Growth is always disruptive. By that I mean any step away from unhelpful patterns, habits, and relationships; any step toward maturity, greater wholeness, and becoming more fully yourself…will disrupt your life somehow.

Why?

Because growth gums up the unconscious management systems we’ve all built to keep ourselves safe and our interests protected. It messes up the less-than-perfect ways we relate to certain people or situations.

It’s true that growth can turn darkness into light, confinement into freedom, and ashes into beauty. But it can also turn a comfortable lifestyle into a risky adventure. It can remove the much-loved blinders that kept us from seeing the harsh glare of reality.

Movement toward God’s best version of YOU is like a tree root pushing up through the sidewalk. The stronger the tree grows, the more it breaks up the smooth path you’re used to walking on.

But grow you must, no matter the cost.

So when life feels tougher to navigate because the familiar has become unfamiliar, because your old way of doing things doesn’t work anymore, or because the crutches you depended on no longer support the weight of your best self-taking-shape, hold on to this:

All the relational tension, the vocational uncertainty, the confusion, the loneliness, the desire to runaway and hide – it all might simply mean you’re growing. You’re getting stronger. And your new life is upending the status quo.