joy in God's choreography, moving from shame to celebration

This is an interesting week, the last week of my summer “holidays”. I am spun between moving up and down between basement, main and upper floor, preparing for a garage sale, arranging rooms and resources, sorting throwaway from usable, participating in functional resume workshops, and enjoying a bit of peace and quiet with my sister at Mum’s old cottage. I have also begun to write the story of my life, focusing in part on the debilitating effect of my mother’s attitude upon my self image for more than half a century. What is thrilling to me is the change in my attitude to myself during these days. Through God’s grace and His choreography of workshops, conversations, personal reflection and prayer, I am so much further along the road of recovery from crippling self doubt and insecurity to confidence and self-understanding. Like my physical work of sorting in the basement, I am building on a solid foundation not only in Christ, but in my understanding and appreciation of my experience. Furthermore, the affirmation that what I share on my blog has hit the mark with various people to the point that they have communicated it back to me consistently has enhanced this recovery immensely. God seems determined to rebuild and restore me in every way. As I have been sharing, He keeps using my struggles and pain, and doesn’t shrink from pruning me or letting bottoms drop out, but He also gives me these moments of seeing the bigger picture. It feels like I have been spending a lot of time looking at the messy back of a needlework project, seeing only the ends of the threads, the knots, the bits and pieces. Now He is flipping the project over from time to time, giving me a hint of the coming finished product. He just shows me enough to convince me that His work is worth the pain and the trouble, that the end result will be beautiful, that His choreography and coordination, via Romans 8:28, is trustworthy. It is not that this has not been happening before in my life, but recently there has been so much more uncertainty and turmoil, and years of insecurity have accumulated, and so I have needed to do so much more work on myself, and receive so much more from Him. I have been faithful, and so Has he, of course. What joy in these moments of seeing the fruit of His handiwork and mine, and what joy there is to come.