Travelling Through Transition In Your Life

Martin Luther said about his conversion: ‘I felt myself to be reborn and to have gone through open doors into paradise’. He describes the glorious experience of the Christian new birth. But what about the transition from there to being a spiritual toddler, even one day a spiritually mature adult? This is the journey of Christian discipleship. It’s one shaped not just by our immersion in God’s word and our openness to his Spirit. It’s also influenced by the many life transitions through which we pass – loves lost and found, bereavement, illness, redundancy, job change, empty nesting, to name just a few.

Life transitions are a key arena for personal and spiritual growth, places where we can meet God in deeper measure or fall away from him in despair. In the fifty days between Easter and Pentecost, the New Testament pictures the disciples both running towards Christ and walking away from him. We see Peter and John running to the empty tomb, and Peter plunging into the water to reach Jesus by the Sea of Galilee’s shore. But the disciples also flee in blind panic from the garden of Gethsemane. Thomas absents himself from the other disciples, first failing to meet the risen Christ. Two downcast followers desert Jerusalem for Emmaus to bury their sorrows in a place of consolation.

Transition times can pivot us to or away from Christ in an instant. They can be bewildering times where we feel lost, without any compass or guiding map. Mercifully, in the biblical narrative of Eastertide’s fifty days, we are given an illuminating portrait of human beings first struggling with and then negotiating change and deeper formation. We see the disciples wrestle with the same burning questions that we ask at such times: Where is God in this? How can I get back to a place of security? What new steps do I need to hazard? Has Christ abandoned me or does he stand just across the next horizon?

We see the disciples having to descend into tombs, live in borderlands of transition, and emerge blinking onto unexpected new shores. Above all, we see them discover that, as they fix their eyes on Christ, these times of transition can become productive stages in their spiritual growth. Jesus has already grown them as leaders during his ministry. Now he carries them into the deepest reality of his death and resurrection, weans them in his risen state from over-dependency on him, blesses them at his Ascension, and pours out on them his Spirit and gifts at Pentecost, igniting in them dynamic new life.

In the Great Commission, Jesus commands us to cross geographic borderlands to carry the gospel to the nations. However, first he has needed to lead us through a series of spiritual borderlands. These form the landscape of the great fifty days. The Bible offers doctrinal truth in describing these territories. It also offers existential honesty about human weakness and vulnerability. This is the combination that we need in personal phases of transition and in the cultural vortex of our times: realism about human frailty combined with Jesus’ profound and tender guidance. Secure in both, we discover that transition need not be a trial but, approached wisely, can become a spiritual treasure.

Photo by Jonathan Self.