I’m going to be honest. Transformation is difficult. It’s also messy, fraught, and — remember, I’m being honest — downright painful. Most of us are creatures of habit. We are drawn to the familiar and the comfortable. Our lives take on a certain static or stable quality that can be hard to transcend. Not that most of us want to transcend our comfortable kingdoms, however modest they may be. Nope. Our comfort zones are havens for safety and predictability. And that’s good, right? Right?
Except that our comfort zones are also traps that keep us stuck: physically, emotionally, cognitively, spiritually, socially, etc. Staying in our comfort zones often comes at a cost—to physical and emotional health, to our growth and development, to our spiritual walk, and to our willingness and ability to reach out to others. You may be familiar with the following internet meme:
It’s a simple little illustration that rings with truth. How can anything new happen when we’re doing little more than getting our collective fingers in the air to test the wind? What if the walls we have built to keep out the unsafe are actually little more than prison walls?
The thing is, I’ve noticed lately that I’ve been drawing the walls of my comfortable kingdom (prison) ever closer. With each passing year I feel more and more anxious, more threatened by things that are not…just so. I’ve always struggled with anxiety. At times and in seasons it has been quite severe. But if I practice pausing in my routine to take physical stock of what my body is telling me, more often than not it is telling me it’s stressed, anxious, and even fearful. I’m struggling. My depressive thoughts are also at an all-time high. I need to be surrendering all of this to God. I need to be moving in step with Him. But that means leaving my comfort zone. You know, that place that is getting tinier and more angst-filled by the moment? I need to cry out to Jesus and then run for my life out into the fresh air. But that’s very hard to do. It shouldn’t be. But it is.
In the Spring of this year I felt the Lord call me to reclaim writing, something I used to do prolifically in my late teens and early twenties. So I built the bones of this blog, intending to get cracking. Planning to pick up writing once more. Well, today is December 17, 2017. More than 6 months have passed and I’m just now writing what I hope will be my first blog post. I fully intended to write. I should have known it wouldn’t be that easy. For starters, it has been a very long time since I’ve dusted off the keyboard. I’m also a mom to a 4 year old with a few special needs. That means I’m squeezed for time and energy nearly every moment of every day. But frankly the largest impediment, the thing that has held me back the most, is resistance.
In her fascinating article, Information Overwhelm Creates Resistance, Johnna Wheeler, an Eating Psychology Coach, discusses the uncomfortable truth that breakthrough and growth begin at the place of maximum resistance. And that maximum resistance must be overcome if we are going to be awakened from our sleepy, snug retreats. As Harvard Psychologist, Professor, and author, Robert Kegan puts it, “All transitions involve leaving a consolidated self behind before any new self can take its place.” Let’s think about Kegan’s statement for a minute. Transition or transformation necessarily involves the un-consolidation of who you are in order that you might re-consolidate into something new. Something more. So in order to transform, a person needs to go from a state of consolidation (unity, strength, solidity, intactness) through a state of un-consolidation (disunion, weakness, permeability, vulnerability). Put another way, before we can be established anew, we must be disestablished. Like I said. Transformation is difficult
Life will keep happening at us and to us. We will continue to be tugged by the current of the life we’re already living. Resistance will happen. The people around us will create resistance. They, too, are used to things being a certain way, and, like you, they depend on it. You can be sure that if you endeavor to grow, develop, or transform your life in any way, the resistance of others will happen to you. Spiritual opposition, particularly if the change you are attempting will bring you into greater alignment with God and His will for you, will also happen. And often spiritual resistance will happen to you with blunt force. But, at least in my experience, the resistance that happens inside of myself is the greatest resistance of all. Let me repeat that. My greatest source of resistance is me. When I want to change something about myself, I will be opposed, by me.
I don’t know about you, but I’m terrified of coming undone. I want my pieces in place, please and thank you. I want to seem to others that I am holding myself together, and my sense of self is so fragile, and so undervalued by me that I can’t stand the thought of letting my old seams come undone. I don’t want to break open. But what if there is something really good inside that needs to come out, for God’s glory and for my good? What if the old seams are just far too constraining, and they are keeping me from breathing, let alone living the life God has called me to?
You may have noticed what I named this blog. The Ball Won’t Unravel. They’re words of encouragement that the Lord gave me during a time of quiet prayer. If you ever doubt that God is a personal, loving God, who cares about every last detail of your life, it’s time to stop. He is. He does.
There are examples of His goodness and His love as numerous as the stars, but here’s one of them. Prior to parenthood, and, as it happens, prior to giving my life to the Lord, I worked a lot with yarn. I crocheted. I knitted. All to my own glory back then. But God gave me natural abilities when it comes to working with yarn. Yarn was, and is, a language that I understood. It’s a language that I read with my fingers. Yarn also became a strategy for taming anxiety when it came. It enabled me to just sit still, with a hook or needles in my hands, and through the repetition of simple movements, and the tactile sensation of the yarn moving over and through my hands, zoom my awareness in to those simple, sensory inputs. Yarn allowed me to block out the chaos from other places. Even my own chaos. Except when the ball of yarn unraveled. Except when the ball I’d been working with went rolling across the room, or into my cup of tea that I left sitting on the floor, or down the center aisle of a dirty and overcrowded metro bus on my way home from work. Then I was back into the chaos. Then I’m chasing the ball and trying to keep as much of it intact as possible, trying to save myself the trouble of having to completely re-wind the ball, from the beginning. Starting from the beginning is harder. It’s messier. I have many, many tangles to contend with. I might have dirt to wash away. I might have to gather a giant and garbled mess of yarn onto my lap, and carefully comb through until I find the beginning, and then commence the laborious process of rebuilding, and re-winding, that ball.
Chances are, in doing so, the yarn might stretch a bit. More than likely the ball will not come together in exactly the same way that it held together before. But it will come together. With time, and patience, and work. And it can be made into something useful as well as something beautiful.
For a long time I didn’t understand a whole lot of what the Lord was telling me with those four words. I knew He was telling me that He is big enough to hold the whole ball of my life. I knew He was asking me to trust Him with that ball. I won’t lie. I struggle each and every day to trust Him. Not because He isn’t trustworthy. But because of childhood trauma. Because of man’s inhumanity to man. Because my trust has been broken for a very long time. But that broken trust is like a ball of yarn. And it’s pretty beat up. It needs the most tender of mending. It needs to be scooped up off the floor by the most gentle of hands. It needs to be untangled, washed, and mended in the places where it has separated and the plies have unraveled. It needs to be lovingly and painstakingly rebuilt. Recomposed. And where the unraveled plies were rejoined, there is strength. It may not look like it, but those fibers will hold. They will move through the fingers of the knitter and come together as a useful, and beautiful finished product.
Over time, and, honestly, as I write this, I’m beginning to see even more of the love and care of the One who holds me. If I gaze at myself with honest eyes, I can see that I haven’t been letting God take hold of this ball of yarn that is me. I’ve been so afraid of falling off the couch of my life, of being submersed, with shock and surprise, in something new and different, of the chaos and utterly uncontrolled feeling of careening down the center isle of an overcrowded space, feeling so small and easily stepped upon.
God is calling me to step out in faith and in trust, into healing and transformation. But transformation is difficult. My life, as I am living it with those around me, opposes transformation somewhat. The enemy of my soul opposes it even more. But I am the one offering up the greatest resistance to lasting change, in the name of fear. I am afraid. I don’t want to expose my tattered self to even more damage. But fear is the opposite of love. 1 John 4:18 says:
There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment.
The one who fears is not made perfect in love. (NIV)
The one who fears is not made perfect in love. (NIV)
Real love is built on trust. The stark, but also beautiful truth is that the tighter I hold on to my ball of yarn, the more I hoard it from God, and the more I waste it. The more I try to control this ball of yarn, the more anxious and out of control I will feel. And so when I do fall off the couch, or, when I’m met with an unexpected but painful and impactful event, as really happened a few days ago, I can see that my comfort zone was never mine. I can see that it was a temporary reprieve at best. I can see that life will keep happening and that my attempts to control and contain it are feeble. Sad. I can see that I need to grow and transform. I can see that I have been a slave to fear. I can see I’ll need God’s help to take that fear and replace it with something much better.
I can see that the ball might well unravel, but that if I leave it in the hands of the One who made it in the first place, He will love it, care for it, and reestablish it in ways I never could. I can see that I need to let that happen, as painful as it may be. God was good enough to think that the world needed me, and so He made me. He has stood at my side for almost 46 years, never leaving, even when I opposed Him, and made a bigger and bigger mess of my life for the majority of those years. He knows everything about me and loves me enough to use a language I will understand, the language of yarn, when comforting and encouraging me. He gave me, and every other person, Jesus, because His love for us is that great. Honestly, how can I withhold me, that tattered ball of yarn, from Him any longer? How can you?
What is just one way, and trust me, there are countless ways, that God has shown His loving and tender posture towards you? Would you share it in the comments so that others will also be encouraged?
