Lately I’ve felt the waters of my life being stirred pretty significantly. How can I tell, you may ask?

Well, the surest way is I’ve been a pretty big mess lately. From disillusionment with my career, to frustration with a few things maritally (unrelated to infidelity), to financial struggles, to a few health scares with Samantha as well as my daughter; there’s been challenge after challenge to wade through.

If you’re reading this blog, on this site, it’s pretty apparent the waters of your life have been stirred as well. Probably stirred in a way you’d like to never have them stirred again.

Many make the mistake of only thinking this is the waters of their marriage being stirred, and not their life. It’s revealed more apparently when couples come to Rick and he asks them, “What are you looking for?” Most reply “We want our marriage saved.” His responds many times with “I’m not sure about that, but if you want a better life, a transformed life, I’m quite certain we can help you with that.”

I hated that answer years ago. Most hate it just like me.

The fact is though, your life has been stirred. It takes a crisis of this magnitude to stir our lives as we resort to auto pilot more times than we realize. We love auto pilot. We’re control freaks and want safety, security, and predictability. But that’s not how we find change, and that’s not how our lives really matter.

I know some of you just want the chaos to stop. I know more of you just want your old life back. Fact is, it’s never coming back. The chaos may ensue, the pain may continue, your spouse will continue doing some of the things they are doing now, and it will push you to a point where you just don’t know how you’ll get through it.

It’s OK. It really is. It won’t always be like this. It won’t always feel like this. Though things seem to be spinning out of control, there is hope and there is a purpose, many purposes I bet, to the stirring.

Lean into the stirring friend. I’m going to. I started to write that “We have no choice but to lean into….” But that’s not true. We do have a choice. We can choose not to lean into it and just sit back and be frustrated, angry, resentful, scared and utterly unhappy at our life and dislike most people in our lives right now. I meet people like that all the time. I’m on some people’s lists of those they dislike right now. I’ve grown used to it.  

But we don’t have to be those people. We can lean into the stirring and trust.  We can embrace the stirring, as we embrace the stirrer.

Quite frankly, the stirring is by design. It’s to change us. Transform us is probably a better, more fitting word. The only way we are transformed, though, is by a metamorphosis which changes us from the inside out. I know many of you are hurting and in pain. I know some of you are feeling like things are completely out of control.

But the stirring is to reshape things, and reshape our spouse, and reshape us. It’s to shift things to where they ultimately need to be, even if right now, it seems like there is no plan at all. Or, it may seem like the plan you have is so far from reach, it produces a hopelessness and anger in you like never before.

Trying to control the stirring, will only exacerbate matters and prolong the frustration with the process of you coming to realize just how NOT in control of things (and your spouse, and maybe yourself) you are.

This stirring is to bring about healing and change.

Today is a day to trust God (the stirrer), trust the process, and stop trusting yourself.