Holy Restlessness

I often joke with my husband that I must really love him because he is the only thing in my life that doesn’t make me restless. But he knows that I actually half mean it. I am not a settler. I crave change, development, and potential in an unfinished project. Before we even moved into this house and gained property I had homestead plans in the works. We haven’t had one single day over 70 degrees this spring and yet here I am, anticipating our autumn harvest when I hardly have seeds in the ground. I don’t necessarily think that it’s bad the way I crave the newness of a project. It has meant that I am a lifelong learner and that I don’t see myself or my world as a finished product but something to daily work on. But it can mean that I tend to flit from one thing to the next without completion. It can mean that I get an idea in my head and drive my poor family crazy with it until I get my way. I believe in being true to who we are as unique, created beings but to also live with a healthy amount of discipline…so I’m working on that one.
But what do you do, if you are like me? How do you stand the constant potential that you see in front of you? The space to create and design? The room and the time for building and for growth? I almost ache with it, and it’s the drive that both fuels my fire but overwhelms and threatens to exhaust me. Passion is furious when we give it legs to run.

I received my answer this morning in a devotional about the Beatitudes. The author wrote, “No matter how comfortable the house, we’ll never feel fully at home in this world; we were made for the coming one”. And I’ve heard that preached time and time again and I’ve read studies on what it means to live in this world as well as the next, but I had not had it hit me like it did this morning. It doesn’t mean to shake off my restlessness or that feeling it is unholy. It doesn’t mean that every time I get the itch for a new project I should stop and feel shame. You know how everyone always says we are supposed to be completely fulfilled by God and that until He is truly our everything we will keep wanting? I say that’s a lovely notion but a wildly unhelpful one. Because guess what? You and I are going to wake up wanting, because that is how we were designed. And until we are in Heaven at our Father’s feet, we are going to keep wanting. That restlessness and yearning will not be fulfilled on this earth, and fact of it is, we get to live in that tension. On spring mornings when I look over the hills and marvel at the way the mist clings to the ground and wraps itself around the trees, with so much desire that my body has a physical, visceral reaction, and with so much longing to feel it deeper, to see it more clearly and to get lost in it…that restlessness is worship. It is my heart craving what God has done and made, craving the goodness that He has in store. I can’t pray that feeling away, nor do I want to. I want with holy anticipation to experience that wanderlust for Him every single day so that I never stop running toward my Home.
We are dancers who have been given the choreography for two ballets. We are dancing in one while trying to remember the steps we have been given for the next. We anticipate the next dance with all our hearts and cannot wait for the glory of the final curtain fall…but we love the dance we’re performing. Right here and right now. It is a beautiful ballet, written just for us, and we are stunning as we dance.