Please don’t let it take over twenty addresses and decades of discontentment, running, starting over, and trying again in a new city, a new state, before you understand this: the process is the process, and it takes as long as it takes.
For years, I believed I was a victim of my circumstances. But the truth was simpler and harder. I had a bad picker. I didn’t know how to choose relationships, jobs, apartments, even hairstyles. I believed the source of my sadness lived out there in the external world, that if I could just find the right place, in the right part of town, near the right neighbors, driving to the right job, I would finally be at peace.
Please don’t let it take twenty addresses to learn that your peace was never location-dependent.
Why do I keep coming back here?
Recently I asked God why I keep coming back here. To this place. The place where, on paper, I don’t have enough. Where, on paper, I’m not qualified. Where, on paper, I don’t have what it takes. And yet, in reality, I have everything I need.
Looking back, I think this process began 603 days ago, the day I lost my job.
Strangely, I wasn’t afraid. I was relieved. I genuinely believed that since the world had stopped making demands of me and my day, I could finally get to work doing what God wanted me to do. What I didn’t understand then was that before God would change my circumstances, He would begin the very painful but very necessary process of changing my understanding of Him.
Because if I couldn’t understand grace, I couldn’t understand God. And if I couldn’t understand God, I couldn’t speak honestly about Him to anyone else.
It would have been easy for Him to restore everything immediately, hand me another paycheck, and return life to normal. But normal was the very thing keeping me from seeing what had been true all along.
I never really understood that it wasn’t me holding my life together.
Things would show up at my doorstep that I never spoke about, never asked for, and never wrote down, with no conceivable explanation for how they found me.
For the longest time, I let myself believe it was because I was special. Different. That belief didn’t start with God, though. It started years earlier, in gifted and talented classes as a kid, where I learned to believe that my abilities set me apart from other people. I carried that into how I understood my relationship with God, too.
Scripture tells a different story. “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23), and every blessing I have received has come by grace, not merit. “It is by grace you have been saved, through faith… not by works” (Ephesians 2:8-9). God “does not show favoritism” (Acts 10:34).
I was never the exception. The only difference is that I’m finally seeing what has been true all along: my place before God was never secured by my performance, but by His grace, just as it is for everyone who belongs to Him.
Every time I moved, I started the process over.
I’ve been on this unrelenting search for peace for so long that I didn’t realize I was resetting the clock every time I packed up and left. Every time I tied my peace to an address, a city, or a title, I was setting myself up for disappointment.
My peace never depended on considerate neighbors. It never depended on a company that could see my worth and compensate me properly. I truly believed that if people could just see me, they’d understand what I needed from them. If my neighbors understood I was just a mom trying to raise her kid in peace, they’d stop living so loudly. If the right employer understood what I could do, they’d finally make room for me at the table.
Please don’t let it take twenty addresses and twenty years to learn that you don’t have to be perfect first.
There are no prerequisites for the love, protection, and provision I’ve experienced my whole life. My landlord approved a lease on a three-bedroom house more than three times the size of the apartment I lost after my layoff, when on paper, there was no reason he should have. My first major copywriting job came with a resume that had little more than this blog to recommend me. Somehow, it led to multiple trips to the East Coast and words I’d written appearing in stores across the country. Experience has taught me that the next role, the next door, will open when, on paper, it doesn’t make sense either.
That’s not because I’m special. “The Lord is good to all; he has compassion on all he has made” (Psalm 145:9). God isn’t smiling on me in a way He withholds from everyone else. What I get to do now is simply believe what has always been true: I am seen, known, and loved by the Creator of the universe. That’s a wild thing to say and an even wilder thing to trust. But my life has been evidence of it all along, whether I recognized it or not.
The fire was never punishment.
My inability to sit still in the fire is the reason my life kept catching fire wherever I went. Not because God was trying to punish me, but because the process is the process, and it takes as long as it takes.
There are things this world has attached to me. Lies embedded so deep in my belief system they’ve become like barnacles on my skin, waiting to be burned off, not just scrubbed or reasoned away. That isn’t painless. It takes fire, refining, pruning, cutting, even cauterizing, to become the person God made me to be. To return to the childlike place where all I knew was that God loved me and I would be okay.
Scripture doesn’t promise that refining is comfortable.
“But who can endure the day of his coming? Who can stand when he appears? For he will be like a refiner’s fire” (Malachi 3:2). Peter writes that our faith is “of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire” and is “proved genuine” through trials (1 Peter 1:7). James goes further: “Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything” (James 1:2–4).
Genesis tells us God didn’t rest because He was tired. He rested because the work was finished (Genesis 2:2). I don’t get to walk away from the process before it’s complete. I can keep packing up and moving every time it gets hot, every time I can’t breathe through the smoke. Or I can sit still long enough to see what’s actually true: I have never once been burned.
“When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned; the flames will not set you ablaze” (Isaiah 43:2). Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego walked into a furnace built to kill them, and the fourth man in the fire was God Himself (Daniel 3:24–25). Not fire that spared them from the furnace. Fire they walked through, with Him in it.
Starting back at one…
Every time I outsourced my peace to a position or a location, I started back at square one.
I can keep screaming in parking lots demanding to know why God won’t release me from this season, or I can accept a hard truth: I am only ever going to be a child who needs help.
That’s not a failure. “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:3). “But I have calmed and quieted myself, I am like a weaned child with its mother; like a weaned child I am content” (Psalm 131:2). I am only ever going to need guidance, concern, provision, love, attention, no matter what the world tells me self-sufficiency should look like. I will keep being placed in situations that remind me I can’t do this alone. Unless God brings it to me or shows it to me, I will lose my way.
My peace was never in my house.
Never in my job, my car, my child, or in how I was or wasn’t raised. My peace is in Him, and Him alone. “You will keep in perfect peace those whose minds are steadfast, because they trust in you” (Isaiah 26:3).
So I’m going to do the thing I have always been most afraid of: surrender.
“Be still, and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10). I’m going to let what needs to fall away actually fall away, let the smoke and the embers do their work, not because I’m giving up, but because I’m finally giving in to the reality that God is with me in the fire, not waiting for me on the other side of it.
There is a real part of me that’s afraid of how long this will take. But that fear is smaller than my fear of another twenty years and twenty addresses spent running from the process.
Another part of me understands that this season was never just about provision. It was about revelation. God could have restored my circumstances overnight. Instead, He chose to teach me something I couldn’t have learned any other way: that grace is not God’s backup plan when my efforts fail. Grace is how He has always carried me. It is the vehicle. Grace has carried me this far, and it will carry me the rest of the way.
I’m letting God finish His work in me.
Which means I’m not just meeting one version of myself. I’m meeting two. There’s the version of me still in the fire, learning to stay instead of run. And there’s the version of me on the other side of it, whoever she turns out to be. “Being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus” (Philippians 1:6).
I’m in no rush to meet her, the version of me on the other side. Right now I want to get comfortable with the version of me still in the fire.
Because the process is the process, and it takes as long as it takes.
