Oh Lawdy. Take a deep breath. We have been talking about Life Hacks and their suggested better ways to do life. Meanwhile, God, because He is so smart, has been dropping some pithy truth bombs that will actually change our life trajectory. Today’s God Hack has to do with being stuck, paralyzed, frozen, or (ouch) comfortable.
Getting unstuck means we must live a different life.
For those of us who loooove our comfort zones, this one makes us squirm.
If I coddle my excuses and my story, which is often a very sad story, then I get to shed my personal power and expect no forward motion. I don’t have to change anything. Because, I am, after all, stuck.
If I am stuck and willing to remain so, I can talk about the problem ad nauseam, but never take the next step of correction.
If I never spend the time with God to discern the truth about the lie that binds me, I will roll around in that denial for months. Or decades.
If I know the truth but never actually take the steps to change the course, or far worse, never follow the Lord’s instructions about how to get free, I will give days, years, and seasons of my precious life to an enemy whose intent is to keep me immobile, ineffective, silenced, and unproductive.
Listen. I love to soak in the Lord, but I rarely experience time with Him without coming back to this world fired up to do my part in bringing heaven to earth. The love of God, His big picture of restoring His beautiful world drives me, and you, forward into action.
“Little children, let us not love in word or speech, but in deed and in truth.” 1 John 3:18
Getting unstuck means doing whatever it takes to let go of lies, unforgiveness, stinking thinking, bad habits, sinful choices, or easy excuses. Your destiny is a stake.
Almost certainly it means receiving help from others. We may have to humble ourselves and admit we need any variety of counsel, money, creativity, or accountability. Some of us literally need a swift kick in the ass like a spiritual defibrillator to shock our hearts into beating again. All of us need a plan of action to live a life that is Unstuck.
The stuck people that Jesus unstuck in the gospels had to learn how to do life completely differently. The blind man, the lame man, the possessed woman, the leper, all of them had created life patterns around their stuck places. Now that was gone. That old identity was gone. They had to deliberately create new habits for this new unstuck life.
I speak from personal experience. I kept running in this toxic mental circle. Think hamster-wheel devised by the evil one. I would tell the Lord about this wonky feeling. The Lord told me, after I had ignored it for a month, you need to name it. I made a lame attempt and said it feels like a worth issue. (That sounded noble.) Back and forth, thinking, praying, musing, and massaging. Still no progress.
Don’t miss this. If I didn’t really know what it was…I didn’t really have to change.
But God. He told me to call a coaching friend. Not a soft, squishy friend who cares about my warm, fuzzy feelings. No, this friend told me I was full of shit. “That’s not what the problem is at all. The problem is people pleasing.”
I was so offended. Or was that exposed?
People pleasing is a sin problem. And sin ALWAYS has a remedy.
Maybe, just maybe, we would rather be people who have wounds so we can be victims. Rather than be people who have sin issues that need a Savior.
Whether we have legitimate wounds or blatant sin, we can get unstuck!
God reveals the truth. And the truth sets us free. We don’t have to live in gray, unnamed, can’t-pin-it-down spaces. This works in one of two ways. God either names so it can be healed. Or He reveals it as a demonic attack. In that case, we break the agreement and the assignment to confound us and replace it with His truth. Either way, getting unstuck is part of our operating system.
Humans are born forward. The reason we dislike being “stuck” in the first place is because something deep inside of us knows we can be and should be advancing. It is at the core of our being. Let’s get used to unstuck. Let’s get used to different.
More God Hacks for Living