Where Do You Go When the Safe Places Die?
On a May night in the summer of 1995, as my family ate dinner while glued to the television, a tweed-jacketed weatherman interrupted our regularly scheduled program to issue a tornado watch. However, a belligerent storm couldn’t divert our attention from Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, and we simply laughed at the weather watch. In South Carolina, where I grew up, a tornado was as likely as a snow-swamped blizzard. Moments later, exasperation filled our lungs as our Thursday night ritual was interrupted yet again, but this time our tweed-wearing friend shared two words with a look of urgency in his eyes: “Take shelter!”
Lights flickered, windows shattered, and a war-like bomb assaulted our eardrums as a tornado ripped into our house. We retreated into the basement while glass shard missiles pursued us. We waited. We listened. We considered. Was this basement, once designated as storage space for canned tomatoes, now destined to become a tomb?
Minutes that felt like hours passed. Finally, my parents ascended to assess the damage. I knew from the awe-filled terror in my mother’s voice that our lives had changed. Then, I heard my father scream, “Get back into the basement!”
Another tornado struck our home.
Hours later, we stood talking in our living room—long vacated by electricity and the reassuring presence of Dr. Quinn. Little did we know that our roof had also long abandoned our home. Hours of rainfall had filled the sheetrock ceiling. As gravity and water did what they do best, we found ourselves once again running toward the basement, this time with the ceiling crashing around us.
Once the dust settled, my beleaguered parents decided that my sister and I needed rest. As I lay on a mattress in that infernal basement, I watched rainwater flowing down the stairs, creating mud-marbled eddies on vinyl flooring. I listened to chainsaws and National Guard helicopters outside. Sleep-laden eyes beckoned me to escape this nightmare. Our home, which had once offered shelter and stability, had fallen apart, and we couldn’t imagine how to put it back together.
Where do you go when the safe places die?
No More Safe Places
I still remember how that night felt in my body—shortness of breath, tightness in my chest, and a racing heart. I don’t think about those events much anymore, but I guarantee you I still feel those same feelings whenever a ferocious storm knocks on my windows.
Maybe you can relate.
Everyone has a tornado experience. A moment when we realize life is not as safe as we first thought. After experiencing about a thousand traumatic moments that we call “life,” we typically develop some coping mechanisms to navigate this scary world.
Some become nervous wrecks, others confident go-getters. Yet we all are more fragile than we think. Comfortable living and controlled circumstances paint a veneer of stability, but the tornados of life strip our pretenses. Tornados destabilize us—such as an ever-shifting culture without a centralized foundation of shared values or mega-viruses that dishevel society and attack our health. Globalized threats of war, “us versus them” mentalities, and uncertainty about the future economy further disorient us. Antagonistic experiences that smell anything like past difficulties draw from deep-buried insecurities, and like the pop of a firecracker, we find ourselves reliving our trauma.
And what about the unrelenting pressure we put on ourselves to be high performers and always perfect? I haven’t even mentioned the dreaded dark night of the soul. Every person reaches a turning point when the ways we relate to God and others don’t seem to cut it anymore. What once brought joy and stability is lost. As life shakes us, we question our previously unquestioned foundations. Storms without and within unravel us as our world comes undone—hence the rise in anxiety, depression, sadness, anger, fear, disappointment, cynicism, overwhelm, and exhaustion. The places and people that we once called “home” prove to be unsuitable dwellings for our souls. Our problem is that we are looking for a home in all the wrong places. And as we try to hold on while tempests rock our world, we will inevitably suffer.
Getting What You Want Is Not Always What You Want
I get it because I’ve lived it. I dreamed of building a family, starting a church, and pastoring people through life’s difficulties. I didn’t envision multiple miscarriages, the death of my wife’s younger brother, and unexplained shortness of breath leading to a heart procedure. I never anticipated so much hurt—mine and others. Each death I experienced tore away another piece of my safe shelter. The serpent snuck into my idealized Eden of family, church, and pastoral identity, and he exposed my nakedness, shame, and fear. Previous methods of loving and living in relationship with God and others stopped working. The experience was confusing and disorienting. I doubted my grit to continue in ministry and questioned God’s grace to sustain me.
I got what I wanted—a family, a church, a ministry—yet with it came many unwanted destabilizers. Depression rose as I awoke to unattended sadness in my soul. Anxiety squeezed as I experienced panic attacks over the fear of losing more loved ones. Weariness settled as I worked harder and harder with less and less to show for it. Anger increased as I saw the destruction around me. Hope waned as the gales grew.
With sincere gratitude to my wife, close friends, a faithful spiritual director, and ultimately to Jesus who saves me daily (1 Cor. 15:1–2), I followed Jesus through death into new life. The journey became clear: I had to learn new ways to relate to God, myself, and others. A stable life doesn’t happen on its own. If anything, the world and the soul are prone to self-destruction. You won’t find stability without divine intervention and learning new ways of being. While I continue to walk this path (and some days, my anxieties and anger still get the best of me), I can say that this transformative journey from instability to stability in Jesus has made all the difference. And I’d love nothing more than to share what I’ve learned with you.
Moving from Instability to Stability
The Bible speaks to us with visceral imagery of a shaken world and shaky souls. Jesus also promises peace. But how do we find this stability? Again and again, the Bible gives us the same answer: take shelter in God!
God is our refuge, and we are secure when we hide in him (Ps. 46; 62; 91:1–2; Col. 3:1–4). St. Paul’s favorite description is that we are “in Christ.” The shift from instability to stability occurs in our hiddenness in Jesus. Jesus is the safe home we’ve always longed for; in him, we regain peace in a troubled world.
But many Christians are just as frazzled as non-Christians. Some even leave Christianity because their experience of internal instability doesn’t differ from their non-Christian friends. The Scriptures are clear that we possess “in Christ every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places” (Eph. 1:3). Yet, how often do we struggle to access those blessings? It’s the experience we lack.
Enter: The Art of Stability.
We must learn to experience our hiddenness in Christ (Col. 1:27; 3:3). By living a participatory life with Jesus, we find shelter for our souls. Tried and true methods abound through which we enjoy union with Christ, yet we also must cultivate the art of being present to Christ. In the same way that a person can inhabit a house without ever truly living in it, we can exist in a state of hiddenness in Christ without fully moving in. Mere existence in the home that is Christ is not enough. We need to hang pictures and infuse the walls with life and love.
But how do we accomplish this?
Click here to read the Table of Contents for The Art of Stability and endorsements from Chuck DeGroat, Jonathan D. Holmes, Scotty Smith, Trisha Taylor & Jim Herrington, Susan Porterfield Currie, and Ronnie Martin.