Alhambra Public Library moved to a new building late this summer. Most moves precipitate housecleaning so there were tables of books for sale as they purged the shelves. I came across a book by one of my favorite authors, a book I hadn't read before, Green Dolphin Street by Elizabeth Goudge. It was published in 1944 and I was thrilled with the find. This was the book I was reading as we traveled last August.
During our trip we visited three of the places we've lived in the past - the farmhouse in Illinois, the rowhouse in Bochum and the apartment in Aachen. Visiting the very different places we've called home and seeing the people who were part of those lives was an unusual experience, perhaps because the visits came in such quick succession, giving almost a time-warp effect to our lives.
As we were traveling, visiting these stopping points of our lives, Captain O'Hara, a key figure in the book I was reading, spoke these words: "There's much that goes to the makin' of a man or woman into somethin' better than a brute beast, but there's three things in chief, an' them three are the places where life sets us down, an' the folk life knocks us up against, an' not the things you get in life but the things ye don't get." Those words haunted me as we were revisiting the 'places life had set us down' and the 'folk life had knocked us up against'. It was clear to see that those places and people truly had influenced who we had become.
And now it's been 14 months since we moved to California, the latest 'place where life has set me down' and I have to admit that I'm surprised at how difficult the adjustment has been for me. I guess I expected that within a year I would feel at home and like I fit in. The truth is, I don't. I've been struggling with this some and wondering about it. Perhaps my expectations were all wrong. If my life were a jigsaw puzzle then I expected that I'd dismantle the pieces of my life in Illinois and just put them back together out here in California. Of course I realized that many of the background pieces would have to change but I still expected that the main "picture" would be the same. Strangely, it seems that few of the pieces fit together any more. No matter how hard I beat on those pieces, they just don't seem to fit any more. I've gone from trying to MAKE them fit, to trying to figure out WHY they don't fit, to a slow realization that God in His infinite wisdom is in the process of making a whole new picture out of the old pieces. Perhaps Captain O'Hara would say this is one of those 'things ye don't get' that is going into the making of who I am.
I've been reading two books lately that have given me a new hope for the picture God will eventually make out of the jigsaw pieces of my life. The Holiness of God by R.C. Sproul and Living the Cross-Centered Life by C.J. Mahaney have challenged me to hope that the new picture won't be one of me at all, but a clearer picture of the cross and the One who died on it for me. I'm awed at the drastic measures God can take to dismantle the old so He can form the new. I have to agree with Captain O'Hara, that there is much that goes into the makin' of a man or woman - much more than we want to see sometimes. I'm grateful for God's sovereign grace over it all.
