Is Isolation Sapping Your Strength?
Isolation can feel so promising sometimes: the comfort of no one watching, analyzing or putting their two cents in. No one’s there to see you mess up. It’s quiet and easy. Sure, you may feel lonely, but you never really have to change.
Change is hard. When you’re alone you don’t really need it, do you? And when you’re doing life with people, you often change as a way to perform, anyway. To please them. To feel affirmed and get attention. To get them off your back. It’s a whole muddled mess, so why bother?
We bother because, well, Jesus tells us to, and if we aren’t trying to do the things that Jesus tells us to do, then we aren’t really following Him, now are we? When we change we give to others a truer version of ourselves. And not just that, we more fully represent the one who changes us. When we allow God to peel back the layers of ourselves, to remove the fig leaves, we are reborn a cleaner, truer self, and it is from that self that we give the Lord the most glory.
In the Coach & Joe podcast, Armando Ramos shares how isolation wasn’t good for him or his family. God called them out of it and into community, a place to plant themselves. In the planting, they are stretched and changed. Their fig leaves are coming off, and deep-needed change is happening—change that isn’t performance, but instead, is fueled by love.
Sure, it’s “easier” to never change, to stay hidden behind all those leaves, but why would you? Why would you settle for that when your King is calling you higher? Take a listen to Coach & Joe, and follow Armando out of isolation and into challenge and change. You won’t regret it.
Listen to the podcast episode here.
