The Great Unsettling

Jun 3

Unsettling is hard.

I’ve never really thought of myself as a person of routine. In fact, I bristle in the face of routine and the cement blocks that it seems to put in my way. But, in my opinion, even the most nomadic person can be settled, and I was one of those people.

When my husband and I decided to change the course of our lives, it was the sudden moving of hidden structures that took me by surprise. The ones you don’t recognize until they’re not in the same place anymore. I began to realize that right from birth, our culture moves us unknowingly towards a life of successful work if you happen to be lucky enough to be born into a country that has a good economy. If you do the study and the learning, you can get to a point where you’re doing and earning. And then when you’re earning, you can work your way up from survival to being able to afford some of the nicer things in life. If you’re organized enough, you can take some of those earnings and save them towards retirement, so that you’re not working right up until death. And if you happen to have any spare time, you can squeeze some meaning into your life around all of this. You could either choose a job that has meaning sewn into it, or you can do extracurriculars that help you to feel like there is more to life than just birth, work, and death.

But when we stepped out of this way of thinking, I began to notice the flaws in this structure.

As human beings, we have been created to hunt out comfort and to work hard to get there. It drives us to insane measures sometimes. This is the great phenomenon that explains our drive for fatty, sugar-laden, salty foods. It also explains the drive behind a poverty-ridden boy facing insurmountable challenges and overcoming them. It’s what all the best stories are made of in some way or another.

But true growth - and I mean that gritty, character-building growth - actually happens in the unsettling.

Did you know that we have a Biblical heritage of unsettling? Every single person that did anything of great importance in the Bible did something to break the structure of their life, change the routine of their day, and point them towards a different destiny. What would have happened if Abraham had not packed up all his things and followed the voice of God into the unknown? What would have happened if Rahab had not decided to hide the spies that day in Jericho? And what would the world look like today if Esther hadn’t gone before the king, at the risk of her own life, in a moment of extreme importance?

Each of these actions and many, many more encourage us from the history books to step outside of our normals and dare to think of what life could look like if we were to take that leap of faith.

We could be mistaken for thinking that what is always required of us is the Abraham-type of change, where we pack up our belongings and move to a different country. But what is actually required is obedience, no matter what that looks like. And for Abraham, yes that did involve leaving his homeland and traveling to a new destination. But for Esther, it meant fasting and praying and putting herself in harm’s way for the sake of her people. For Rahab, it looked like protecting a foreigner’s life at the risk of her own, even though she knew that foreigner would destroy her town. It looks like obedience, no matter the cost.

And in today’s world that is incredibly scary. “You’re asking me to submit my life to the power of this ‘being’ who would have the power to ask anything of me?” Yes. And why am I so confident in this? Because we will never have the ability to see the whole picture, no matter how educated and self-aware we become. But there is one who does know the whole picture, and who is weaving together a tapestry of the greatest beauty and importance.

Would you allow yourself to trust him? He is weaving you into a story that you might be allowed to peek at one day. He’ll shake the confines off of you and change the way you see yourself in the world.

And when the dust settles again, the change underneath will be so phenomenal that you might just be forgiven for thinking of yourself as an entirely new person.

Unsettling is hard. But I promise you it will be the best thing you ever do.