“Rise, take up your bed and walk.”— John 5:8

Apparently, I took that rather literally.

I went and made myself a mat.

Mine happens to be pink, fits in my hand, and looks considerably less burdensome than the one the man in John had to carry around. But the idea behind it came from that story.

When Jesus encountered the man who had been lying beside the pool for thirty-eight years, He didn't simply tell him to get up and walk. He told him to take his mat with him.

For some reason, that part has always stuck with me.

Why take it?

Why not leave the thing lying there? If that mat represented the place where he had spent all those years waiting, hurting, hoping and watching other people get where he desperately wanted to go, wouldn't leaving it behind have made more sense?

But Jesus told him to pick it up.

And walk.

Somewhere along my own walk, I started realizing that maybe there are things we're supposed to leave behind without pretending they never happened.

Maybe we're supposed to carry the evidence.

That is what this little pink journal became for me.

On the inside cover I wrote:

M.A.T.

Every mat tells a story: what marked us, what affected us, and how God transforms us.

The M is the mark.

What happened? What left the scar, the stain, the memory, the belief—or sometimes just that strange little reaction you can't quite explain until you finally trace it backward?

The A is how it affected me.

What did I begin believing because of it? What did I start doing to protect myself? What patterns grew out of it? What did I carry into my marriage, my parenting, my friendships, my work and even my relationship with God without realizing where it came from?

And then there's the T ~ Transformation.

What does that same mark look like after God gets His hands on it?

That's the part I'm learning to love.

Because God hasn't asked me to pretend the marks aren't there. He's been teaching me how to read them differently.

I actually started doing something in my physical M.A.T. that became a picture of this without me really intending it to.

There is a page titled “Labels That Once Defined Me.”

They're still there.

I didn't erase them. I didn't rip the page out or scribble over everything I didn't want to remember.

Instead, I placed a transparent page over it.

On that page I began writing:

“Who He Says I Am.”

• Nurturer.

• Radiant.

• Scribe.

• Lampstand.

• Friend.

• His beloved.

The old words haven't magically disappeared. If I lift the transparency, they're still underneath.

They just don't get the top layer anymore.  Truth does.

And when it came time to decide what the first actual entry in my M.A.T. should be, I didn't have to think very long.

Camp Barakel.

If you've been walking with me since the beginning, you already know that story. It's where I was benched.  At the time, I thought it was a setback.  Looking back, it became a benchmark.  I didn't need to write the entire story again. I had already lived it, written it and shared it. What I needed to understand was what it had marked.

So that's what I wrote.

M: Busyness filled the space I was meant to rest in.

A: Distraction kept me from actual relationship and from admitting the uncomfortable truth—I didn't know how to connect.

T: I stopped trying to perform well enough to belong there. God met me in my honesty and called me friend.

Then I covered that page, too.  Another transparency.

This one simply says:

START HERE.
Come As You Are, Walk As You Go.

I don't think I understood how appropriate those words were when I put them there.

Because that's exactly where this story started.

Not because Camp Barakel was the beginning of my life with God. There were decades behind me by then. There were prayers, churches, wounds, mistakes, encounters, disappointments, moments I recognized Him and plenty more when I didn't.

But something changed there.  I stopped simply knowing about God and started learning how to have a relationship with Him.  And once that relationship began, He started showing me the mat.

Jesus also told His disciples to take up their cross and follow Him.

I don't believe the mat in John 5 and the cross Jesus spoke about are exatly interchangeable. But somewhere in my own journey, those two images began speaking to me together.

Following Jesus requires leaving an old life behind.  But leaving it behind doesn't mean pretending it never happened.  I carry things today that I no longer live under.  There's a difference.  I'm carrying the mat. The mat isn't carrying me anymore.  And sometimes I need to look at it.  Because I've discovered something about faith:  The middle is hard.

It's easy to tell you where God was once I'm standing on the other side. I can look backward and find the provision. The protection. The redirection. The prayer He answered differently than I wanted. The door I was furious He closed that I later thanked Him for closing.

But when I'm still in it?  That's different.  When the prayer hasn't been answered yet.  When the provision hasn't arrived.  When everything looks completely contrary to what I thought God said.  When I can't see where He's taking me or understand why He's allowing something to hurt this badly.

That's when I forget.

And sometimes I think the only way we eventually recognize where God was in those places is by looking at the stain or scar they left behind.  That's what my mat gives me.  Evidence.  I can look at something that once marked me and see what God has written over it now.

He was there.

And when the next middle comes—and it always seems to—I can look backward and remind myself:  This is what God did for me then. I can trust Him with what I cannot see now.

Maybe that's one of the ways hope strengthens into faith.  And maybe that's why Jesus didn't tell that man to leave his mat beside the pool.  He wasn't supposed to lie on it anymore.  But he could carry the evidence that he once did.

So before we continue walking forward, we're going to do something different.  We're going to look back.  Not because I want to return to any of it.  And not because every scar needs to be reopened.  I'm going to lift some of these transparent pages and show you what's underneath.

Some of these stories happened long before the ones I've already told you. Others were happening quietly underneath them. Some marks have healed. Some have scarred. And I'm fairly certain there are a few I'm still figuring out.

But we're not looking at them from the middle anymore.  We're looking through the rearview mirror.  And this time, we know something I didn't always know while I was living them:  God was there.  So grab the mat.  We're taking it with us.

Companion Thought:

Sometimes we have to look back to recognize the God who was beside us all along.