I Must Be Doing Something Wrong

This season has been hard. Everything has been changing, and the anxiety of every day life has taken quite a toll on me. On one hand, I’ve experienced much gratitude and growth. On the other, each day has been it’s own challenge. I can’t help but want and need a reprieve of some sort, a chance to heal and replenish.

I’m not one to change my long term plans. Even in the short term, I think before I act, and I feel the weight of every decision. But these days everything is changing. I’ve had to reimagine how I live each day, and I’m surprised by my own shifting concept of planning, surviving, and flourishing. In short, I am no longer who I used to be. My life requires much more courage than I used to think I had.

In all of the shifting, there’s one particular feeling that I’m trying to address in my heart because I do not believe it’s true: the feeling that if everything is changing, I must be doing something wrong.

Ever since I was little, I’ve had the same core dreams. In a way, the movement I am experiencing must be part of those dreams; however, in moving towards those dreams, I am also moving away from the initial stages of dreaming. It is that movement, and the shaking up which accompanies it, that stirs up this strange feeling: I must be doing something wrong.

It is the familiar that feels right. Unfortunately, familiar doesn’t mean right. Sometimes the right thing is remarkably strange, and we must accept the feelings of wrongness to in fact do what is right. I know I believe this. But still. Most days, in my exhaustion, I feel it ever so clearly: I must be doing something wrong.

It’s funny, really, presenting this feeling to God. God knows everything I’m doing right and wrong, and surely He could separate the two for me; surely He could give me moral clarity.

Still, the lines are blurry–my decisions seem morally grey, though I know I must make them. I know I must take responsibility for my actions, whether I feel like God has given me direction or not. I must accept the risk of being wrong while believing that God is covering me, somehow leading me, and loving me all the same.

Maybe I am making bad decisions. Maybe I am making the best decisions in less than ideal situations. I don’t have the answers yet, and I don’t expect to soon. Still, I return to that funny place with God, where I confess I could be messing things up without knowing how, without seeing forward, backward, up, or down.

It is in the act of returning to God that I know I’m doing something right. God, help me in my weakness, as in my weakness, I return to You.