Quicksands of life

I remember a year ago as I was sleeping in a stranger's bed and completely lost as to where my life was going. I know that it is very easy to get back into that same place..the question of where my life is heading. That's where it's at. Where am I going? What am I doing here? Why am I here? Am I the only  one that thinks these things?

Ty and I have gone through a lot in the last year, but we still feel like we are stuck in quicksand. Not going anywhere not doing anything. Just living....

That was never what we wanted for our lives. We have wanted to move forward and live our dreams. But this quicksand of bills, house payments, car payments, and life just kinda get in the way. Where are our dreams now? Have we lost them.

Living your dream is not easy...especially when you lose sight of them.

There are so many purposes for us to be where we are at, but we are still confused about those exact purposes. For the last year we have focused on our careers, and pulled back from a lot of the things we once knew. We have made friends but still isolate ourselves a lot (even when we don't really want to). Sometimes I wonder if we are just living too much in the past? Are we hoping for our friends and family from back home to come into Labrador City? Are we hoping for the same type of church? For the same type of environment  Because if we are, we are going to get discouraged, because bottom line is things are different here, and they always will be. We have a different life, and different friends, and different careers. Not that any of this is bad, but sometimes it's hard to not want to step back and go back into the "comfortable". Into the place that we knew, into the careers we knew, into the life we knew. But is that what living dreams are about?

It's kind of like our spiritual lives. People for so long live in the comfort of their spiritual lives and don't move. They don't reach out to all the possibilities that God could have before them. We get stuck in the past, so when things change in the future, we get angry. We get angry with God mostly. God tries to move us to new things by presenting new challenges in our lives but we resist it because we don't want to leave our comfort zone. Those challenges sometimes suck. They bring us to crossroads where we have to decide things and we seek out guidance, but feel like we are all alone and God is not answering our call. So then we stay where we are. We don't move anywhere, because what's the point. If we move from this place, there could be new challenges around that corner, and there could be breakdowns and meltdowns. We could feel lost...so in order to avoid all those troubled thoughts and fears, we stay put...hoping that the storm will pass us by, and we will not be forced to "move" from our quicksand.

So here we are...in a place where everything continues to constantly change. Where there is constant learning and constant challenging, but what is my response??...well right now I want to go back to where it was comfortable. A time when I didn't have to face challenging questions in my life. Where I didn't have to ask myself or God "is this all there is?" or "what else can I do?" or "where do I go from here?". It's the crossroad.....it's the place that we all try to avoid at one time or another. We don't want to go down either road so we just stand still..and maybe eventually someone else will make the choice for us, or we will just get stuck deeper in that quicksand and not be able to go anywhere.

But what happens when you eventually want to move out of that quicksand? How do you finally get unstuck? You still don't know if you want to move to the right or the left, but you know you want out. It's the feeling that your not moving forward despite wanting to. You just have no idea where to go from here. You are just stuck in the "comfortable"...usually all alone to make up your own mind, and to figure out for yourself how to get out. You can call on God, but the only answer you get from him is that "you can choose either road, and I will still love you. It doesn't matter what road you take as long as you are following after me". God just wants us to keep chasing him. And perhaps that's how we get unstuck from our quicksand, is that we keep chasing him? That we never give up and look back no matter what road we decide to take. He's on both roads. He's there cheering us on through the race despite how much we may be unhappy with our own choices. Eventually he will give us another crossroad, and we may get stuck again, but we can find hope that we will always be able to get unstuck

I don't want to remain in a comfort zone of life, or spiritual life. Therefore I can't stop walking. I have to keep moving forward no matter what the crossroad might bring. I have to keep following "the light". Just keep moving. Just keep going forward, and stop looking behind me..no matter how comfortable it might seem.

So are you looking forward or ahead? Have you gotten stuck and want to become unstuck? How do you become unstuck? It's the challenge each of us faces. So what do we do about it?