Have you ever wondered what keeps the world spinning?  Or more specifically, in our own lives how do our cycles begin and what does change really mean? Where did they begin and why do we see the world the way we do? How does our past send a ripple through our daily reality?

Each one of us was created whole in His image. In His likeness and with all his giftings and beautiful well-rounded perfection.   We are like the perfect set of Jenga bricks stacked carefully in a pillar of perfect right corners, foundations, core, and top-tier. As time goes forward each one of us begins to buy in, as a child, to a core fear, desire, weakness, and longing. These are things that should be giftings, they should be beautiful pieces of us, but instead, they have been turned into gaping holes. 

Like a mad intense game of Jenga we play against ourselves (and the enemy). One piece gets punched out in trauma and manipulated into something different. It is then stacked on top in an attempt to piece ourselves back together. This happens over and over…. And over again. Trauma after Trauma, and experience after experience, we begin to morph into something very different from our original tower of solidarity. Instead, we are somewhat reminiscent of a wooden piece of swiss cheese.  We are leaning and shaky with holes throughout and our center of gravity has changed dramatically.  Eventually, we are staring at ourselves across the table asking, “okay, what’s your next move?” Quietly a prayer slips through your lips asking for strength and pleading that a stray gust of wind won’t ruin it all. 

So at what point do we become so anxious and debilitated with fear, loathing, dread, and self-hatred that we just give up? Isn’t that type of surrender frowned upon? Instead, we wait, in a state so on edge we begin to lose sight of everything else in the room, our focus fixed on the teetering tower of compromised integrity.  Seemingly without warning a family member or friend may enter the room laughing and talking as they walk past the table. What is our response?  I know I would immediately yell “Careful! Don’t bump the table!” or “shhhhh! Your distracting me!”  Now the broken pieces of my tower, my insecurities, and my vulnerability are widening their impact. Now those small little punched-out pieces that seemed so insignificant to anyone other than myself, are impacting my sphere of community and, if I am honest with myself, they are impacting the unique “towers” of my community. My reality is directly projecting and impacting the relationships of my life. What once should have been solid and whole is now something unidentifiable and it fills me with desperation just trying to keep it upright.

So, here is my question. The moment it all goes crashing down, isn’t there a rush of excitement and frustration followed by the first true deep breath you have taken all game? An immediate sense of release washes over us and the tower can be rebuilt with the blocks back in their places. I would argue that after all the desperate attempts to maintain its wobbly broken existence by furthermore removing and relocating blocks, we find true peace when we allow the broken to fall and be pieced back together in the box square as it was intended.

At the end of the day, understanding what those traumas are, how they have framed our perspectives, and why we do what we do gives us the power to heal them. When we heal them it is the process of placing each block back into its correct place. Filling ourselves and settling into a new outlook of the whole world.  In turn, it impacts the community around us, our relationships, and eventually our entire reality.  God intended us to see His world and our lives through a complete view with balance, love, and absolute reckless abandon. 

I challenge you to rebuild. You don’t have to be a broken swiss cheese tower. You can be fulfilled. That power is yours and with each healing, you fortify and strengthen. Each trauma you reframe gives you the power to see more clearly and free of anxiety.  You were meant to live in total freedom.