What’s Been Shaken Loose in Your Life This Year?

The needles on my Christmas tree are falling rapidly now. If someone runs too closely to it, a handful will come off. If you bump it, hundreds pour down. I’m dreading the vacuuming job required after we carry it out the door. I doubt there will be many needles left on the branches...just a bare trunk to be tossed to the curb.

Life sometimes feels a bit like that. We’re shaken like a tree losing needles. Sometimes, the shaking has happened little by little as we grow tired or life just feels chaotic. Other times, we’re hit by horrific headlines, sickness, death, injustice, and division. Like needles on a dying tree, our tears fall hard and fast, leaving a mess to be cleaned up. Eventually, we’re left standing bare. If one more thing happens, we’re not sure we’ll even stay upright. We feel weary and raw, vulnerable and desperate.

But often we have to reach the point of desperation before we reach for God.

In Life Without Lack, Dallas Willard writes:

Desperate faith is all about trusting God when the shaking begins and everything crumbles around you. Through the prophet Haggai, God speaks of shaking “heaven and earth, the sea and dry land” (Hag. 2:6), and the writer of the book of Hebrews picked up the cataclysmic theme, explaining that this “indicates the removal of those things that are being shaken, as of things that are made, that the things which cannot be shaken may remain” (Heb. 12:27). What remains is the kingdom of God that cannot be moved...

Maybe we feel like a Christmas tree on December 26–the glimmer of lights gone, the branches exposed. Our sense of control, our plans, our goals, our views, even our beliefs...they’ve been shaken. But the process isn’t fruitless, because it reveals the things that cannot be shaken–and those are the things we need to hold most tightly.

I know my silly tree metaphor falls apart eventually. But the point is this: If you’re feeling shaken up, know that who God is, who he says you are, what he’s doing in the world, the kingdom he is establishing on earth as it is in heaven...those things can never be shaken. They do not change. They’re not going anywhere. So we can cling desperately to our God rather than try to rely on what is bound to fail and fall.

As Willard also wrote, “The faith of desperation—trusting faith—digs in, holds on, clings tight, and says, ‘I don’t care what’s going to happen, I am holding on to God!’”

That is not an easy prayer to pray, but it’s one that leads us to a place where we can say with the psalmist, “I have set the LORD always before me; because he is at my right hand, I shall not be shaken” (Psalm 16:8).

What’s been shaken loose in your life this year? What remains? What does living out the faith of desperation look like for you this week?

Whatever this past year brought, and whatever next year will bring, may we be people who hold on to our God. May we be people clinging tightly to him even as everything else is shaken loose.