Complete your symbols.

If the first half of life is finding your true symbols, the second is more fully tending and harvesting them. For example, i live (invest, dwell intentionally nurture) in three cities currently, each represents a unique aspect of my own story, and His Story through me. Each symbolizes part of His story of my life.

The three cities you occupy are aspects of a whole symbol. Austin, San Fran and Antwerp—each symbolize different aspects of your calling and identity in His. They are part of His story through yours!

You could base in whichever you choose, but they are actually all part of One whole symbol. Austin, pastoral creative haven; san fran, visual intelligence and global launching, Antwerp, monastic gateway into europe and the nations…you can occupy all three and rotate seasonally. Or however you choose, but they are all part of His Story of you! Part of His Testimony, He is completing through the art of your life–part of the path prepared beforehand to be your “way” in Him (Ephesians 2:10). That way is eternal. The trajectory of your story is something “in Him”! It’s inviolable, eternal, and a poem He made up! So there is no threat to loss of identity, as we enter more deeply into His. Peter was given his own name, by seeing who Jesus was!

In the first half of life people are searching for self, what is home, what is Real, what is theirs to know and tend. What symbolizes them. In the second, you know what’s yours and you begin to refine it and teach it to others. Mine art, spirituality, integration, and identity. Creativity and Identity and their proper relationship in Jesus.

Will you leave completed symbols on the earth? Now that you’ve found your symbolic lands, how to cultivate and complete them. That’s the second half of life’s mandate. The second half of life is about that symbolic efficiency. You know what you have to tend, now you can make it fruitful—finish the lines of your poem!

As you go into the 2nd half of life, you want to refine what you already have. You want to make each symbol more complete!!! Stewarding your symbols becomes a pleasure. When young, you found them, now to edit refine and share them. To tell the whole story. To collaborate in completing your testimony—His story of your life! This becomes your passion.

To complete your symbols on earth, becomes the task of the second half of life. The symbols you searched to find and conquer in the first half of life—the true images of self or yourself, others and the world, can now be contoured, completed, filled in, outlined, shared. The story can be told! The second half of life is to tell the whole story well. To complete the symbols in Peace and with Wisdom and articulation. No longer are you in competition, so you can complete your symbols in peace. Walk them out! Steward your story well. Cultivate the pleasant lines of your inheritance!

Having crossed your Jordans (your necessary deaths to self), having entered the land of your inheritance (the pleasant lines of yours), having occupied, possessed-now, you move on to cultivate, to bear fruit which will outlast you. So others can rest beneath the shade of your trees, and eat from your gardens! To complete the symbol of God’s story through your life. To interpret your life as a sign for others. To tell the whole story-His story of your life. To do so, you must steward the symbols of your life. Jesus completed His symbols! Let’s us allow Him to tell the whole story, to complete His symbols of who He is through us! Let’s steward our symbols with Him in collaboration until He is done. And like Him, be able to say, “It is finished”.