Finding Your Stability in an Unstable World

I don’t remember running off with the circus.

Yet some days feel like riding a bareback horse around a ring in an-fitting tutu, or at least what I think that would feel like. I haven’t worn a tutu lately.

This is our circus, friends. The good news is that we don’t have to succumb to the chaos around us. We can find stability right in the middle of it.

Throughout the first year of the pandemic, I cranked out emails and social posts fluently as a means of seeding hope and creating spiritual rhythm for myself and, hopefully, for many of you.

In this second year (hard to say, much less believe), I have been much busier, developing a mobile app called Dawn for you and me and anyone who wants to fall back in love with spending simple, quality time with God.

We also returned to full-time homeschooling. At times I have felt threadbare, despite my best efforts to nourish myself, and have been coping with regular dance party breaks with my kids and jelly bean rewards that we call “vitamins.”

Send the back-up horseback riding ladies! I’m tired.

I don’t tell you this for sympathy but recognition, because I know your life also has a new cadence that doesn’t feel quite right, the tutu is squeezing in all the wrong places.

A handful of times over the last month, I have found myself saying to God, “I know you are leading me. I just don’t see how all of this is going to work out and work together. This doesn’t feel sustainable.”

My desire in this season is not to be the most amazing Angie I can be, and rise above. I think this time calls for a little more nuance than that. My desire it to continue to find God’s promised place of rest, for my rest to supersede my fears, my busyness, my uncertainty.

Here's what I'm learning about finding stability in an unstable world.

Being fully human is healthy.

In this #circuslife, nothing feels sure. Unsureness is constantly staring at us in the face, forcing us to reckon with it. It’s tiresome, even when we trust God, because we are flesh and bone.

If we’re honest, there are moments of bitter complaint and pints of ice cream. When I heard our church was being shut down…again...due to Covid I burst into tears.

I needed to grieve. It’s good to grieve.

Finding stability entails allowing ourselves to be fully human. In other words, the more we try to juggle everything and control it and wear our happy face, the more unstable we will become.

Jesus didn’t ask for your happy face but for your whole heart, so He’s always a safe person to hash things out with. Go to that friend who lets you vent without canceling you for having an opinion. Get a beautiful journal and put in ink all of the dreadful and hopeful things your mind conjures when it wakes you from sleep. Go for a long walk and have a good cry.

Do whatever it takes to feel some normalcy and relief.

And just be human. It requires feeling hard things and owning up to mistakes. But it’s what enables us to stay soft in a hardened world, and to recognize and attend to the suffering of others.

We are not hopeless. We are the hopeful.

“…we also celebrate in our tribulations, knowing that tribulation brings about perseverance; and perseverance, proven character; and proven character, hope; and hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us.” Romans 5:3-5 (NIV)

Hope. Perseverance. Character. Love.

The lives of the redeemed are marked with these things. We are crushed and beaten back like everyone else but we rise hopeful with God’s strength.

Hope comes not from ignoring the realities of our world but in keeping our feet firmly grounded in the promises of God that will remain long after our world has disappeared.

When we dig deep into His truth, we are surprised to find otherworldly grace. It’s one we could never muster on our own, fueled by a love that fills our own vacant and needy places. We find grace for ourselves, for others, and for a future that we more full recognize as unknowable.

Hope doesn’t always ease our present suffering but it enables us to bear it.

We find our stability in the balancing.

Our temptation is to wait and hope for the circus life to ease up, so we can catch our breath. We aren’t always given that opportunity. Chaotic times have proliferated since the beginning of time. It’s practically our calling card as humans. “Where we go, crazy stuff happens.”

Stability doesn’t come because we waited out the crazy. It comes because we partnered with Jesus, the Prince of Peace. The more we focus our eyes on what He is wanting to do in our lives and how He wants to use us in our sphere of influence, the more that becomes our natural way of life.

I wonder. Is it possible that, with intention, we could become the freest people on planet Earth through this circus experience? Not our best selves - just more like Jesus. People who can drop anything to follow where He leads? People who love with more abandon the very people who confound us the most? People who live with the deep peace of knowing their true security is in heavenly places and not here on earth where everything eventually rusts out and crumbles?

In the midst of these days, as my good friend says, “There is no balance. Just balancing.” In our forced continual balancing, may we not dig into our own wells of strength and become set like stone in our own ways.

May we learn to be even softer, more pliable in the hands of a Father who knows the intimate details of our hearts and the things we’re going through. He will lead us through one feeble step at a time, by his strength.  

I pray you find peace in the unsustainable, in the balancing, in the waiting, in the unknowing, and lean more heavily into a hope that does not fail.