God is what our souls are made for. Everything else keeps us restless.
The first time I taught Stuck I asked a roomful of women a simple question - “When was the last time you felt jealous?”
These were women with children and jobs, not junior high girls, and yet there was not one woman who had not felt jealous in the past week. Most had felt it creep in within the past few hours.
Our eyes seem to always be searching for what we want or do not have – both on the surface, such as pretty things in catalogues, and the deeper hidden things, like better marriages or even just to be married.
When we were knit together, God spent some time knitting parts of us to need Him. We were created to matter – to be known and seen – and once seen, to be loved no matter what.
These desires are innate – God knit these spaces into us.
He wanted us to need Him. Funny thought really, God of the universe creating spaces in little people so we would need Him, possibly want Him, and be incomplete without Him. But we don’t want Him. We never have.
We hunger to the point of starving for Him and yet we still don’t turn to Him; instead we chase wind.
I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and indeed, all is vanity and grasping for the wind. ~ Ecclesiastes 1:14 (NKJV)
Here is the problem with us. We don’t go to war against invisible soul-sickening sin. We deal with the big, showy, impressive sin that everyone sees. But the invisible stuff is trickier, sneakier and deadlier. Discontentment in the forms of jealousy, comparison and greed is making us sick, washing over our minds constantly. And yet we are so accustomed to it, we have become numb.
Stuck. The more this word is tossed about in my head the more I become angry. I am angry at the devil, at myself, at this world. I am angry that such small and insignificant dreams would bind us so tightly that we live disappointed and paralyzed.
While we compare and long and wait and ask and save and spend and flaunt and pretend and cry and whine and tear down and puff up and stare and wish and ignore and complain and demand and search and find... we are missing something. I think we might be so distracted we are missing everything that lasts.
“My soul is restless until it finds its rest in thee.” ~ St. Augustine
When You Feel Stuck...
Women are hurting. A lot of us feel stuck. This is not a novel perception – this is human. We are stuck trying to be perfect. Stuck in sadness. Stuck feeling numb. Stuck pursuing more stuff to make us happy. Stuck in something we can’t even name. And most of our stuck places are invisible to the world, which keeps us from dealing with them.
When I wrote Stuck, I dreamt of creating things that took women to deep places – real places. I think we might have learned so much about God that we missed actually knowing Him.
I want us to live truth, not just memorize it. And this takes encountering a supernatural God; pushing ourselves up face-to-face with Jesus. And, in the process, I pray we grow closer to those around us as we go to war with stuck places. The trenches are a good birthplace for the deepest of friendships.
I don’t know that the goal is getting unstuck. Our stuck places are the very places that make us ache for God, leading us to Him and His freedom. God’s never been one to tie up our problems with little pretty bows and send us on our way. We wrestle, and as we wrestle on this journey we depend entirely on Him. We are inadequate to fix our lives...and we have a relationship-building God who likes to move in and settle in those holes within us that hurt.
I want us to band together and grow and live and experience God.
But let’s not neglect that, as women who know Jesus, we have something priceless to give away in the process. I believe God wants to do more with our stuck places.
