I've spent a lot of my life stuck. But I've come to believe stuck is more a belief system than an actual state of being.
Stuck happens when I don't believe my next choice will make life feel any better or any more hopeful than it does right now, so why make a choice at all? Stuck comes from believing that because this feels like the end it indeed must BE the end. Unstuck, moving forward in your story and leaning into new life, that comes when you believe this might feel like the end, but you know it's only the beginning. In his sermon this weekend, Steven Furtick highlighted this wonderful advantage God has when it comes to our stories. God gets to see them from the future. God gets to see my childhood traumas and my hang-ups and addictions and my life of failed relationships from the actual ending and not from the place that feels like the end of me. God gets to know how those stories actually end and not how I imagine them ending. The struggle comes, I think, when we insist on knowing that ending before me take a step toward it. It's not enough for us to have faith that God knows something about our future story that makes it worth living, so we refuse to live. I am fortunate today to have lived through a life full of moments that felt like the end but were actually beautiful beginnings. Even still, I'm not immune to stuck. But when I get to feeling stuck these days, I know for sure that I'm not. Stuck is not a place, it's a belief. And I ask God to remind me that my story that feels like the end is actually a story that still has a lot of chapters missing. Can you remind me of that, God? Can you point me to the missing chapters? Can you remind me, God, that my story has a very real ending that will make much more sense of my life than the ending I'm imagining in my stuck beliefs? If you are reading this, you have not reached the end of your story. If you feel like it is, that feeling is just that, a feeling. Please know that feeling comes from missing pieces of your story. Pieces written that you have yet to read. Don't give up on the chance to read them. Parts of them are in today. Parts in tomorrow. All of them are in keep going. So keep going. What feels like the end of you is only the beginning. So keep going.
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Robert "Keith" CartwrightI am a friend of God, a dad, a runner who never wins, but is always searching for beauty in the race. Archives
May 2024
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