…I started my life like soft, brightly colored Play-Doh – potential in a can. Life tossed me into the hopper, squeezed me through the pattern, and out I popped, a unique star-noodle … But, hardening over time, I felt irrevocably set …

Recently I thought about how the Play-Doh Fun Factory is a picture of how my circumstances and experiences sculpted and molded my view of life. Although I had started off with high hopes and dreams – wounds and disappointments began to shape my sense of identity and reality. Eventually my life felt like a Not-So-Fun-Factory.

As a child, Play-Doh delighted me. Each time I opened a new can of fresh soft dough, its distinctive fragrance filled the room and my imagination soared. What magnificent creation might emerge this time? The possibilities seemed endless.

The year I received a Fun Factory still lives in my memory. Now I had my very own little noodle machine. What joy it was to squeeze the dough through the Factory, pressing out fun shapes depending on the pattern: pasta-like stars, spaghetti, and blocks. The multi-colored dough became the raw material for my abstract sculptures. (Sometimes, I would forget to put the dough back in the can; months later I might find one of my petrified creations in my closet. I just offered it as an impromptu gift to my parents, “Here Mom, I made this for you – what is it?”)

My life felt like the Fun Factory, with great expectations of limitless potential. But as I experienced difficulties, my wrong reactions to other people’s wrong actions began to squeeze me into a crazy shape. Over time, my life began to feel like a Not-So-Fun Factory (NSFF).

When I was wronged I reacted by taking sides, choosing what seemed safe, effective, and powerful. Without realizing it, my side-taking determined what I valued or devalued, pursued or avoided, loved or hated, all based on the NSFF.

With my heart and mind divided and divisive, my life became a mess. My unhealed wounds crusted over and I felt permanently stuck as the product of my NSFF. I thought the best I could hope for was good coping mechanisms and techniques for managing the crazy shape I was in.

After becoming a Christian, I tried to do an even better job of dealing with problems. My goal was to be a good Christian with a happy life, free from struggles and pain. Controlling my circumstances seemed like the only way to deal with my strife and envy that still ravaged every part of my life.

Thinking I was being nice and spiritual, I adopted platitudes like “forgive and forget” and “I will get my reward in heaven.” Those words made me feel better for a little while. However, when people hurt me or made my life difficult, my veneer of niceness fell right off. I consoled myself with words like “what a man sows he reaps” and “vengeance is Mine says the Lord.”

Those words merely cloaked my wounded and divided heart. Underneath I was convinced that I was irrevocably stuck as a byproduct of the NSFF, yet nevertheless I should do my best for Jesus’ sake.

Adding Bible knowledge on top of my false and petrified conclusions gave me the illusion that I was growing. I memorized hundreds of verses, but they just rolled off the hardened dough of my belief system.

Among the Scriptures I memorized were those about the new creature in Christ. I liked the idea of transformation, but it only seemed possible for those lucky people who had the magic combination of circumstances – those who had the right heritage, the right upbringing, and all the right resources.

In my opinion, I already had three strikes against me. Blaming the NSFF for my condition, I thought it was too late for me to become a new creature on this side of the grave. The evidence seemed conclusive; I had tried to transform myself for years, and I still looked like the weird Play-Doh creatures I made when I was six.

Although I had given up on real transformation, I thought I could tweak and improve the crusty relic produced by the NSFF. The very highest I could imagine was do-overs: somehow take another run through the Factory with a different pattern tacked on, and voila, another crazy shape. None of my ideas ever produced anything close to God’s description of the new creature, but I kept trying.

Comparing myself to the shapes that other people’s NSFF had cranked out, I looked down on some and idolized others. I endeavored to become the best product of the NSFF possible. My goal to succeed in the NSFF kept me entangled, blind, deaf, in hiding, and ignorant of God’s answers.

This may sound like a mere theological discussion, but I guarantee the stakes are incredibly high. My false belief system, the very foundation I had built my life upon, was unstable in every way.

Predictably, my life crashed to the ground and broke in a million pieces as a result of my wrong thinking.

I was stunned. How had it come to this? My high hopes and dreams had vaporized, and simply surviving one more day became my highest aspiration. I vainly attempted to glue the shards back together, but the patch job kept falling apart. Trying to displace the blame on others, I protested, “If only someone had told me the truth!” But that argument didn’t hold water. I had heard, memorized, and studied Scripture, yet ignored it.

The only explanation for my plight was that my walled-off, wounded, and divisive heart had deflected God’s truth from penetrating and healing me. The wall of division I had erected as a means of protection and power was keeping me disconnected from God’s love and truth that would re-create me.

Then I started to hear the real truth about Christ. You might think I would have bolted for God’s answers like a Kentucky Derby winner, but I continued to pull back on the reins. I said I trusted Christ, but in practice I relied on my efforts to improve life inside the NSFF. Why was it so hard for me to believe God’s truth?

Although my belief in the NSFF had failed me in every way, my entire life had been invested in sustaining it. My sense of rightness, fairness, and justice had all been shaped by the NSFF. It had been my hope, however meager and insufficient, for trying to satisfy my heart-need for love and honor and belonging. I knew I had to abandon my old NSFF life, but did that mean I would have to do without those vital aspects of life?

Obviously my question was coming from fear based on untruth. The very Scripture I had memorized clearly promised if I was truly connected with Christ, my life would be so satisfying and free and astonishing I would never look back. I had no idea how to connect to Christ at that level, yet some part of me knew God’s mercy and truth would re-create my heart and my mind if I would let go of my defenses and take it in.

Anguished and despairing of hope, I finally got honest enough to admit I was at a dead-end. Only then did I begin to come out from hiding.

When I realized how thoroughly entrenched I had been in the NSFF, my heart pounded with the shock of it. I began to grasp the devastating consequences of continuing my pursuit of life in NSFF while ignoring God’s answers in Christ. What’s more, I would continue to live defeated – unless I could discover how to take God’s truth to heart.

Humbling myself before the Most High God, I acknowledged my stubborn pride and arrogance and cried out to Him for help. This was a real turning point. Honestly seeking with a humble heart, I began to awaken to God’s astounding truth.

Scripture says we were originally created for an infinitely higher and unimaginably superior kind of existence. However because of Adam and Eve’s sin, we have a flesh and blood nature that cannot inherit the kingdom of God. Now every person is born as the child of the flesh, and as the product of their circumstances – so we could never conquer the root problem. Left to ourselves we would be forever defeated, forever stuck in the NSFF. We need an entirely new kind of nature.

A major result of our flesh and blood nature is the fact that our hearts are divided and divisive. Just as I had taken sides, so has everyone else on the planet, and consequently we have experienced the battle of the sexes in our hearts, in our homes, and in the world.

Christ came and paid the entire debt for the destruction each of us has caused (and also suffered) as a result of our divisive, twisted, flesh-and-blood nature.

Oh, but the story doesn’t end there. Not only did Jesus die for all of our sins, He resolved the Big Problem that is at the root of our craziness. On the cross, Christ dealt definitively with our divisiveness by accomplishing absolutely everything necessary to re-create us and to reestablish our connection with God.

In Christ there is no enmity, no dividing wall, no male or female – only a whole new kind of creature. Christ accomplished this amazing reconciliation in Himself on the cross, establishing true peace. In Christ there is wholeness, oneness, and completeness. God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself.

Proving that His work was perfectly and comprehensively finished, Christ walked out of the grave!

Now for the most amazing, most excellent, best news ever: we all have access through Christ into this new kind of aliveness, this new creation with a new nature. All this is available by truly trusting all Christ accomplished. In other words, real faith. In Christ there is complete forgiveness and access to God’s promise of complete transformation.

We can move out of the NSFF for good! No more trying to whip ourselves and others into shape. No more coping with the wounds and heartache of the NSFF. No more disconnection and divisiveness. No more living as the by-product of our circumstances.

As we begin to believe all that Christ accomplished, including this amazing wholeness, then we become a “child of promise,” also called a “child of faith.”

Embracing wholeness in Christ, our minds and hearts are finally freed from divisiveness, reconciled to God, and actually re-created.

God says when we abandon our old NSFF life and dwell in Christ’s life, we no longer belong to this world. We belong to God’s family as a child of God – our hearts full to overflowing, fulfilled, connected, and complete in the One whose love never fails.

The reason I had not experienced this radically new kind of life in Christ was that I had clung to my NSFF identity and reality and then tried to follow Christ. No wonder my way had not worked.

The necessity and promise of being totally re-created in Christ started to make sense. I can’t tell you how much that truth began to extinguish my fears and light a fire in my belly. As the genius of God’s truth in Christ slowly sank in, I was dumbfounded.

God’s solution to my impossible dilemma is the ultimate in rightness, fairness and justice. Perfect Love paid my debt and promises to totally re-create my mind and heart as I awaken and become fully convinced of His truth.

All that my heart had longed for – wholeness and purity, effectiveness and strength, love and wisdom – all is available in Christ. Why waste one more minute or one more ounce of energy in the NSFF? When I realized what God is offering, I started earnestly running towards God’s answers in Christ.

But I have to be honest with you; awakening has been the hardest thing I’ve ever done. It has required letting go of all my old attachments and power struggles, letting go of all my old self-justifying and excusing, letting go of all my old elevating and devaluing.

This awakening requires every bit of determination, focus, and perseverance I can muster, and then more. It spells a permanent end to the old NSFF sense of identity and reality – the end of my old self, the end of the old me.

Ah, but the payoff is beyond reckoning! The benefits are so over the top I can’t imagine any other pursuit. As I rest in God’s plan to re-create me and other people in Christ, my life is spontaneously and radically being transformed.

Like the monsoon rains in the Serengeti, everywhere the Life-Giving Water percolates into the soil of my heart, new life springs up from what was once hard and barren.

This is not just metaphorical or religious talk. I am simply not the same person anymore. Every aspect is changing: how I think, what I feel, who I am, my identity and my reality, my whole life.

Everything in me wants to shout this astounding news from the roof tops. I want everyone everywhere to wake up to the glorious new kind of life God has prepared for those who love Him. Moving out of the NSFF and into the true reality of Christ – this is the Ultimate Reality Shift.

JENNY WEST • JULY 2014
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