Day 2 of 31 Days of Connecting the Dots: make more sense of your life, your world, your hopes and dreams – for more 31 Days fun, visit the Nester

On a summer Sunday afternoon I got a call from a man who would change my life.

Harold was eleven years older than me. Earlier that day in church he heard me tell the story of how I became a Christian. He was calling to invite me to his Sunday evening class.

I attended the class that evening.

That was the beginning of the dot connecting

Dot connecting was not what he taught. He never used that phrase. But it was what he did. It was how he lived and viewed life.

It was normal to him but not to me.

I saw life as a complicated collection of separate challenges and experiences. God and the Bible were over there. Marriage and family were over here. Then there’s work, and friends, and money, and all the swirly, soupy, foggy tangle of stuff I wish I could untangle.

If I could untangle it and assign everything to its own dot it might look like this:

• the past I can’t change, with the drunkenness, irrresponsibility, and guilt
• the future I want — are these hopes and dreams real or just wishy-washy?
• the acceptance I want, have, don’t have, wish I could give
• the anger I don’t talk about
• bad days
• good days
• fear of the present, fear of the future
• discouragement, confusion, defeat
• “this is awesome!”
• “this is horrible!”
• “They’re idiots! How can they think that!”
• “if only…”
• “why does this always happen to me?”
• “God must not love me…”
• “God must really love me!”
• “I am such a loser”
• “Why can’t I change?”

You get the idea.

YOU might add:

• divorce
• illness
• unemployment
• loneliness
• rejection
• hope
• regret
• despair
• success
• happiness
• trouble
• pain
• etc

That’s how I saw life before Harold. A bunch of separate dots.

I was wrong

(continued HERE)

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