CBB 8/18/2021
“True growth most often begins with a growing sense of dissonance. We are dissatisfied with the way things are. We are not the person we hoped we would become by now. Unheeded, this discontent can lead anywhere from a numbing affluence to a disastrous addiction. When we pay attention to this discontent it can lead to tremendous breakthroughs into the greater purposes for our lives. Paying attention means opening the vault of our quiet desperation and bringing forth our discontent that it might be named aloud and offered to God.” Seedbed Daily Text today
Two and a half months after Bill’s death August 6, 2020, I was rattled by a creeping sense of discontent. It had to do with my home. I began to feel the burden of its size and maintenance and the realization that my expectation that I would live there for the rest of my life no longer felt like a permanent sanctuary of peace, but was instead an increasingly unsettled, outsized and time-consuming chore. The shock and sadness of that realization plagued me for several weeks before I had an extended opportunity for prayer and the chance to talk about the feelings with two beloved sisters whose listening and understanding was a comfort. At the end of that day I felt the Lord remind me of something he had first told me nearly seven years earlier…. “I have called you to a people and a purpose, not a place.”
When I had first heard those words it was about a move to a different place but the same group of people and purpose to whom I had been called to ministry eight years earlier. I struggled to make the decision to change as the situation where I was then became filled with conflict and oppression. My struggle was to try to change the situation in that place instead of moving on to what God was preparing elsewhere that I could not yet see. The discontent had been a call to have the courage to trust him to create a new “place” to continue the work we were doing.
Now, six years later, as a widow it seemed to be still about furthering ministry, again. But it was not about creating a new place for ministry itself as it was more about building a sense of safety around me in another place so that I could continue the ministry vocation that had been created without the intrusion of so many distractions that now had come to occupy my thoughts and days. The size of my home there on the lake, its proximity to the residence of the women I discipled, and my changed circumstances had begun to erode the boundaries between them and me that had been well enforced when Bill and all the pets were present with me there. They were gone. And what came was a sense of erosion of the walls of my safe sanctuary. Boundaries were being broken down that made me uncomfortable in my own home and in my own skin.
This time care for the “people” to be addressed by working through the discontent seemed to be for the relationship between God and me, not as much for the women of Titus 2. However, if I was going to continue to teach them about healthy boundaries I had to be firm in maintaining my own. The relocation across town to a smaller home and all the effort it required, physically and emotionally, has reset the boundaries between my need for personal space with God and ministry to others. It has been for my good as well as for theirs. And God is beginning to show me that he has even other possibilities ahead that will only further his call to people and purpose…… Divine discontent seems to precede an invitation to grow in our personal relationship with God in Christ. Getting to the heart of what God is doing in the midst of it will come in his time. But prayer and wrestling with it to understand our resistance is always worth the effort. If we are all in on becoming what God desires, we will trust him, surrender the pain we feel in being dislodged from our comfortable sense of “place”, and know that he is the God of All Comfort and will not leave us. No matter where he calls us to go, we can trust that he leads the way and will not leave us.