new growth

I was writing recently about how, in the midst of a really challenging time last year, I started writing a list of life goals that were extremely ambitious and, thinking pragmatically and honestly, seemed to be pretty much outside the realms of possibility. 

Then, another time recently I read Isaiah chapter 11 and, as I usually do, I wrote a reflection on the passage and I saw a relationship between what I read, my goals and my life experience. This is what I wrote:

This chapter is talking about how something profoundly good is going to come from devestation and breakdown. Everything is going to change. In verse 1 it says, 'a Branch will bear fruit' (the good) but that the branch will come from the 'stump of Jesse'. This is talking about the line of King David (because Jesse was his father) but things had declined so much that it doesn't even use his name - and it's just a stump - it's no longer a great tree. It has been blasted so that it's just a stump. But, from that stump, a branch will grow - a shoot will come up - that will change everything. 

Who cares about a stump? What difference does a stump make? People just think it's dead. 

When the new growth comes - the fruitful branch that will change everything - it renders the stump irrelevant. It doesn't matter that it used to be a stump. 

The stump is like my old life. It feels like it's been decimated and I've lost so much. The branch is my new life that God is bringing to pass. 

All of the things that are bothering me [all of the problems, challenges, losses, I was experiencing when I wrote this] belong to the stump, and my next level goals [that's what I called the goals I wrote] belong to the branch.