Motivation Monday - When You Know It’s Time for Transformative Change
“We break free of old rules, old ways, and old strategies to move from someone who has been sleeping inside to someone who is reawakened. We experience family, church, community and ministry reawakening. We set ourselves free from the traditions and ‘stuckness’ keeping us from living God’s dream.”
Looking back over past few months, there has been very little in my personal world, or in the Gather Women ministry world that has not been rocked by
change. I can’t tell you how many times I have said the phrase, “it’s been a weird year” in describing 2022.
Things that Gather experienced ministry success with in 2021 had different outcomes in 2022 – influenced by the new nuances of a world reshaping
itself after a chaotic and unsettling pandemic season.
I don’t know about you, but even as a visionary, I find myself pushing back against yet another change. I am craving stability, while also understanding that nothing will ever be the same.
God wants us to experience continual restarts, rebirths, redefinitions, and to literally rebrand our lives. He never meant for this full life to be boring (John 10:10), but intended for us to experience the excitement and inspiration of perpetual transformation.
This is a life of faith where we achieve and fail, rise and fall, suffer and recover, experience loss and gain, and then after having pursued and endured, fulfill our destiny.
This transformative experience is what it means to walk with God and is the one described in
II Corinthians 3:16-18:
“But whenever anyone turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away. Now the
Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And
we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being
transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the
Lord, who is the Spirit.”
This principle of personal transformation is also applied to ministry transformation. Gather cannot stay comfortable in old models of ministry and must seek to respond to the surfacing needs of women in the church in Canada, in response to genesis revelations from God.
While there are many reasons that change is hard, one of the primary reasons is our resistance to moving on and moving forward. Learning new things is not the difficult part, but rather letting go of the old things, those old stories of who we were, how we use to do things, and what everyone feels comfortable with and thinks we ought to be.
Exodus 14:10-12:
“As Pharaoh approached, the Israelites looked up, and there were the
Egyptians, marching after them. They were terrified and cried out to the
Lord. They said to Moses, “Was it because there were no graves in Egypt
that you brought us to the desert to die? What have you done to us by
bringing us out of Egypt? Didn’t we say to you in Egypt, ‘Leave us alone; let
us serve the Egyptians’? It would have been better for us to serve the
Egyptians than to die in the desert!”
In those moments, like the ones the Israelites experienced, we tend to settle for the easy, safe, or status quo. This is what happened to Moses when he tried to lead the Israelites out of their attempt to “nostalgicize” life back in Egypt.
Exodus 14:13-15
“Moses answered the people, “Do not be afraid. Stand firm and you will see
the deliverance the Lord will bring you today. The Egyptians you see today
you will never see again. The Lord will fight for you; you need only to be
still.” Then the Lord said to Moses, “Why are you crying out to me?
Tell the Israelites to move on.”
What Moses learned, and we can as well, is that the only way to get unstuck is to move on and move forward. Holding our ground is not the answer. Becoming unstuck means deriving our identity from our vision of
tomorrow and not the nostalgia of the past.
You must both change your mind and be prepared to change your plans.God knows that for you to become unstuck, you must endure and overcome extreme levels of stress as you leave the familiar motivations and coping mechanisms behind to pursue the next stage of his dream for your lives.
I am certain that of all the solutions that passed through the mind of Moses, parting the Red Sea was not on the list. Turning and fighting the Egyptians was logical. Having God fight the Egyptians was something they had already experienced in Egypt with the plagues. But walking through the sea on dry
ground...well, this was new.
What we can learn is that Moses had a plan and a set of expectations based on past history, but God told him to “change his mind” and “change his plans.”
This is how we become unstuck.
We have to change our minds and change our plans.
We have to let go of the familiar
and open our mind to possibilities of who we are supposed to be, and our ministry plans that may make no sense to anyone, just as walking through the Red Sea made no sense until it was done.
This is exactly how God’s dream happens.
We break free of old rules, old ways, and old strategies to move from someone who has been sleeping inside to someone who is reawakened. We experience family, church, community and ministry reawakening. We set
ourselves free from the traditions and ‘stuckness’ keeping us from living God’s dream.
As we have continued to pursue the new genesis moments that God is revealing to the Gather Women movement, we choose as a leadership team, and guided by our governing board, to not resist the necessary changes. We dare to believe that the best days are ahead.
We cannot wait to gather with all of you in Calgary on February 4, 2023, at Calgary Life Church www.gatherwomen.com/gather-rise-2023 adding a stunning day to the ONEConference.
www.globalleadershipnetwork.ca/oneconference
We pray you will plan now to join us for this incredible reimagined Gather Rise GENESIS gathering, curated for you, a woman who seeks transformation, who seeks to influence her world for Jesus Christ, leading in
any sphere of impact. Email us today to be the first to receive information on this incredible day!
Dare to make the changes in your plans necessary to be free from all that keeps you stuck.
There is no better time to start the change process than today.
I believe in you!
Cathie