The Way Out of Stuck
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Have you felt it before—the rumble on the horizon of something amiss? The sticky heaviness that clings to you and weighs your heart earth-ward? Maybe it’s a hurt you wonder whether you are feeling more deeply than the other party. Perhaps it’s a fear you know you need to face but nothing in you wants to go there. It may be a rift in a relationship you don’t want to walk away from, or an attitude you wish you could shake so you could find the positive more readily and nitpick the negative with more reservation, or something you put your heart into and it still nose-dived.
I’ll be the first to raise my hand. We’ve been navigating this life of opening our hearts, lives, and homes to our neighbors for 1 ½ years so far, and the hard truth is that at times it’s messy. Complicated. As an Enneagram 9, conflict in any color makes me squirm on the inside, and yet there are times that things need talked out because the people we are doing life with matter more than whatever the wedge is that seeks to drive us apart. This life of together—it’s worth clinging to, fighting for.
Sometimes we try hard and it just doesn’t work. We hurt someone, or can’t stop someone from hurting us, and there we are, feeling broken and hearing the ominous rumble of thunder.
Sometimes life simply doesn’t fan out into the picture we envision. Sometimes there are things that are hard that we have no choice but to walk through.
Sometimes we have been brave enough to start, but then we fail, and how do we keep going then?
I am thankful for the way the ordinary moments can sometimes direct us, give us a key to dissipating the tension in our question. One of these ordinary moments for me culminated in a plateful of muffins.
I homeschool my girls (3rd and 1st grades), and we dabble in Montessori, unschooling, and unit studies. Sometimes we set aside our math curriculum, put on our aprons, and work through fractions in the kitchen. On this particular morning we set out to make muffins. One girl measured out the baking soda—her favorite ingredient to add—carefully leveling out the top of each teaspoon, but lost count of how many teaspoons she had added. I knew only that it was too many. I’m learning about grace and breathing my gratitude in every moment, and this felt like a test. Would I let my frustration chide her and infuse our memory of baking together with sharpness? Or could I take a deep breath, tell her it would be ok, that we would try our best to correct the mess and hope for the best. We knew the risk—salty muffin batter oozing and dripping, then burning, or muffins dry and dense falling with a thud into the garbage bin. Together we chose—chose to not rinse the batter down the drain, to keep going and wait to see what happens.
Maybe the way out of stuck is always forward; it’s the getting there, not which direction to go, that stumps us. As I ponder this, a bright little voice pipes up: “The muffins turned out better than I thought, mama!” Between her mouthfuls of blueberry goodness, I can hear the wonder in her words, see it emanating from her eyes. It’s worth the risk—to taste the sweetness that can come next, even when there is a chance that it will not. It’s just not always easy to risk again when we are hurt or broken or disappointed.
This I know: when we fall, we need someone to encourage us to keep going, someone to help us brush off our knees and stand up so we are in the position to take the next step. We need to surround ourselves with people who won’t let us give up.
In that moment of low, it helps to also remember that the God who is hard to see right now has a track record of faithfulness in our life. It’s like glancing in the rearview mirror as we inch our way forward, this remembering. He hears me. He sees me. He has never left me. He has granted me strength. Answers. He showed up when I pressed into Him. His voice became louder that quieter I became. I can see now that His timing knows no flaw. I heard a sermon once about how objects in a rear-view mirror are closer than they appear. When we glance backwards at the ways God has proved His faithfulness, we remember that He really is closer than it feels like He is in this one crushing moment.
With the confidence we draw from a God who provides us strength and people who help us stand again, we are then positioned to risk failure—and risk failure we must because that is the only way to taste the sweetness of the reward. That’s how we keep going—we go knowing the risk, the sureness of the One who has our back and beckons us to Himself, and the support of others who won’t let us give up. We go because “we are braver than we know,” as Annie F. Downs titled Day 3 of 100 Days to Brave. She goes on to say, “I never felt brave. But day after day, I just did the next thing, took the next step, said the next yes.” Stepping into brave is a moment-by-moment decision to do #mynextrightthing (Emily P. Freeman).
I invite you to linger for a moment, wherever you are reading, and give some thought to these questions:
- Where are you stuck? What is the failure or scar or dashed dream that has you down?
- Who in your life are the ones who won’t let you give up?
- How can remembering the past faithfulness of God in your life help you move forward today?
May we close in prayer?
Father, You see where we are stuck—where we have been hurt or disappointed—where we have failed and let ourselves or others down. If we don’t yet have people in our lives who won’t let us give up, would You help us to cultivate those relationships? Meet with us as we remember how You have been faithful in all our yesterdays. With Your strength filling us, would You help us walk forward again despite the risk, step into brave through doing our #nextrightthing? In Your holy name we pray, amen.
Downs, Annie F. 100 Days to Brave: Devotions for Unlocking Your Most Courageous Self. Zondervan, 2017.
Freeman, Emily P. The Next Right Thing: A Simple, Soulful Practice for Making Life Decisions. Revell, 2019.
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