I broke my arm playing on a seesaw when I was seven. While standing on one end trying to perfect a balancing act, another child, without warning, pushed down the other end of the seesaw sharply. I found myself in the air, and before I knew it, I was hurtling towards the ground head first. So, I put out my left hand to break my fall and fractured my radius. My parents were dissatisfied with the medical attention I received in our local hospital and opted to continue my treatment with a traditional orthopedist. I don’t remember much about my visits to the orthopedist. But, I recall she would meticulously check the alignment of my bone, insisting I wouldn’t regain full use of my left hand if she didn’t accurately realign my radius. In hindsight, that episode was a parable for something I would experience later in life.

Those who have read my blogs over the last five years may have noticed that some posts are accounts of my lived experiences. In many ways, these blogs are a journal of my spiritual pilgrimage. About six months after I began writing, I got to a place where it dawned on me that I didn’t know God for myself. It was difficult to accept that because I was a church kid. But, as someone once said: “Proximity doesn’t always imply a relationship”. Sadly, it’s possible to spend your life in church and never encounter God personally. The foundation of the Christian life is a personal relationship with Jesus Christ [John 10:1-10]. Without that, being a church-goer is of little value. That’s what I discovered, and even more startling was the realisation that I wasn’t living the life God intended for me. Human wisdom dictated my priorities and choices rather than Scripture and divine revelation, and it showed. I realised something was wrong and broken in my life. I was restless and discontent even though outwardly, I’d attained a level of success many wished they had.

It didn’t make sense when it began, but as I reflect on the last four years, I see evidence of divine realignment. Today, I see God’s hand guiding my life, and it’s exciting. God loves us: He paid an unfathomable price to save us from damnation and grant us access to eternal life. However, we cannot experience all God has for us without aligning ourselves with His will and playing our part in advancing His purposes. Yet, many people don’t recognise that God is the answer to all we desire [Matthew 13:45-46], so we wander from God’s plans for our lives as we pursue lesser things that never satisfy our deepest needs. Mercifully, God often brings us to a place of restlessness and discontentment to alter the course of our lives. If we embrace that prompting and call on God, He’ll respond and lovingly meet us where we are. Yet, God won’t leave us as we are because something is wrong if peace and contentment are absent in our lives. Like the orthopedist who realigned my fractured radius, God lovingly realigns our lives and continually prunes what doesn’t serve His purposes so we can become all He intended us to be – enjoying all He’s given us for life and godliness and partaking of His divine nature [John 15:1-2, 2 Peter 1:3-4].

Realignment is painful because it often requires a leap of faith and sacrifice – dying to something your flesh treasures. Most of us want a measure of control over our lives; where we live, what we do, who we live with and so on. So, we struggle to surrender the security of familiar environments and routines for a future we can’t see. God honours our will. Consequently, He will never compel us to change course. So, many of us will haughtily revel in being masters of our destinies despite the warnings from Scripture that it’s vain to do so [Psalm 41:1, Ephesians 4:18]. But eventually, our folly catches up with us. For some, it might be a sense of dissatisfaction we can’t escape. For others, an unravelling of our best-laid plans, a moral failure or a devastating unexpected event. If you’ve gone through any of these experiences, you know that human wisdom doesn’t provide satisfactory answers. That realisation is a sign that something is wrong, and you need a personal encounter with God.

Realignment never happens on our terms. Furthermore, God never reveals the full details of what lies ahead. He requires just one thing from us: Trust [Proverbs 3:5-6]. We trust Him by doggedly holding onto His promises, convinced that if what we’re experiencing isn’t what God promised, then it’s temporary [Jeremiah 29:11]. It will hurt as God strips away all that’s not of Him in our lives. I suspect Abraham shed a tear or two as He left all he knew in Ur [Genesis 12:1-3]. Instead of a destination and details of what lay ahead, God gave Abraham three promises. He believed God and obtained his reward [Genesis 15:6, Romans 4:18-22]. For thirteen years, all Joseph clung to were two dreams and the faithfulness of the God of his fathers. But such was his faith that he saw God at work, even through his brothers’ sinister schemes to abort his destiny [Genesis 50:20]. Their stories affirm that God finishes what He starts, and the result never disappoints [Philippians 1:6].

If you’re experiencing a season of realignment, I want to encourage you to see it all through heaven’s lens. Embrace what God is doing because He’s preparing you for great things [Proverbs 25:4, 2 Timothy 2:21]. If your spirit is hinting something is wrong because there’s an absence of righteousness, peace and joy in your life [Romans 14:17], God is trying to get your attention. Yield to Him. You won’t regret it [Revelation 3:20]. If none of this makes sense to you, bookmark this page. It may come in handy one day [Psalm 127:1-2].