Five years in a foreign land, wandering my Egypt, leaning in to the still small voice wherever it might be found. Peace is apart from striving. Peace is found in the total surrender, the total abandonment of one’s will, the release of all pain and human understanding; it is the undoing.

And you will seek Me and find Me, when you search for Me with all your heart. - Jeremiah 29:13

How can one search for God when their heart is full of the desire for so much else? Or when their heart is simply full; full of anything and everything but the raw simplicity of surrender. Surrender is the opposite of striving.

There is no striving in His love. There is no striving with God, in God, or for God. Striving is only found when apart from God. When I think of striving in my mind I see someone pushing with all their might against a steel skyscraper, willing it to move from their will and brute strength alone. It is a fools errand.

With God, departed from striving and resting in surrender, we simply speak through faith to the skyscraper and it moves from its foundation. I hear some telling others to do more, claim more, “seek the more of God”, never be satisfied with the place in life that you are in, twisting scriptures to fit the narrative of their own restless hearts.

Yet, God doesn’t ask us to seek the “more” of Him, He asks us to seek Him. He is all in all. He is I am that I am. He is summation, completion, fullness. Wisdom says that He alone is satisfaction. We are taught to rest. We are taught to be content when abased and when abounding. To trust.

In Egypt my heart has been emptied of all that it was striving over. Life has become so simple, so clear. There is no higher calling than to love God and love those around you as you love yourself. In this season, those around me have become fewer and fewer as I have trusted God with my future in the purest way I’ve ever known. I have chosen to die to the need for human love or acceptance. I have died to appearances. I have released my need to be important, to do, to accomplish, to prove myself, to even get justice where it’s deserved, to be understood. Egypt has been emptying, the surrendering, the dying.

From this place peace that long felt evasive has returned and is returning. To serve and love one’s husband, to build one’s home, to create a legacy; this simple existence has the keys to life that all the striving in the world could never create. It is the gospel. To me there is no higher calling than to love God and love one’s family. My immediate family may be small in number but the responsibility to love them as I love myself is weighty. I am ever more convinced that the more I get this right, the more rightly I will be able to navigate the rest of who and what life brings.

I have also discovered that before becoming a wife and before growing our family further inside of marriage, I truly had no idea how holy, how remarkable, and how important building and loving my family would be. I cringe at the grossly ignorant opinions and broken beliefs I had of this sacred space. When you’re on the outside looking in, you truly have no idea what you’re talking about when it comes to marriage and family. You speak from speculation and jealousy, but experience is the true teacher. God chose to place Himself inside of family and He unlocks so many secrets, graces, and deep truths from this place when we choose to receive it for ourselves.

Egypt gave me marriage, it gave me the holy path of wife, it gave me a soul healing husband and life partner, it gave me motherhood, it gave me home. While I sense that it isn’t God’s desire that I live the fullness of life out in my Egypt, I know that it has served the purpose for which I was sent to it and that it ultimately gave more than it took. The confusion of wandering and the pain of divorcing from striving were no easy feats to trust God through, but I praise Him that He counted me worthy of such a pruning and has been generous to give me what I never knew I needed.

So, dear reader, wherever you find yourself in life; whether it be single, married, wandering an Egypt, walking in the fullness of your calling in God’s presence, or somewhere in between, I pray that you would seek Him with a heart that you allow to be emptied. That you would reject the human need to strive and embrace the satisfaction of surrender. When you find Him in that dying place, He is able to rewrite your story and straighten the crooked path you’ve followed into a completely new life.

It is in the embracing of a life built by God rather than your own hands that you see how faithful He really is and how powerful prayers of “not my will but Yours be done” actually can be when you mean them. And if you are richly blessed to have a family of your own, I pray that you would sit with God and search Him as you learn what it means to love them, to serve them, and to know them. There is no striving.

-Rachel