disorientation

No matter how you slice it, we are living in a season of disorientation.  Things are not as they have always been, which brings confusion and chaos and sadness and anxiety and fear.  There is the grief of having to let go of the way things have been, and there is a fear and uncertainty to not knowing how things will look when this season comes to an end.  And it will come to an end.

The fact is that there are three basic seasons in the spiritual life: orientation, disorientation, and reorientation.  Half the battle is knowing what season you are in and choosing to embrace that season, rather than ignore or deny or resist it.  The other half of the battle is the realization that whatever season we find ourselves in is actually leading us somewhere.  It is taking us to somewhere new, to a reorientation.  It is not taking us back to the good old days where it was easy and comfortable, but forward to a totally new place.  It is leading us to a way of being and seeing that is different, and better, than that from which we came.

But living in a season of disorientation certainly has its challenges.  In fact, we would love to bypass it or escape it if we could, but we cannot.  Therefore, we must learn to let go.  Letting go might be the most significant spiritual discipline of the season of disorientation.  And letting go always involves some amount of grief.  So don’t be surprised if this season involves some pain and sorrow and sadness.  Don’t run from it, but enter into it.  Learn from it.  Let it build and grow you.  For the refusal to let go comes at an even higher cost: frustration, anger, bitterness, despair, depression, etc.  

So we must, by God’s grace, learn to live well in our current season.  We must learn to let go well, which is going to call for some significant trust.  Trust that God is good.  Trust that God is always at work, even in the darkest and most painful times of life.  And trust that God is up to something good in and through us, regardless of how dire and desperate the circumstances appear.  He is leading us not back to an old season of orientation, but ahead to a new and beautiful season of reorientation.

God always wants more for us than the life (and the season) we are currently experiencing.  And that more does not usually come easy.  So rest assured that this season—as hard and as dark as it might seem—is certainly no exception.  God is more concerned with our growth than he is with our ease and comfort.  He is always about our becoming.