The notion of reinventing oneself has always had a glamorous association for me. I’m not sure why, though. In practical terms, it seems more courageous than glamorous.
Looking back through the last few decades, I see and remember moments when I did things that felt like reinventing myself. When I quit my studies at Carolina to play music, it felt like a risk but never like a mistake. I experienced life at a very young age that I might never have experienced had I not done that.
At 26, I started my own business in sales and became a “Mary Kay lady.” It surely was a different persona for me, but as I often say, it was “the right thing at the right time” for my little family.
Answering the call to enter seminary in 2009 was yet another moment of reinventing; although, what it really was, was a moment of full commitment. It began a season of carving away things that did not serve my identity in Christ well. My submission to a call from Jesus to serve His Church requires ongoing submission to a process of transformation.
And, as I enter yet another turn in life, taking on a new iteration of my career and dreaming up new ways to serve communities in my sphere of influence, I see these changes less as my own reinventions and more as the evolution of my self as I was created by God to be. These are merely the tangible expressions of God’s transformation process in our lives.
17 Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. 18 And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit. 2 Corinthians 3:17-18, NRSV
Finding a new "normal" 