Unpack That Box

Once a month, I send an email to a list of people who signed up to receive it. I don’t always share the things I write in the emails on the blog, but this practice has been so helpful for me over the last week, and I wanted more of you to have access to it. So here it is….

Unpack That Box

I woke up yesterday morning with a full and heavy heart — so many things to pray about! So many friends going through hard things! So many friends going through good things. So many uncertainties in my own current season!

I sat on my couch trying to journal, but struggled to focus. I finally closed my eyes, held out my arms, and said, “Okay God...let’s take a look at what I’m carrying.”

I imagined myself holding a giant box (or two or three) and I began to name what was in each box and what each box represented — worry, fear, an event I’m hosting this week, a class I want to take, some writing goals I want to set.

I was concerned that I was picking up too many activities— that I was falling into the trap of doing too many things and not leaving enough space for my soul to breathe (as Emily P. Freeman likes to say). But as I unpacked each box and evaluated each package, I began to see that the heaviest items taking up the most space were not the activities themselves, but my feelings about the activities.  

The worry, the fear — those were the boxes that were distracting me from God. 

I wasn’t quite sure what to do about it at the time, so I just made an elaborately physical gesture of laying down the box before God and saying, “Hey God. Help me unpack this box.” I prayed that prayer and made that motion over and over again until I felt a release.

Hey God. Help me unpack this box.

Hey God. Help me unpack this box.

Hey God. Help me unpack this box.

Prayer is really a much more simple thing than we make it out to be. We feel worried, we feel scared, and we run to God asking him to make that fear and worry go away. What if, instead of trying to stuff or avoid and disappear those hard things, we saw them as an opportunity to engage with God — to come before him ask him to help us unpack that box.

I share all of that with you because sometimes we aren’t fully aware of the things we need to bring before God, and we need a creative way to engage with what’s going on inside of us. Once we’re able to engage with those things that are beneath the surface, we don’t necessarily need fancy prayers to pray about them. We just need a simple sentence to help us become aware of the God who's already there. 

Hey God, help me unpack this box.

God has not abandoned you in the hard things that you’re dealing with, he wants to meet you in them.

So what’s in your box? Will you bring those things before God today?

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