"Let the ruins come to life..."

I finally got a chance to listen to the whole Hillsong Glorious Ruins album (delayed I know!) , and as always they did not disappoint! The title track of the album, also called Glorious Ruins seems to have however stuck out the most for me. I feel as if it adequately describes the place I feel I have been in recently; a place of brokenness, where so much of what I knew fell apart around me and where many of those I counted on disappointed me. Basically, a place of ruins.

As my main goal in this life is to follow in the footsteps of Christ, I have realised I need to take a cue from 2 Timothy 2:3 and "..endure hardness as a good soldier of Jesus Christ." And that realisation has brought me to the journey I am on now, one of rebuilding and starting afresh in most areas of my life. Yet please don't get me wrong, I am not a ninja warrior who just took everything in stride! It took a while for me to get to this realisation. For months I sat in the rubble of the life I had become accustomed to and cried for " the way things used to be." As silly as it sounds I even hoped that things would just surprise me by "fixing themselves" but they didn't. It took a while before the fog cleared and I realised that things were never going to be the same again, and that this was possibly one of the best things to happen to me. When I stopped staring into the past and focused on God, it began to dawn on me that the past really wasn't as great as I allowed myself to believe. I had gotten comfortable in sin; in a relationship where we pulled each other away from God as opposed to closer to Him and in friendships where we promoted the worst and not the best in each other. I had left the path that God predestined me to walk in and was well on a journey that was fast leading to my destruction. So God came and ripped me away from all of it. He took a wrecking ball to the life of sin I had started to enjoy living in, and it hurt like mad, it still kinda does. But now I understand that He had to save me from myself. That's how much God loves us, He is prepared to hurt us for our good. He is not afraid to give us some tough love, because sometimes the greatest threat to our destiny is ourselves.

Sometimes God will reduce some things in your life to rubble so you can start again right

So now that I understand why basically everything I loved had to be reduced to ruins, I can start again. I can begin again and lay the foundations of my life with God at the centre. I can consult Him in this life I am trying to build, in the dreams I want to accomplish and the desires that are rooted so deep in my heart. And that is why the song Glorious Ruins speaks so profoundly to me. Because I know with God, out of these ruins will come forth something I believe will be amazing, and out of these ashes God will bring forth beauty. So to anyone out there who may feel like everything is falling apart, you are not alone. My encouragement to you and to myself is to let God be God. If He lets your house be reduced to rubble, He has a better one in store. His plans are always greater than ours, and His ways higher than ours. So let's cling to Him in faith, believing that He will bring the ruins of our lives back to life.