Restlessness
is woven into the fiber of my being.
Also, I’m
fairly certain restlessness is not a spiritual gift.
I know from
the Bible that God gives gifts to all of his children, and that all of his
gifts are good. That’s scripture truth. I also know that all of us are also
plagued with certain personality quirks and tendencies that are carryovers from
genetics, human history, and Eve’s original mistake in the garden.
In my own
unique personality, there are too many of these latter ‘gifts’ to count, including
an absolute inability to wait (for anything) and searing impatience with heat
and traffic. The Atlanta suburbs in July make me a joy to live with.
Restlessness,
though, comprises a large part of my psyche. It is the lens through which I
view my calling, my husband’s job, my children’s schooling, and even the
geography of our surroundings.
This
situational agitation comes in spurts: I go through months showing great
contentment with our life, loving our community and our church and thanking God
with great piety for his gifts.
And then, an
explosion of discontent:
Why do we share space with five
million other people?
Why do we drive ten miles to get to
our church when there are ten churches within two miles from our house?
Why have they torn down another
hillside of rolling trees to build another Marshalls?
A Whole Foods at that intersection is
going to add ten minutes to my commute.
Why do I commute? Why do you commute?
I wonder: is
the stirring in my soul the push from God I’ve been waiting for? The whisper,
the urging, that is telling me to pull up stakes and make the bold move towards
simplicity? I yearn to swim upstream against the pull of our culture that begs
for more: more money, more hours, and more career advancement. I wonder why God
is not on board with this plan. My flight from the city is barred with
practicalities: our parents’ dependence on us, my teenager’s absolute refusal
to move mid-high-school, and my husband’s sensible suggestion to stay put until
our kids have gone to college.
They are all
good reasons. I ask God, and he tells me to wait, and so I tamp down my
restlessness for another six months, hoping the next time it flares up, God
will say yes.
Yet through
each of these cycles the question nags: is this disquiet in me, almost always
simmering beneath the surface to the extent that I would pack away fifteen
years of friendships and history for a change
in scenery, equal to sin?
As I pray
for the surrender while simultaneously hoping God will make a change, I don’t
have a good answer to this question. The desire for adventure and revolution is
so strong that I have a hard time counting it as a mistake, and yet I’ve walked
through this season feeling like a person who has worn the wrong outfit to a
party.
My faith
tells me that God is not rocked by my periods of moodiness. He made me, he
loves me, and he is patient when I am not (which is often). Even more, he can
see down the long road and around the blind curves, with unlimited wisdom and
sight distance. It only remains for me to find the balance between trusting him
with what I have, while always hoping for something a little different.
Am I content
with my life? Never. There is always better.
I want mountains and space and neighbors and travel. I want my kids to grow up pleasantly
different from their peers. I want to live a life that looks different and is
different because of the hope I carry each day.
However, I
have learned in the great, long waiting game to be content with God. Even when I look around and heave a great sigh and wish a
great wish, I can rest in a God who writes a great story, one that is going on
all around me. The secret is boiling away the temporary and clinging to the
adventure in the eternal: the difficult neighbor on my street, the children in
the local school that need feeding, or my own children that are navigating
adolescence.
It doesn’t
always look like the grand adventure I seek, but most days I can have faith
that it is, because it was written by a wildly adventurous Author.
