Recently in my life, I have felt like I’m swimming with no concept of the depth.

It feels like so much of my life is currently unknown, and in reality, there is a lot I do not know. Some of the changes this past year have brought are emphasizing to me just how little control I have over my own life. While I like to think I have been growing in having faith in what God is doing, and peace in this season, I have been feeling the creeping anxiety of “what should I be doing” growing in my gut.

In conversations with friends, I have found a common theme to discomfort that comes in the periods of stillness, as if there is something wrong when we are not being active in our lives.

I was vocalizing this fear to a friend when she made the following comment about how she was feeling in her own life:

“I really feel like in Psalm 23 it isn’t just that He’s telling us to lie down, He’s MAKING us.”

The little tone difference she used made me laugh, but that perspective simultaneously challenged and encouraged me. Sometimes we feel as if there is something we are falling behind in doing when it may actually be God pulling us to sit still for a moment.

Psalm 23 tells us that “He restores my soul”.

We don’t always need to be trying to do the most to grow, sometimes we need to trust the lessons God has for us in the calm as well.

The season of life where medical causes have limited what you are capable of? God is using that.

The season of life where you are unsure what the next steps are career-wise? God is using that.

The season of life where things feel routine, and you feel stagnant? God is using that.

There isn’t a limit to what God chooses to use. Sometimes the things we view as a barrier to what we think we need or want are actually what God is using to make us pause.

In our culture of constantly doing, we tend to forget to just be. I have found incredible discomfort this past year in the number of times I have felt like God was sitting me on the bench, and yet I can already say how much I needed those seasons to grow in my humility, trust, and peace.

God wants more for us than to be creatures of accomplishment - He made us to be creatures of relationship. Our life’s purpose is not just what we can do for Him, but how we can know Him.

That is the God we know.