Unlearn It All.

It’s a scary thing to change. When the things you were so convinced of, you begin to question. When the most important thing somehow fades and dulls, slipping amidst the array of good ideas and holy habits.

I felt a changing happening in me a couple of years ago. It came after grief, after healing, after traveling, after some dreams had come true. I couldn’t attach the changing to one or to another, but possibly instead to an aging or maturing. I felt the passion of my youth humbled and corrected, not by brutal reality but by invitation into something other than what I’d been chasing for years. 

I resented the course correction. 

First came fear of the danger of ‘deconstruction’. If I questioned the trajectory of my faith, was I abandoning it? Was there a way to redesign my priorities and purposes without landing in the lukewarm waters below? I was terrified that if I slowed down my sprinting, my faith would grow cold. I had been charging hard after a life of missions and outreach, while my heart had been yearning for family and art. How could it be that God had planted the dream in my soul for this ministry, and yet could be calling me away from it so soon to be a wife, a mother? Was it the whisper of God, or was it burnout, chasing me toward another life?

Then came the wind of pride. In the name of zeal, I had pointed the finger at any who had slowed down. I accused the mothers and homemakers of settling for less than the call of God, for giving up on their missionary dreams or getting caught up in materialistic needs. What sleepy souls had they become, I thought, obviously apathetic toward their God and the world so lost. If I was to take the hand that drew me out of my world-changer life, I was either settling too or confessing my wrong thinking. 

Did I have it in me to change? Could I be brave enough to let God lead me into a land I’d not yet seen? 

This new territory was uncharted. These new dreams of mine carried with them great priority shifts and terrible goodbyes. As much as I yearned to take this leap away from the life I’d known, I felt the terror of loneliness on the other side. But I recognized a figure before me, the promise that I would not have to endure what was ahead in solitude. 

For God is with us in the changing. In the mystery of the future, there is security in him. I don’t understand how ‘both can be right’: the passions and purposes he placed in me a decade ago, and the new riches of slowness and intimacy I have discovered in marriage and motherhood. But I have found him in these lands just as I did back then, and I’m convinced that one day I will mature to see him lead me to new country once again.