I have been re-miss in my blogging duties these past few weeks and for that I ask for your understanding—there has been a lot of stuff going on and I just haven’t had the time time to organize my thoughts enough and put them into words. On the other side of that—I am still trying to make sense of everything that has been happening in my life. Call it blog-block or just a time out—it essentially means the same.

On the one hand, my wife—who knows me as well as anyone—says that I am stuck in the past. And in a sense she is right—although I would beg to differ with her that I am really just using the past as a literary vehicle to move into and explain today and the future. Yet she is right. I am stuck and have been for some time.

God designed me to be a plane that flies into the heavenly realms and I have spent a lot of my life on the tarmac moving this way and that without ever making it to the runway itself. (Can You Relate?)

In the past couple of weeks, I have taken a call from my brother who I have not talked with in several years. I have been visited by my Michigan uncle and cousin who I haven’t seen since the early nineties. I have also been invited to play music with a praise and worship team that I have admired for several years.

And that is just the beginning.

Having been a Christian for most of my adult life, I have come to the awareness that what seems random at the time it is happening is often a part of what might be called a “grander scheme” of things. While I can’t connect every dot together to form a picture of my life and show how everything relates to one another, the feeling of destiny is often just under the surface of my day to day existence.

Life is filled with what I have termed “window of opportunity” times. These are distinct moments when we can step from one level of reality into another—from one place of being into the next life moment. Often the keys to unlocking this window or door are presented to us in a subtle way or can occur in one of those “light bulb” moments.

In all of this I am not talking about getting that car or bike or fishing pole that you have always wanted—I am mostly referring to human potential and the steps we take that lead us into becoming a person of maturity.

It is my belief at this time that we were created by God to live a life of substance and purpose and that each of us has a destiny—so to speak—built into our very DNA. A plan and purpose that only we can uniquely fulfill. We are not cookie cutter creatures that come out of the oven all looking the same but very distinct creations with the potential to become beings that interact very deeply with everyone and all that surrounds us.

Everything that we do creatively is an attempt to connect with and add meaning and comprehension to our journey here on earth. And this creativity is not just limited to the arts but includes science and math and yes, even the psychology of our everyday encounters with one another.

All this having been said—it is also my belief that we can get stuck in certain areas of personal growth and if not released can end our lives never having fully lived or reached the potential that was in our original design. Hopefully as you read these words and my attempt to explain the last few weeks of my life, you can pick up on the thoughts that are not written down—the spirit of what is being said that exists in the space between the very words themselves.

As a I alluded to earlier, we are beings that were created to fly in heavenly places and yet spend most of our time scratching around on the ground looking for food like chickens. Events in our lives that have gone unresolved have clipped our wings in a spiritual sense and when left, all piled up inside, kept us from fully being all that we were created to be.

This is sort of abstract thinking to the degree I have not given an event or moment in time to pin this all to. For the sake of clarity, lets just say that when I was a child, parts of who I was becoming stopped growing because of some external event or trauma. Fast forward to adulthood and I can only reach my full potential to the degree that these areas of wounding are healed and put behind me. I firmly believe that we are all works in progress and that God has never stopped interacting in our lives to bring us into this fully alive maturity. He knows our needs even before we ask. He knows where we have stopped up places in our innermost being and has never quit working to bring events and circumstances into our lives that will facilitate our breakthroughs. There is a plan and purpose for each of our lives and until we discover this plan we will never fly as high as we were intended to. That there are windows and doors that show up in our lives and lead us to discovery of self and one another is a gift from God to a people that were created in the very image of this self-same God.

I don’t want to remain on the ground, weighed down by all the baggage that life can heap on us—crippled inside by all the hurts and wounds that I have not been willing to let go of for whatever reason. Life on this earth is short and I for one am tired of only feeling half-full.

During these trying times, I believe that for those who seek, we are being given a “heavenly” opportunity to unload all the baggage that has kept us from soaring. What we have carried around to our detriment for all these years can be unloaded in a matter of minutes if we are listening in the spiritual realm and take the time to respond. Only when we are free and living fully alive can we then take that same presence into our relationships and the lives of those around us.