{"id":186,"date":"2011-12-20T13:27:00","date_gmt":"2011-12-20T13:27:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lrtministry.org\/random-thought-on-transformation\/"},"modified":"2011-12-20T13:27:00","modified_gmt":"2011-12-20T13:27:00","slug":"random-thought-on-transformation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesojournersgarden.org\/blog\/random-thought-on-transformation\/","title":{"rendered":"Random Thought on Transformation"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have been in a desert place the last month or so. I have been unable to put together cohessive thoughts on things I have been reading and pondering. For me, in reality for all of us, I don’t think this is uncommon. There are times when I feel close to God, thoughts come and I can articulate them well, and life goes on. These are productive times in one sense, but to be honest there is less transformation of me personally.<\/p>\n

For me, transformation comes when I am stretched and tested. It is in these refining fires that I am open to deep transformation. Transformation that seems to create some of my life altering changes. I hope that this makes sense to you. It’s not that either of these positions are better than the other – we need both times of rest and times of refining. A couple of my former seminary profs called this cycle a transformations crucible. In the center we can find rest, but around the edges we get our impurities burned away. <\/p>\n

Our current message series at my church is called Inked (click here if you want to view<\/a>) has been great because they have been focusing on the promises that God has given us in His Word. You see it are these promises that I turn to, that we all should turn to when we are in the desert places. As one of the Jasons said this last weekend (and I paraphrase), when you feel alone add 1 because God is there. <\/p>\n

Don’t run from times of trial, struggle, hurt or aloneness – rather lean into the promises of God, seek out others for support, open yourself up to the Holy Spirit’s transformational work and see where God brings you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have been in a desert place the last month or so. I have been unable to put together cohessive thoughts on things I have been reading and pondering. For me, in reality for all of us, I don’t think this is uncommon. There are times when I feel close to God, thoughts come and … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Random Thought on Transformation”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-186","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-random-thoughts"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4xZq6-30","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesojournersgarden.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesojournersgarden.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesojournersgarden.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesojournersgarden.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesojournersgarden.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thesojournersgarden.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesojournersgarden.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesojournersgarden.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesojournersgarden.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}