How to Rebuild Your Life
In professional sports, people often use a term for bad teams that are intentionally trying to get better over a couple of years: they’re going through a rebuild. Just the other day I heard a sports commentator complain about his team winning the last game of the season because it ruined their chances of getting the No. 1 draft pick.
As strange as it seems, I think sometimes our hearts go through rebuilds. It’s not as simple as losing to get better players, but it often includes tough seasons that result in good things later. We often need time to transition from one thing to another, or even time to comprehend what we are going through. This might be because of stress, sin, or seasonal changes in our lives.
What do we do in a rebuild? We intentionally try to get better. We use this time to examine ourselves openly and deeply. It might start with recognizing our faults, our hidden stresses, or our unmet expectations. No matter what is underneath the surface, the purpose is to expose it so that we can move through it. We can know the heart we need for the season of life ahead. We cannot do that without being 100% honest with ourselves.
Rebuilding also means we need to re-orient our relationship with God. All of us have gone through seasons where God feels far away, like we aren’t on a good page spiritually. And maybe you’ve come to the same conclusion that I have, which is that God never moved far away, we just stopped noticing him. Learning to actively love God – even when we don’t feel like it emotionally – is part of what it means to be a mature Christian. Over time, we learn to like the things we do that get us closer to God. What might feel like discipline during a rebuild might feel like a joy in two years. To quote Jonathan Pokluda, "spiritual maturity is learning to want to do things that you don’t want to do.”
Lastly, but most importantly, we must place our faith in God with the knowledge that he will restore us. It is a promise, not a possibility, that he will come near to us if we come near to him. There’s lots of Bible verses that speak to us on this, but one comes to mind more than others, because during a season of rebuilding our hearts need to have faith. To have faith means to trust in what you cannot see, which leads me to Proverbs 3:5-6:
“Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight.”
