From Transferred to Transformed

     “Get down and give me 300,” barks the drill sergeant. The rookie soldier hits the ground in compliance. It’s been a rough few weeks at boot camp. Sure, he had sort of been a wandering, aimless, undisciplined youth before the army, but not an outlaw. Was all of this harshness really necessary?

     It was my first day as a Kroger employee. “I really don’t have that much experience,” I confessed to my manager in a bid for her patience. “Oh, that’s good!” she replied. I looked at her blankly. “When folks who are transferred from other stores come to work for us, it is always more of a challenge to train them in our ways,” she calmly explained. “They always want to hang on to their old ways of doing things.” “Oh,” I replied in my most enlightened voice.

     Jacob and his family were headed to Bethel (the house of God), but before they left on this journey, Jacob ordered his household to get rid of their idols, clean up and change their clothing. (Genesis 35:2) Jacob was renouncing some things. It was shortly after this that God appeared again to the man called “Deceiver” and reinforced the fact that he was now a “Prince with God’.

     Many times we transfer our hearts over to God and He is so glad that we do but God is not satisfied with just transfers; God is in the business of transformations. Drill sergeants scream, managers deconstruct and God makes tricksters limp because they all understand that transferring without transformation will cause you a lot of struggle and suffering in the long run. Break our wills? Renounce? Relearn? Repent? Yep… it’s painful stuff, but it’s the stuff that good employees, soldiers and princes are willing to do. It’s the way we get from transferred to transformed.

Photo credit: http://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/hoepker-drill-sergeant-web.jpg%3Fw%3D655%26h%3D441