We are God’s amazing poetry: how God repurposes what we yield
In our last post, we talked about God the ultimate Creator, about His creativity and ours. This week, I want to talk about God the Author and how He naturally repurposes our past in His writing of our lives from beginning to end. Isn’t He just the most amazing all-encompassing artist?
Seriously…
I love poetry. Some will say it’s an acquired taste, or they don’t get it, or it’s “boring.”
And I understand all of that.
But years of reading and writing it has given me an appreciation for this art form. It essentially takes emotion, circumstances, images, or ideas, and turns them into something beautiful on the page.
Ephesians 2:10 is where we’ll start.
Ephesians 2:10 (The Passion Translation)
We have become His poetry ("workmanship" in other translations), a re-created people that will fulfill the destiny He has given each of us, for we are joined to Jesus, the Anointed One. Even before we were born, God planned in advance our destiny and the good works we would do to fulfill it!
When I read that we are God’s poetry, a recreated people to fulfill the destiny He’s already given each of us, I heard the word “repurposed”. Then the idea that poetry is repurposed pain, or repurposed experience.
Most of the time, when you write a poem you either start out with a thought or an emotion, a beginning or an ending.
And you’re writing to make a point, but sometimes you don’t know where you’re going, especially if you’re only relying on what you know
or what you can see.
What does repurposed mean?
You might find yourself scrolling through sites like Etsy or Facebook Marketplace for “used” or “repurposed” items– essentially, other people’s things that, instead of throwing away, they’ve recycled, repainted… made “new.”
Repurposing takes one thing that’s old to one person, and makes it new to another. Not so much like a hand-me-down. What one person might see as a kitchen chair, another might receive as a new nightstand.
Repurpose literally means to adapt for use in a different purpose.
When you write a poem, you’re most often taking an old idea, or a painful or thoughtful experience, and putting a new meaning to it so that it’s useful in a new way.
God repurposes our life when we yield to Him
If we’re God’s poetry, if He’s already written the ending and we are His unique and beautiful beginning, the only way we may find out the ending is by yielding to the author in all of the in-between.
We live by faith. We trust that even if the road from start to finish gets murky, the Artist will revise, and revise, until He gets to His intended ending.
2 Corinthians 5 says we are a new creation in Him. Romans 8 says God works all things for the good of those of us who love Him.
When you edit something, you just delete things as if they were never there, and you start from scratch. When you revise, though, you work from what you’ve already written and make it go somewhere.
Re-purposing is something that comes naturally to God. When we yield to Him, God repurposes our pain. Repurposes and redefines and exchanges the garbage from our past for a beautiful future. When we mess up, He doesn’t edit us out of His plan; He revises.
The world throws out broken things
It shames and ridicules, perverts and destroys, it cancels, and gives up.
The world’s poetry ends with an image of a broken person– doesn’t bother revising. It’s careless and clumsy.
That’s why we put our faith in God our Author, His ending. Our faithfulness works in tandem with the tip of His pen as it carries us through.
