2026.06.28 | I Keep Praying for Stability. Maybe I Should Be Praying for Something Else.

I have a default prayer.

It's not one I planned. It's just the one that comes out when life feels uncertain. God, please stabilize this. Please make this clearer. Please let things settle down so I can get my footing.

Stability. Clarity. Settled. Those are the things I've been asking for most consistently over the last year or two.

Devin closed his sermon on Sunday with a challenge that made me sit up a little straighter.

He said: prayerfully embrace change this week. Surrender the idol of comfort and ask God to introduce change in your life.

He framed it around Jeremiah 29:13 - you will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. And he said seeking is an action verb. It involves movement. It involves not sitting where you are. It means chasing something, being in the race, not handing out water on the sideline.

I've been handing out water.

Not literally. But spiritually - I've been in a comfortable orbit around my faith without a lot of forward motion. I show up. I participate. I maintain. But I haven't been pursuing anything. I haven't been asking God to change me or move me or put me somewhere uncomfortable.

And Devin said something about Apollos leaving Ephesus that reframed how I've been thinking about change. The church invested in Apollos and then sent him to Achaia. From their perspective - he's gone. The thing they built together is over. But Paul writes later that he planted and Apollos watered and God gave the growth. The thing that looked like loss from inside Ephesus was actually multiplication from above it.

I've been treating stability like it's the goal. Like if things would just stop shifting, I'd be in a position to really grow.

But Acts 18 doesn't show Paul in one place finding his footing. It shows him moving from Corinth to Ephesus to Caesarea to Antioch to Galatia - strengthening churches everywhere he went, staying where God said stay and leaving when God said go. The movement wasn't the problem. The movement was the ministry.

Devin's challenge wasn't to go create chaos or manufacture transition. It was to stop asking God to keep things comfortable and start asking him what he wants to change. To surrender the idol of comfort - which is a strong phrase and I felt it - and open my hands to whatever comes next.

I don't know what that looks like for me specifically yet. But I know my default prayer has been the wrong one. Stability was never the destination. Pursuit was.

This week I'm changing the prayer.

You can watch the full message from Devin Hopper on our YouTube channel or through the Hope App.