The Danger of Instability in the Spiritual Life
Could Fleeing Be Sabotaging Your Spiritual Life?
What is instability and why is it dangerous for our spiritual life?
Simply put, instability is the temptation to flee from the physical place that you have been called to serve.
In this book I’ve been reading called The Noonday Devil, the author draws a quote from the earliest Christian monks who would spend their entire days enclosed in a desert cave or a cell, devoting their lives to praying to God.
The flight from self is concealed beneath a flight from one setting and way of life. It will be better elsewhere. It used to be better back then. In short, the here and now become unbearable. Alone in confronting himself beneath the noonday sun, the monk can no longer hear or see himself. He no longer tolerates himself. His illusory salvation lies in desertion.
Photo by Ali Morrie on Unsplash
What’s the point? I’m not a desert monk. I’m not spending my entire day trapped in a cave in the desert. Why does this matter to me?
Okay, so I’ll give you that. We’re not desert monks. We’re not trapped praying in caves all day. We have families to serve. We have people at work that need us. We have bills to pay, mouths to feed, but at the core of instability is this desire of thinking that by going somewhere else, our lives will be better. I think all of us have felt that before, whether it’s to a physical place, or a place back in time: those jolly old good times. When times get tough, we desire to flee or to escape.
This temptation is dangerous. This temptation ultimately undermines the fact that God has ordained this particular place that you are in for your salvation. The temptation to flee is a distraction from where you truly need to be: the present.
My Rough and Unstable Transition Out of the Military
After separating from the Air Force after six years of active duty, I had to rediscover myself, and this was hard because I made the Air Force everything about me. It consumed my life because my career was my identity.
This was a big struggle for me because when I was in the Air Force, I made a name for myself. I loved who I was in the Air Force. I was a leader and I had men under me. I loved that responsibility, and at the young age of 24, I couldn’t be any prouder of myself.
I went through a really rough transition period transitioning into civilian because suddenly I felt as though my identity was stripped from me, bringing me back to ground zero.
I went from turning wrenches and leading men in the field to sitting in a cubicle from a 7 to 5. I went from being greeted by the sunrise at the airfield on chilly, English mornings to leaving home when it was dark and coming back home when it was dark. I lived this life for almost 2 1/2 years and it drove me to despair.
The only thing I wanted to do is to go back to England. I wanted my Air Force life back. I missed the old times.
As I’ve grown in the spiritual life, I’ve come to realize that God makes His grace present in the moment.
He doesn’t work in the future.
God doesn’t work in the past.
He works in the now.
And that’s why instability is so dangerous. When we experience this temptation, we hyperfocus on the future or we long for our past.
We turn our gaze away from the now, where God is ever present.
We shut ourselves off to the grace that God is freely wanting to give to us now. This will ultimately lead us to a cycle of despair, where ultimately, we lose out on hope for anything good to come. We frantically hyper-analyze every moment of our days and compare it to what we want in our future. We look at our jobs and say that, oh, this isn’t the job that I had in the past, or we look at the place that we live around us and say, oh, this isn’t the place that I used to love.
Often, we think that our solutions are in these desires, but that is far from the truth. Instability is more of a distraction from what we need to do now.
We forget in these moments of instability that God is giving us the grace to pursue the present. God’s will is infinitely greater and more fulfilling than any desire that we have. We should not abandon the post that God has called us to serve.
Instead, we need to ask for the grace to weather the storms.
What we want and what God wants are two separate things most of the time. If we ask for the grace to be anchored to this present moment, we will discover that with the grace of God, we can find peace and fulfillment in His now.
This article was written as part of my weekly newsletter, Three Holy Things. Three Holy Things is a weekly email newsletter where I share and discuss three things that I’ve learned through prayer, podcasts, books I’ve read, and really any form of media that helped me get closer to God.
If you like what you have read, subscribe to Three Holy Things for free to get articles like this direct to your inbox today.
