I link up with Lisa-Jo on Fridays for a writing flash mob…throwing caution to the wind and gathering to share what a few minutes of free writing can buy.

Today’s topic: PRESENT

GO.

I’m very comfortable with this place — this place where I’m not seen, behind the computer and hiding among the flowers on the wall and blending into the background. This place where there is not a lot of responsibility and not a lot expected of me and this place that is not that vulnerable. Because it’s easy to be transparent and open when it’s black letters on a white screen and quite another when it requires me to move away from behind the screen.

I’m very comfortable with this place — this present place where it’s so easy to trust God when I don’t have to. I can boast in my trust in Him when there’s not a lot of strength I require from Him. When it doesn’t necessarily have to be His strength I’m able to stand up with, when it’s my own, really…and I haven’t noticed that until now.

My present is changing. That comfortable place is quickly becoming my past, not my present, and the uncomfortable place is quickly becoming my present, not my future. And that brings knocking to my knees, and quickening to my breath, and herds of butterflies to my stomach. I cannot survive in that place on my own. I’m not made to stand up in that place — that place where I can’t hide among the flowers on the wall. It’s a foreign place where I don’t speak the language or look like the natives and the currency is one that I don’t understand.

Yet that’s what happens when the cocooning time is over. The caterpillar is no longer the same and it requires supernatural strength to break through the cocoon and allow its new wings to expand and flap and get strong. And it has to trust that God has made those wings to fly, not fall, and trust that the Creator knew what He was doing when He changed its present so drastically and completely.

STOP.