A little over a year ago I realized something I didn’t expect.
On the surface, everything seemed fine. Andy and I had survived our renovations and felt settled in our home sweet home. I loved Jesus and had good relationships with my friends and family. And I had a good job working with a custom home builder I loved working with doing things I loved doing. It was all good.
Until I realized that it wasn’t.
Andy and I were driving through the mountains on a chilly, late spring afternoon when he said he had a song for me to listen to and I heard Dean Brody’s familiar voice on the speakers singing:
The trouble is
You think you have time
You think tomorrows always coming down the line
And then one day
You wake up and you find
The trouble is you thought you had time
And somewhere between the mountains and the music, it hit me: I didn’t like who I was becoming.
Although I acted like everything was fine, I was stressed more often than not. I was constantly distracted and not fully present with the people I loved. The things that consumed my time and energy didn’t always reflect the things I claimed to matter most. And perhaps most importantly, I couldn’t honestly say that the life I was living was helping me become more like Christ.
If anything, I was becoming more jaded and cynical, drifting further and further away from the Spirit-filled fruit I wanted my life to be marked by – the love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control I so desperately craved.
And the trouble was, I thought I had time. I thought tomorrow would always be there waiting for me – that I could make the changes I needed to make some other day. But I wasn’t fooling anyone, including my husband. And I didn’t want to wake up one day five, ten or fifteen years down the line and discover that time had quietly passed while I kept wandering in the opposite direction from the life I was created to live.
That realization was incredibly uncomfortable, but I am forever grateful for the unexpected journey of pruning, growth, reflection and re-orientation it has led me on over the last year.
Creating Space
After the realization that my trajectory in life was shaping me into someone I didn’t want to become, I spent some time discerning what needed to change. But the truth is, I knew what I needed to do. I had been dabbling in this journey for a while and many of the ideas that would eventually shape this new season of life weren’t new or revolutionary.
Books had planted seeds.
Conversations had stirred something in me.
Questions had begun to surface.
The problem was I didn’t have the margin to do much with any of it. I was surviving more than I was reflecting. So, after much prayer, conversation, and discernment, I made what felt like the first necessary change: I quit my job.
Not because work is bad.
Not because everyone needs to do the same thing.
And certainly not because quitting my job would magically solve all my problems.
But because I knew that for me, in that season, I needed space.
Space to think.
Space to pray.
Space to examine the life I was building and the person I was becoming.
Space to begin the deeper work of transformation.
I needed to clear the ground to make room for something different – something deeper – to grow and truly transform the inner most parts of my being.
For me, creating that space meant leaving my job for a season. For someone else, it might look entirely different. It might mean saying no to one more commitment, protecting an evening each week for reflection, setting firmer boundaries around work, deleting an app that consumes more attention than it deserves, or simply being honest about what isn’t working anymore. The specifics will look different for each of us, but the principle remains the same: growth sometimes often requires margins.
Rebuilding & Reshaping
I quickly realized that becoming more like Jesus wasn’t going to happen accidentally. The same is true for all of us. We are all being formed by something – by our habits, our calendars, our phones, our work, our friendships, the media we consume, and the stories we believe about ourselves and the world around us.
The question isn’t whether or not we are being formed. The question is who – or what – is doing the forming and who are we becoming in the process.
So rather than simply drifting into this new season – filling the newly created space with fresh commitments, busyness and people-pleasing – and hoping I would somehow become more present, peaceful, joyful and Christ-like, I wanted to approach it intentionally.
I began wrestling through questions like: Who am I and how would Jesus live my life if He were me in this time, this place and with the opportunities He has given me to steward? What will I choose to prioritize in this new season? And what practices, ideas, and rhythms help to form a life well lived as an apprentice of Jesus?
I figured a good place to start was to first take an inventory of where I was at in life. Afterall, it is hard to know where to go from here, if we don’t know where “here” is in the first place. Years ago Andy and I had attended a workshop where we took a life assessment and I recalled how helpful and clarifying that was. I still had many of the worksheets from that event, so I spent an entire day sitting by the fire, poring over them. I used them to reflect back over the last year and evaluate the highs and lows and everything in-between. And then I worked through an assessment of all the key areas of life: relationships & family, physical, business, financial, spiritual, mental, and lifestyle, helping me to better identify which areas of life needed nurturing in this next season.
Around this same time, a friend encouraged me to take an Enneagram personality assessment, which along with Ian Morgan Cron’s The Road Back to You: An Enneagram Journey to Self-Discovery, ended up being another incredibly helpful tool. I had heard murmurings about the Enneagram for years but had never given it much thought. But as I began learning more about my type, I felt like I had finally found the language for motivations, fears and patterns that I had sensed for years but struggled to articulate. For the first time, I felt like I could see some of the hidden currents beneath my decisions and reactions more clearly.
Understanding myself and where I was at in life was important, but awareness alone wasn’t enough. If I truly wanted to become a different kind of person, I needed to begin living differently too. It was time to restructure and to rebuild – to introduce practices, rhythms, and ideas that would help to nurture a new way of living. But the lingering question in the back of my mind was this: What does it truly look like to live well for the glory of God?
I started taking a deep dive into questions of direction and purpose, working through exercises like the ones outlined in Cultivating Purpose: A Simple Guide for Clarity & Direction. I voraciously read books like Practicing the Way: Be with Jesus. Become Like Him. Do as He Did., The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction, The Spirit of the Disciplines, and The Fix: How the Twelve Steps Offer a Surprising Path of Transformation for the Well-Adjusted, the Down-and-Out, and Everyone In Between and learned to cultivate a life of discipleship through regular rhythms and practices. I listened to the Bible Project’s podcast series on the Sermon on the Mount, deeply contemplating what the good life looks like, what it means to be a follower of Christ and how to see things the way He sees them. I also started spending more time with Him and in His Word, allowing Him to shape my desires, my focus and my understanding of what it looks like to live well in His Kingdom and for His glory.
And this journey is not over yet. I feel like I’m still growing and learning in so many ways – constantly stepping out of my comfort zone into a new way of living. There are still habits to unlearn, rhythms to protect and areas of my life that need tending to or pruning. But for the first time in a long time, I feel like my life is moving in the right direction. And most importantly, I feel like I am becoming the kind of person I hoped I could be all those months ago in the mountains.
Not quickly.
Not perfectly.
But slowly, imperfectly, and by His grace alone, I am on this journey of becoming more like Christ. And that’s truly the best place to be.
This Darling Adventure 