I’m Grateful for Instability

By Kirsten Nicole

February 2, 2026

Two years seven months and fourteen days ago, I wrote a blog post about an identity crisis.

My identity crisis to be exact, which happened to be the moment the Lord asked me to lay the idol of my writing down at his feet so that He could pick it up and redeem it into something wholly devoted to Him.

At the time, I was reluctant to release the gift He’d given me in the first place, afraid that giving it to him would mean I’d resent the uppity, overly spiritual writing that I would turn out like boring monotonous sludge. I realized that my identity had been placed in the writing achievements I had accomplished and the ones I wanted to accomplish, not in Christ.

So, of course He would come after my writing, chiseling away another part of my identity that wasn’t found in Him.

 In reality, when He finally pried my fingers free of “my” writing and made it “His” writing, He blessed me with a love and joy in the craft that I hadn’t experienced in years. The blessing followed the obedience, even though the obedience had to be coaxed out of me. To put it mildly.

It’s been a long journey and it wasn’t an overnight shift. I still love an entrancing story. I still love getting lost in plotting and imagining. Neither of which are bad things! My writing does look different than I ever anticipated, and I’m so grateful. 

However, I think the Lord was beginning a much longer sanctification work in my life. One that involved tearing down the very things my life was built on in order to carry me to a foundation in Him instead. This time, it wasn’t really about the things I’d built my identity on, but rather the “constants” in my life that created my sense of stability and which I took for granted: my family, my home, my dreams, my sense of unchanging “normal.” 

The Lord has been so gracious to me in this season of intense and huge change, and a few months ago, I tallied up just how much change had happened in my life this year. It’s been a lot. As I was crying out to God and to patient family members about the amount of destabilization that happened in 2025, things I had built my life on and around…I realized just how shaken I had been by all of it. I don’t like change. Change is hard. For me, change can be hard even when the change is positive. 

This instability in my year left me feeling very frustrated with God and honestly, distant. I was angry that He’d shaken my otherwise compacted and sturdy foundation.

Except, it wasn’t sturdy. All it had taken was a little bit of water at a time, and my sense of surety crumbled around me. 

It was gradual. It was little clumps of sand here and there, but that’s all it was. Sand. And I was left to imagine what it would have been like if the Lord had let an entire wave hit my little foundation I’d built, one I had so carefully crafted to look like a strong boulder amidst all the pebbles and seashells on the beach. “I’m on the Rock. My foundation is the Rock.” I’d say. Even as bits of sand slipped away with the tide. 

Imagine if the Lord had allowed the entire thing to crumble all at once. But no. He was gracious. Yet again. In ways that I certainly do not deserve and never could have asked for. 

And as I was left crying and clinging to the rubble of my fast collapsing house, I looked up, and there He was, patiently waiting to pick me up off the rubble pile of all my achievements and accomplishments and set me higher on the Rock, where I could see the perspective of how insignificant my little sand castle really was on the vast beach, and what a beautiful view there was from the sturdiness of His shelter.

Here I could rest. I didn’t have to hold anything together or up. I didn’t need to hold myself together or up. It was all Him. And in crafting me to be more like Him, He used the instability of the year to fix my foundation. It’s been painful and scary. It’s involved tears. And being on the Rock doesn’t mean the waves will never crash against it. But it does mean I will never be dragged out to sea. A storm will never cause the Rock to collapse. My identity isn’t in my sandcastle. My identity is in my always faithful, always stable Savior and Creator.