God is disruptive.

Have you ever noticed that? Straight up disruptive. He's won't just leave things the same. No matter how perfectly situated I get my life, no matter how perfectly I've trained my ducks to swim in that row, He inevitably does a cannon ball into the pond. Even better, sometimes He's more sneaky. It's not a big event that throws everything off. Sometimes its small, subtle changes where at first I don't notice, and then suddenly one day I'm ugly crying into a tub of ice cream wondering how things got to where they are. Its uncomfortable. Its messes up my makeup. And its painful.

Why does God do this?

Why does He seemingly bless us with so much, only to pluck it away?

I used to think that it was God's way of punishing me. That was the only way that it made sense. He messed with my relationships, my hobbies, my church, my job. What once felt like a very full life, suddenly felt very empty. And it only made sense that it must be my fault.

But then just as suddenly, or just as subtly, I woke up to a life that was filling up again.

It didn't look the same. God didn't put anything back where I had it. Instead He had rearranged it in a way that I could have never pictured. And it was beautiful. Needs that I didn't even know that I had were now fulfilled, and joys that I had never experienced were felt. The emptiness of the transition finally made sense.

God wasn't throwing out my blessings, he was making room for new ones.

That's the beauty of God's disruption. In the moments where we've become deaf from our screaming and blind from our tears, He's working. To us He's dismantling everything we had that was great, but to Him he's making space for something greater. He simultaneously comforts our hurt, while building us something new, something that wouldn't have been possible had he left everything the same. And that, my friends, brings hope and purpose to this seemingly empty chaos.

Now don't get me wrong. Every time that I feel that God is pulling me away from something, my knuckles turn white, my cheeks turn red and I channel my inner toddler. I don't want to let it go. Sometimes He'll take it away and I'll try to go back, just to be denied. It's painful every time. The future becomes unclear. It seems that the plans have been tossed.

But despite the struggle, I've learned that the outcome is always the same.

God comes through.

His beautiful disruption results in overflowing blessings.

Now when it all seems to be falling apart, when I'm angry, grieving or confused about where all of this is going, there's a new emotion in the mix: excitement. An expectant anticipation. Something is coming. And I can't wait to find out what it is.