The other day, I was having one of those random conversations that somehow ends up becoming one of the deepest you’ve had in a while. It started with a simple question: “What’s something you battle daily when it comes to sin?” I didn’t think much of it at first. But as I started typing my response, I realized I wasn’t just answering someone else—I was answering myself.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized that underneath every habit I wanted to change, every temptation I kept returning to, and every way I tried to escape my own life, there was one thing quietly holding all of it together: fear. Not the kind of fear that makes your heart race, but the quieter kind. The kind that disguises itself as control. The kind that convinces you if you can just hold everything together, you’ll never be disappointed. If you stay distracted, you’ll never have to sit with yourself. If you keep reaching for temporary comfort, you’ll never have to face the ache underneath it.
For a long time, I thought my greatest struggle was temptation. Now I think it’s surrender. Surrender requires trust, and trust requires vulnerability. That’s the part no one really talks about. We pray for peace, for healing, for freedom, but when they begin to show up, they ask something of us. They ask us to loosen our grip. They ask us to stop performing, stop controlling, stop anticipating the next thing that might go wrong. They ask us to simply receive what’s in front of us.
I spent years praying for peace. Then, when peace finally started showing up in my life, I realized something that caught me completely off guard—I didn’t know what to do with it. Even peace and full surrender felt too vulnerable for me to hold at times. I found myself drifting back toward old habits, old patterns, old ways of thinking. Not because I wanted chaos, but because I understood it. It was familiar.
There’s a quote that says, “You’re so afraid of an unfamiliar heaven because you’re so familiar with hell.” I think that’s one of the truest things I’ve ever read.
Not because anyone wants suffering, but because suffering can become predictable. If you’ve spent enough time living in survival mode, your nervous system eventually learns survival. Chaos becomes normal. Stress starts feeling productive. Busyness becomes your identity. Escaping becomes routine. Eventually, peace starts feeling suspicious. You almost wait for something to go wrong because that’s what you’re used to.
Maybe that’s why we sabotage ourselves. Not because we enjoy pain, but because pain is familiar. If you’ve always expected relationships to end, consistency can feel boring. If you’ve always criticized your body, self-acceptance can feel dishonest. If you’ve always distracted yourself, stillness can feel unbearable. If you’ve spent years carrying everything on your own, trusting God can feel terrifying—not because He’s untrustworthy, but because dependence is unfamiliar.
I wonder if we spend so much of our lives asking God to change our circumstances that we forget He’s also trying to change our capacity to receive them. Maybe the life we’ve been praying for has been knocking at the door for years, but we’re more fluent in survival than we are in peace.
Lately, I’ve been thinking that maybe this is what growth really is. Not becoming someone completely different, but learning to stop returning to the versions of ourselves that only knew how to survive. There’s a grief in that. Some of our worst habits once protected us. Some of our walls were built for a reason. Some of the versions of ourselves we’re trying so hard to outgrow carried us through seasons we never thought we’d survive. We don’t have to resent those versions of ourselves. We can thank them. They got us here. But they were never meant to lead us forever.
Maybe that’s what healing asks of us. Not to erase our past or pretend we were never hurt, but to stop asking old survival strategies to lead us into a future they were never designed for.
I used to write about Narnia a lot. Not because I wanted to escape into fantasy, but because it represented a longing. I thought I was searching for another world, another version of myself, another life where everything finally made sense. Looking back, I don’t think I was searching for Narnia at all. I think I was searching for an unfamiliar heaven.
Not perfection. Not a life without hardship. Just a life built on things I’d never fully learned to trust—presence instead of distraction, faith instead of fear, community instead of isolation, intention instead of impulse. A life where I don’t constantly feel the need to outrun myself.
Maybe heaven isn’t just a place we arrive at one day. Maybe, in small ways, it’s every moment we choose trust over control. Presence over escape. Faith over fear. Maybe heaven feels unfamiliar because we’ve spent so long adapting to places we were never meant to stay.
And maybe healing is simply learning to feel at home in the peace we’ve been praying for all along.
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