It seems that all my bridges have been burned, But you say that’s exactly how this grace thing works, It’s not the long walk home that will change this heart, But the welcome I receive with a restart.
I have this friend who is crazy about white boards. In college, he’d have them all over his apartment hiding behind couches or hanging over his desk. He’d use them to outline papers or keep track of the NCAA tournament – or really any other number of tedious tasks that proved his white boards useful. We were on a ministry leadership team and – sure enough – right in the middle of the meeting he would bust out his white board with some phrase or task for us to consider.
For him, I think the white board possessed some powerful connection to the way he thought, processed and conveyed information. But, in some other sense, I think it yielded a power of possibilities that he understood more than any of us.
I know that it is just a white board. It is just a tool that yields whatever information we want to scribble on it. But in another sense, it yields an infinite amount of possibilities – a blank slate onto which we could imagine anything and then write it into being. And when we fill it up or want to write new ideas into being, we can erase it completely and cover it all over again.
I think this is what is at the heart of the phrase, “Time to go back to the drawing board.”
We have tried all the possibilities – something isn’t working or something is amiss. Something has changed – a relationship is over, or a job didn’t pan out the way you expected. A phase of life or ideas or relationships or plans or philosophies is over. And so it’s time to try something new – to go back to the drawing board and erase some things, write in some new colors, or just wipe the whole thing clean and start over.
There’s just one problem for me: I hate going back to that drawing board.
Don’t get me wrong – I love the first draft process. I love looking at that brilliant, untouched, pristine white board and imagining what could grace its surface. I’m an idea guy.
But I am not a revision guy. I will chase those initial scribbles to their furthest conclusion – even if it’s not practical, even if it’s harder than starting over. In my mind, nothing could be harder than starting over. That’s why I’ve come to the conclusion that there are, in fact, only two kinds of people in this world: the ideaists, and the revisionists. They compliment each other, and help keep the work going depending on which one is needed at the moment – ideas or revisions.
The problem is that we do not always have the revisionists among us – those people who help us see the life after the clean white board that we’ve filled up with all our doodles and drawings, the ones who show us that we can add new drawings.
Consider that some of our most life changing moments are the ones where we cannot see anything beyond what is right in front of us – the transitions from something familiar to something completely new.
The sudden loss of a friend,
the end of a long enduring relationship,
the major transition from a community we’ve always known and loved into a new and completely foreign one,
or the promising prospect of an opportunity that didn’t come together like we had planned.
We can name any number of significant transitions in our lives because we know that many of them began with us looking at a cluttered board filled with plans and visions and goals and bucket lists and hopes and dreams – and we knew that we might just have to wipe the whole damn thing clean. But I’m interested in the promise of what comes just after that. The part where we make room for new and unexpected things to happen, the part where our plans don’t matter because they are no longer relevant, the part where we had to rest in the awkward serendipity of unfamiliarity and all we could do was trust that something transformational was on the horizon.
As it is Holy Week, we remember the journey of two disciples down the road to Emmaus. In the shadow of the cross where their teacher and friend has died, their heads hang low and their hearts pour out for each other. “We had hoped that he was the Messiah, the redeemer of Israel,” they said to what seemed to be a stranger they meet along the way. We had thought that this would save us. We thought that everything would go according to plan. We thought that this idea would work. It is easy to dwell in that moment of death and say, “That’s it! There’s no way I’m coming up with another plan.”
But resurrection says that something new is happening. It says that everything you thought was going to happen has just been completely blown away and it’s time to make room for something new. It says that the new life is not just a chance to start the old life over again, but is a chance to completely rewrite the story. It’s filled with new colors and new additions, new scribbles and new lists. Resurrection is time to go back to the drawing board and work things out all over again. And we’ve been returning, renewing, reinterpreting and re-imaging this story ever since.
In a lot of ways, this Easter season is my own chance to renew and re-imagine my own story. This summer I will be interning for Metro Baptist Church in New York City. I’m very excited about the new possibilities this internship will bring, but I also worry about its unfamiliarity. It will look almost nothing like my summers of the past. It will be a trip back to the drawing board – to erase, to draw in new colors, and to make room for some new things. I’m learning to be okay with that.
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