Its hard not to miss them. Chances are you have seen them also. The powerful images of personal transformation that inundate our Facebook feeds, Instagram and Pinterest boards. These “before” and “after” photos are impossible to deny. After all, they are a testimony to benefits of personal wellness programs, workouts and products. Pictures that pack the promise that you also can look the picture, feel like the picture, be the picture with just the right program and a little will power.

But can they save your life?

Some of them say they can. Don’t misread me here. I’m a firm believer in exercise, good nutrition and an overall healthy lifestyle. I also know their effectiveness to transform a life, to save a life, has limits. They are tools yes, but our hope can not be in programs, products, or even people. Our hope must be tethered to an unfaltering foundation and we certainly are not that, nor are our products or programs that we too easily idolize. Yes, church, this includes our programs. In and of themselves, programs usually are not bad, many times they are even great, but too easily I think we forget we do not do the saving. Christ does.

Everything else is a broken world’s empty promises.

Anyone who knows me or has stumbled on this blog knows how important Christ is in my life. Christ isn’t a religion to me, a discipline to study, or self-improvement program. Christ is EVERYTHING. He is the HOPE that anchors me. He is Salvation. He is LIFE. I recognize that without Christ, my favorite idol is myself. Without Christ I am sinful and desperately in need of a savior. Many years ago God called me to repentance. What that means to me is that, as Michael Lawrence stated in his book, “Conversion”, a calling for a re-orientation of worship. Acts 3:19 urges us to “Repent therefore, and turn back, that your sins may be blotted out.” Acts 26:20 goes on to say, referring to Paul’s description of the Thessalonian’s own conversion, that “They should repent and turn to God, performing deeds in keeping with their repentance.”

“But their turning was not merely moral or behavioral. It was a reorientation of worship. Their hearts had turned from worshiping idols to worshiping God. An idol is anything or anyone without which you can’t be happy and fulfilled. We can make an idol out of almost anything: sex, money, other people’s opinions of us, security, control, convenience. But our all-time favorite idol is self. I am my favorite idol. You are your favorite idol. And we want others to worship our favorite idol too. We were created to worship, and if we won’t worship God, we’ll worship something else. Calling people to repentance, then, means calling for a reorientation of worship. So who or what are we worshiping rather than God? What compels our time and energy, our spending and our leisure? What makes us angry? What gives us hope and comfort? What are our aspirations for our children? Idols make lots of promises, even though they can’t keep them.” ~Michael Lawrence, Conversion

So, about those transformational pictures…

All that leads me to this: Pure transparency. God changed my life. He did that through His son Jesus Christ. My very life, everything I am today, is because of Christ and by Christ alone. Yes, God used circumstances, people, church programs and youth groups, but God did the work. It’s a process that gradually, day by day, continues as I am changed not for my glory, but His. And so, prayerfully, I have chosen to share my “before” and “after.”

The picture to the left is the last picture I can remember being taken with my biological mom in my own home. It’s somewhat hard to share, for a myriad of reasons, but a picture is worth a thousand words and a thousand words could not describe how broken I truly was. That picture is what my life once looked like. I was a little girl, friend-less, God-less, and terribly insecure. I hated school because I smelled of the cigarette smoke from home. Other kids bullied me because of how my parents looked and how they acted socially. I had missed all but some 30 days of my 3rd grade year in school. To this day I struggle with higher math concepts because I missed the foundational year for multiplication and division. But I missed out on so much more than math. This picture was also taken the same year I was removed from my home by the state of Kansas with little more than a backpack of belongings to my name. I lived in a series of foster homes until I “aged-out” of the system at 18. You see, I entered foster care at the critical age of 11 when a little girl just needed her dad. I became lost within the system until Christ reached down into the depth of my situation and pulled me through it. Notice I said God didn’t change my circumstances, but that He pulled me through them. I realized so many things in those hard years but the one that changed my life was realizing my desperate need for Jesus. God changed everything about me, from the inside-out. To start, I was no longer orphaned. I made friends, excelled in school, graduated high school one of the top in my class and went on to travel the world, as pictured at right while in Honduras. God has brought me through so much and taken me some pretty amazing places. Not just foreign places, but everyday places only God can orchestrate. Places like forgiveness that allowed a relationship with my biological father to grow. That relationship God used to change my father’s life from the inside out in the difficult hard of cancer and to give him the hope of heaven. That forgiveness also let me feel the unconditional love of a father. God has also led me to a beautiful position of marriage. Michael is an amazing, faithful man of God who loves me so well and unconditionally that daily my old rejected heart marvels and is reminded IN CHRIST it is no longer rejected. God has also beautifully orchestrated a place of adoption that through a beautiful little boy, my son, I am reminded daily of my own adoption by God. It is a redemptive path, a path that reminds me I belong, am chosen and fought for, never alone. That in Christ I have family, am family. This, THIS my friends, is TRANSFORMATION.