knowing of self, and no deep knowing of self without a deep knowing of God.

This truth, as advocated throughout Scripture, is the driving force behind the third “crucial practice” of Embrace Ministry: “Engaging Our Stories.” We are passionate about this message because we each have experienced how powerfully transforming it can be to step into our stories with Jesus. It’s messy, and takes time, courage and curiosity, and is best engaged with a godly counselor and/or wise and safe friend. My late husband and I long ago observed that our human tendency is to live with a known level of pain rather than risk the unknown in order to reach a place of greater healing and wholeness. Some even seek to justify that choice by quoting Isaiah 43:18, “Forget about what’s happened; don’t keep going over old history” (MSG). But when we look at the context of that verse, in which God is rehearsing to His people all that He has done for them in the past, it seems that the message is not so much that we should ignore the past and focus on the future, but that His past actions on their behalf paled in comparison to what He was about to do: “But forget all that— it is nothing compared to what I am going to do” (NLT). After all, the constant drumbeat throughout Scripture, even as Jesus urged His dearest friends at the Last Supper, is REMEMBER. Remember who God is. Remember what He has done. Remember what is true. Remember our identity in Him. Remember our belovedness. Remember that, whether we can see it or not, God constantly has been and is powerfully present and faithfully at work in our stories.

Have you ever pondered the word, remember? I hadn’t until a few years ago. As I sat with Jesus and the concept of remembering, He showed it to me in a whole new light. Taking apart the word,  re (again) and member (to put together; as Google’s “AI Overview” summarized, “when referring to a "member"..., it essentially means one of the parts that come together to form a whole, so you can think of it as being "put together"), we see a richer meaning with profound implications.

Could it be that God’s intention is to re-member us as we remember our past? Could it be that  Jesus invites us to engage our stories as a primary means of restoring and “re-storying” us to wholeness? And could it be that it is as we remember His past presence and work in our lives that our knowledge of and experience with God deepens and becomes so much more? For, while remembering almost always involves pain, the path to wholeness also can lead us into awe and worship of our infinitely powerful and intimately personal God.

Photo credit: Joshua Earle (Unsplash)

He used “flowers from stone,” images sown over many years, to draw me deeper into Himself, closer to my true self, and further into worship. Because our Abba is so wildly creative and so intimately personal, He has been speaking to you in a way He knows your heart most needs – likely not blooms sprouting in unlikely places, but love letters awaiting your attention that will capture your heart if you accept His invitation to join Him on a journey. That is, the journey of prayerfully, intentionally, and courageously engaging your story. Whether you’ve already for years been on this adventure with God or are newly determining to take that brave first step, I believe you’ll find, as I have, that it is the journey of a lifetime!

Photo credit: Vlad Bagacian (Unsplash)

Written by Rosalyn Otto