on quitting and learning to leap before i look.

All throughout the Bible, we find stories of people who get to leap before they look. We read the narratives of people who are called beyond the realm of their comfort zones -- people who are given new names that are entirely contradictory to the identities they have always known. The weak are commissioned to go to war, to defeat giants. The barren and the virgin are called forth to bear new life. The Lord tells people to move without maps.

My husband and I signed our names to resignation letters a couple weeks ago, and I have to be honest, it is one of the scariest things I have ever done. Not just the resigning part, which will officially take effect in eleven short days, but my waking thoughts on the morning after, and the morning after that. Our lives are about to take a drastic turn. And drastic turns are not for the faint of heart. They require strength, but even more than that, they require vulnerability -- something that I can only ever ask of myself in easily measured doses. So it wouldn't be too difficult to deduce that sometimes I take issue with an immeasurable God who asks us to do seemingly crazy and often even impossible things. There are days when it seems like nothing about this faith is easy -- days when I have to try even harder to remember Brene Brown's revelation that if you can measure it, it probably isn't all that important. And in all my years of studying the Bible, I've never come across anyone who was called to easy.

To be fair, our destination isn't totally unknown: we are moving to South Carolina, to a town all of forty minutes from where we live right now in Georgia. But we don't have a house there yet, and I will be without a job. A couple weeks ago, Craig got a phone call, and within a matter of days, had been offered a job. His dream job. The job that he would talk about when we lay awake at night and talked about where we wanted to be in ten years. Of course, I cried, because that is what I do. And I said that we would be crazy not to walk through this door that had so obviously been opened by the Lord. And so we wrote our letters of resignation and put in our notices, bound for a place that had not been entirely revealed. We were all geared up to take the leap of faith. And we still are.

There's something different about this leap, though (granted, at twenty-four, I don't have a very extensive history when it comes to leaping). Surely, there have been days when my heart has nearly beat out of my chest with the anxiety of it all. Where will we live, what kind of job will I be able to find, how long do we have to change our drivers licenses, what about health insurance?  I am learning to let go of my perceptions of security, learning to let the Lord go before me. 

In Deuteronomy 31, the Lord promises his people that he will go before them. It is a truth I have not heavily relied on. Rather, I charge ahead with my own plans and my own schedule and priorities because who in their right mind would actually trust their entire future to a God who delights in leaping without looking? Sure, I've claimed the yes, claimed the surrender, but all these years I've been living the no and the striving and the hustle. I say that it is because I want to be prepared -- I want to have the nice house, the steady and rewarding job, the fruitful marriage. But the truth is, the striving and the hustle are fueled by fear. Fear of letting people down, and people letting me down. Fear of letting God down, and God letting me down.

I inhale deep as I stare at the words. Afraid that God will let me down. Afraid that at some point, he'll fall asleep on the job and I'll leap head first into a black hole of pain and grief and loss. Afraid of the total insanity of it all. I think God is probably nodding along as I type, as if to say yeah, girl, you're kind of a work in progress. And I've never been comfortable with being undone.

But lately, that is what I find myself asking for. Lord, undo me. 

Because this undoing of self is how all of his stories begin. And I want my story to become his.