Tool in the Box

Perhaps you recognize that feeling you have found your element. It's not a matter of everything going right, but that you realize the situation is where you belong, that you were made for this. The last time I felt that sense was about 20 years ago, when serving with the US Army in Europe. It wasn't the military work I did so much as the volunteer work at the NATO chapel. No, not every moment I remember sparkles, but the sense of God accomplishing much through me cannot be shaken.

That time ended when the circumstances changed significantly. The people who needed what I had moved on, and others came to fill their places with completely different needs. The time came to move on myself, and to be reshaped for another mission. On purely human terms, it would seem I've wasted most of the years since those days in Europe. Yet I cannot escape the sense I have been doing the only things I could.

We are on the threshold of change. Though things have been moving quite rapidly behind the scenes, and much has been unveiled lately, it still has not struck the consciousness of the world. Sure, the media has told the world we are having some financial trouble, and talks of unrest in other parts of the world, but aside from that vague sense of unease, the Western world has not been shaken yet to the foundations. It's coming very soon. I can't say for sure what people will notice, and whether they will see the facts, or any part of them, but they will know the good times are gone. We cannot at this point estimate what the world will feel like tomorrow, only that it won't be the same.

The one thing solid as bedrock beneath my feet is the sense I have been shaped for some divine role in that world to come. I have great peace with what I am doing now in this transition time, but there is no doubt I am only marking time. In my soul I see the changes only God could have wrought. Over the past few months I have jettisoned things I once thought were integral to my character. Things I've handled for years now seem unfamiliar, and the face in mirror is no longer the fellow I once thought I knew. Either I am descending quickly into madness, or I am following the call of Christ to a place no man could have told me, because my joy grows by the hour.

What's coming will be sorrow unimaginable for many, but I will be in my element. I lack the intellect to extrapolate from the changes in me to guess the changes in the world to come. The alterations have come so swiftly of late, my head is still spinning. The only anchor in my heart is the assurance it all fits in His plans. Somehow, I am being prepared for a world which does not yet exist.

I'm a tool in the box, an arrow in the quiver -- something set aside for another time. I believe that time has almost come.