Metamorphosis
Friday (October 24)
Metamorphosis
Psalm 30:11
You have turned for me my mourning into dancing; you have loosed my sackcloth and clothed me with gladness.
J.R.R. Tolkien, author of The Lord of the Rings, once coined the insightful term eucatastrophe, which he described as ‘a sudden and favorable resolution of events in a story.’ It also carries the idea of being completely unexpected or against the grain. So, I think of that whenever I read David’s expression of joy here in Psalm 30:11. It’s as if, one minute, he’s covered in sackcloth on a heap of ashes, and, the very next minute, he’s dancing for joy in a lush pastureland. What a metamorphosis! Ah, but which side of Psalm 30:11 are you on today, friend? In the pastureland or still in the ash-heap? Rejoicing over some miracle or anxiously awaiting one?
Consider that God didn’t call Abram to leave his homeland and seek a better country till Abram was seventy-five years old. Nor did God instruct Moses to deliver Israel from Egypt till Moses had spent forty years as an anonymous shepherd in the back hills. And consider that Noah didn’t have a carpentry shop to go back to after the floodwaters subsided, but he didn’t just sit around for days weeping about the life he’d lost; instead, he got busy learning a new trade and planting a vineyard. “Behold, I am doing a new thing,” says the LORD in Isaiah 43:19; “even now it springs forth; do you not perceive it?”
Metamorphosis doesn’t always happen in an instant. And God is doing a groundbreaking work through our seasons of sorrow and confusion and drought, even when we don’t perceive it. In fact, right at this very moment, fresh new seeds have been sown into the soil of your life of faith that God is tending underground. And soon they’ll become a great harvest. You may look out your back door today and only see a landscape of mud and weeds and unmet expectations. But keep trusting the Sower! From the very first moment He reached down into the dirt to fashion Adam to this present moment where He’s reaching you through these meager words, He’s been metamorphosizing what seems low and insignificant and even miniscule into something magnificent.
Remember, friend: even if you don’t feel like dancing today, your God-authored eucatastrophe is coming! Children of God don’t mourn forever.