I’m down to six hours before I have to be out of my apartment. A little over sixty days ago, God told me to move. To not renew my lease. I had hoped that in the sixty days between giving notice and moving out, God would provide some answers. Where am I going? Why am I moving? What is next?

God has provided some general clues and some general timelines. But He has not shown me where I will live. Everything is going into storage. I will be on the road for several weeks, waiting on an answer. But as I packed a suitcase full of clothes to put in storage, it struck me. Hard.

This is not about a place to live. This is about surrender.

I have spent the last eight years growing in my faith. I have experienced the pain of surrender and “death to self” multiple times. Each time it seems I surrender a bigger piece of the old me. Each time the mourning over the “death” of what I have surrendered grows more intense. And with each surrender, God replaces my old secular desires with His desires for my life.

Delight yourself in the Lord;
And He will give you the desires of your heart.

Along with each surrender comes the struggle of learning to live in a new way. From the trivial (the time my “love” for donuts just disappeared overnight) to the significant (squelching of my anxiety and depression). But this time God is asking me to surrender my intellect. To stop trying to figure things out and trust Him in everything. This move has been incredibly difficult because my mind will not process things as it used to.  I am stuck between the old secular me and the me that God is trying to create. And amid the ambiguity come attacks. Relentless whispers from Satan: you are wrong, you can’t do this, don’t move.

I am not opposed to living a new life. I have survived over six decades living the “old way”, it has not been the best of lives. I want what God is offering me.

But you did not learn Christ in this way, if indeed you have heard Him and have been taught in Him, just as truth is in Jesus, that, in reference to your former way of life, you are to rid yourselves of the old self, which is being corrupted in accordance with the lusts of deceit, and that you are to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, which in the likeness of God has been created in righteousness and holiness of the truth. – Ephesians 4:20-24

Just now it became very clear. I am too comfortable. I will not fully surrender while I am comfortable being the old me. For that reason, God is moving me out of a place to live. He is thrusting me into the unknown. I must trust Him more and grow in my faith. In the uncomfortable unknown of these next few weeks, I expect God is going to ask for more surrender. The rawness of emotion I have been dealing with is the building feeling of mourning over what parts of me have died off recently. And growing anticipation of what is about to die.

I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me. – Galatians 2:20

Are you seeking spiritual maturity? If so, what is the last thing you surrendered?

The photo attached to this post is me with my grandmother and King, her white German Shepard.