It’s been a little frustrating, like I’ve been on this road for quite a while, but I haven’t really moved all that far. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of traffic holding me back. But something is jamming me up. For the most part, it appears the travel delays have been self-inflicted unfortunately.

I’ve been a Christian for going on a quarter of a century now, and I’m sometimes amazed with the amount of basic truths I’ve either forgotten, blocked out or somehow passed by the last 25 years. I’ve been slow to receive much of what God has for me because I’ve been trying to “have my act together” before approaching him. Feeling like it would not be genuine to try and have a deeper relationship if I still had ongoing sins, things I’d yet to surrender. And so for a while now, I’ve let every stumble send me back to the beginning.

But I’ve had the process all wrong. The order of things in particular. “Who you are” is on a parallel track with “who you want to be.” You get wins along the way. You make progress along the way. And eventually, you get close enough to see both roads inching closer together. I was coming to grips with this, when recently a pastor reminded me that surrendering is a process in itself. We don’t completely give over everything all at once. We do it little by little. In that journey is where God shows up.

As it turns out, I’m as ready as I’m ever going to be. And I can’t allow every transgression to reboot my process. I like analogy and metaphor, and I use those language tools probably a bit too often. But here’s another one. In bowling, if you are at my skill level, you have an occassional gutter ball, where it just sticks to your thumb, or you pull it or whatever, but the end result is you are riding the gutter all the way down the lane. It’s not great for your overall score when this happens, but they don’t send you back to the first frame to start over. They don’t take away the pins you’ve already knocked down in previous frames.

It’s probably not a perfect metaphor, but close enough for horseshoes. The point is that I’m no longer going to let missteps steer me off the path. I’m just going to stumble ahead until I catch my balance again. And keep moving.