Hey there, you. You’ve been in a pretty sideways season for a pretty long while now. You’ve struggled to get back something you feel like you’ve lost, but for some reason, you just can’t seem to get going in the right direction. You feel pretty disoriented and with good reason. There’s a whole chunk of super important pieces of your identity…or at least pieces of what you thought were your identity…that are missing and it’s an ache you feel down deep.

You’ve identified yourself with all the things you “do” at church for so long and since you’ve stopped doing them, you’re all mixed up about what you thought made you “you.” Totally understandable.

And since you’re all mixed up about who you think you are, that confusion has also bled over into your relationship with God and so you’re all mixed up about Him too. That certainty you’ve always felt where God is concerned, doesn’t feel so certain anymore. What used to be black and white seems kinda blurry and gray and the fire in your bones that once burned hot seems to be nothing but smoldering ash.

You keep waiting for something to happen to bring everything back into alignment again. Like for God to do some big miraculous thing to restart your heart and destroy all your doubts so that you can get back to the way things were even though you were so restless then that you couldn’t wait for things to change…to be better…different than they were.

It’s like you keep trying to rebuild a sandcastle in the same place and the ocean tide keeps washing it away, but you just keep right on building and rebuilding with your stubborn self in the very same spot, unwilling or unable to move and then shouting at the sea about it all.

But have you considered that maybe God doesn’t want things to get back to the way they were? Maybe His plan all along was to let some things die because they were growing and spreading and taking up all the space and God ultimately had something new to plant there?

So many times in recent years you’ve said how you wished you could erase all your preconceived notions and bad theology you’ve adopted over the course of your Christian lifetime and just start fresh. How do you know that’s not exactly what God’s been doing? You think He’s been silent, like He’s not been listening, but maybe He’s doing exactly what your heart desperately desired – more than even you realized.

Maybe He’s cleaning the slate,
tilling up the ground,
taking out the trash
…whatever you want to call it.

Maybe He’s doing the exact right thing at the exact right time in the exact right way.

And maybe you need to just wait Him out a little bit longer and see. And maybe in the meantime, you might try and get over yourself and consider a different spot on the beach for that sandcastle.