Not the same person

It is a story about transformation.  It is a story about new affection and new direction.  It is simply a new story for two people who desired change and who changed their desires.  For all intents and purposes, most people would say that they are not the same people, and yet, they have become even more of who they really are.

They haven't lost anything, but have gained new life.  The pictures say it all.  You can read this story of change here.

The transformation is obvious.  But it made me think about other, even more profound, changes in lives, changes in desire, changes in the trajectory of so many lives.

Lee Strobel, the former legal editor of the Chicago Tribune, was an atheist who sought to prove God wrong.  In the end of his investigation, God changed the course of his life.  His journey is documented in Strobel's book The Case for Christ, which was recently chronicled in a movie.

But what still brings tears to my eyes are a couple of paragraphs, hidden in the last few pages in his book.  As he continued his spiritual journey, now with Christ, his life began to change before his eyes.

Strobel wrote:  "Maybe that sounds mystical to you;  I don't know.  Not so long ago it would have to me. But it's very real to me now and to those around me.  In fact, so radical was the difference in my life that a few months after I became a follower of Jesus, our five-year-old daughter Alison went up to my wife and said, "Mommy, I want God to do for me what He's done for Daddy."
    "Here was a little girl who had only known a father who was profane, angry, verbally harsh, and all too often absent.  And even though she never interviewed a scholar, never analyzed the data, never investigated historical evidence, she had seen up close the influence that Jesus can have on a person's life.  In effect, she was saying, "If this is what God does to a human being, that's what I want for me."
     "Looking back nearly two decades, I can see with clarity that the day I personally made a decision in the case for Christ was nothing less than the pivotal event in my entire life."

Nothing will ever be the same.
That would be your heart.
That would be your life.

The world says you are stuck
    and that you can never really change.
But God says to the contrary,
    God shows to the contrary.
God specializes in changed lives.

Therefore,
if any one is in Christ,
he is a new creation;
the old has passed away,
behold, the new has come.

                2 Corinthians 5. 17