Dear Reader,
Leonard Sweet, in his book Faithquakes, tells the story about a West Virginia man who asked for directions to a certain place. The man said, after thinking about it a few moments, “If I was wanting to get there, I sure wouldn’t have started from here.” According to Sweet, the moral of the story is that we don’t get to choose our starting places in life.
I think this is true. We start out in families, but we don’t get to choose our families. Families are the people we’re “stuck” with, someone said. Born in the South, I started life as a Southerner. And I’m stuck with a Southern drawl. We all start from some place and have very little choice, if any, in the matter.
One of the ways of dealing with your starting place is to fuss about it. “If only I had been born into a different family,” we lament. “If only I had had better teachers in school.” “If only I had been raised in Disneyland instead of Dixieland!” To lament our starting place in life is one way of dealing with it.
The other way to deal with your starting place is to “own your origins,” and then roll up your sleeves and go to work. I can only imagine what would have become of Abraham Lincoln had he spent his life apologizing for having started life in a log cabin. Our nation’s history would have been diminished if Booker T. Washington had spent his life lamenting his starting place as a victim of segregation. Our cultural and literary life would be poorer if Maya Angelou had wasted her time wallowing in self-pity because she was abused and sexually assaulted at the age of seven. These persons, and others like them, had starting places in life that were without promise. Yet, they rolled up their sleeves and went to work.
The older we get, the more we must own our choices. During the Lenten season, my thoughts have drifted to the fact that as we continue planting Grace Resurrection together, many are making choices not just for ourselves but for the community of East Cobb. In just a few short years, we’ve gone from 30 people to people flocking into this new congregation. On Easter, we connected with about 500 people. We get contacts and questions from the community consistently. New members join monthly. All of these choices change the course of our lives—but most importantly, they will change the face of our community. So starting places are important, but the future is affected by how we respond to our starting places—not the starting place itself. I don’t know about you, but that’s freeing to me. The good news is that regardless of our starting place, we are offered a new starting place every day. We are even free to choose this starting place, if we will. The starting place, of course, is God. There is ample testimony that for those who begin from this starting place, life takes on a whole new meaning.
So how is it with you? What’s holding you back that you credit to the starting place you experienced? And what steps can you take today to ensure you’ve given God control so He can use that start for His glory? I’m dealing with that personally these days. Let’s pray for one another.
~James