4 Questions to Ask Yourself When You Feel Restless but Want to Trust in God

Ruth Chou Simons Author
Updated Apr 17, 2024

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I don’t know about you, but when I come home from a long day, the first thing I do is drop my bags at the door, take off my shoes, and change into comfortable clothes. I remove everything that’s weighed me down all day because I’m home and ready to rest.

It’s not resting if I’m also scheming, manipulating, or strategizing a way to get something I want. That’s not resting. Resting in God means choosing to lay down our self-reliant ways of accessing more. God wants us to rely fully on him and his grace and, therefore, be at rest.

What I really need during my most restless seasons, and what I continue to need day by day, is to see my current circumstances the way God does. I needed to align my perspective with his and to call on him now, to trust him now, to walk with him now, to obey him now.

This might mean you and I need to stop looking for a remedy for our restlessness and press into it instead.

Okay, but how?

Simply put, I think it starts with being honest about why we’re restless, naming what we think we don’t have, and talking to the Lord about those not yets in our lives. We can’t do the work in our own hearts or with God if we’re not honest about what we’re really struggling with or what we think is missing in our lives. Worldly counsel might suggest that we name what we want as a way to manifest and achieve goals for ourselves, but what I’m proposing is completely different.

We’re not naming the source of our restless longings to will into being what we think we deserve. Instead, we’re naming the source of our restless longings in order to see them through the lens of God’s story of redemption—through gospel glasses, if you will. Only through this lens will we find the true remedy for our discontent and longing for what’s unfulfilled, not yet, or not enough.

Let me offer you a simple rubric for self-assessment:

What circumstance is causing my restlessness?
What underlying identity or self-worth issues am I struggling with?
According to God’s Word and wisdom, is the remedy for what I need found in myself or in him? In my efforts or in God’s work?
How can I stop scrambling and start resting right where I am?

Here’s an example of an honest confession of restlessness from my early motherhood days:

God, I’m restless for more than the thankless job of changing diapers, cleaning the house, and breaking up toddler fights every day. I want to be appreciated for what I’m good at, and I don’t feel good at this mundane and tedious work! I have gifts that I’m not getting to use, and I don’t think I’ll feel fulfilled until I do.

And here’s the way I’d assess my feelings as they arise:

What circumstance is causing my restlessness? The life circumstance causing my restlessness is the weariness and mundane everydayness of these little years. I feel like I have no life of my own.
What underlying identity or self-worth issues am I struggling with? I’m believing that my value comes from a paycheck or approval from others.
According to God’s Word and wisdom, is the remedy for what I need found in myself or in him? In my efforts or in God’s work? My worth and value come from what God says about me, not from what I do for him. My identity is in him when I’ve been saved by grace through faith. That means my life is not my own. He created me (as a masterpiece!), and he has a purpose for my life—that I might walk in the grace that saved me. My approval will never come from what others think of me but from what God says about me.
How can I stop scrambling and start resting right where I am? I can be on the lookout for how God will use all the gifts he’s given me, but I can trust that what I’ve been given to do today is also valuable and purposeful. The value assigned to how I use my giftings is not dependent on paychecks or approval, so I can choose to use them now, even in my current context as a mom to young children, right where I am.

This little exercise in preaching and applying the truth to myself changed my life and carried me through the most restless seasons. It exposed the ways in which some of my restless thoughts were idolatrous and a form of worshiping my own dreams and aspirations instead of the God who created me with the giftings I desired to use. But it also helped me to process what I was longing for, and when I chose to put my trust in him again, I learned to be steadfast in my identity in Christ while simultaneously using my giftings in ways I wouldn’t have planned for myself.

Remember: God wants your heart more than he wants your dreams to come true.

If our hearts are what God is truly after, then here’s the paradigm shift that will transform our restlessness right now: feeling restless and unsatisfied is exactly where we need to be in order for God to shape us and take us where he wants us to go.

Friend, restlessness is not a puzzle for us to solve on our own; it’s an invitation from God to find answers in him, to press in and discover who he is and why we can rest in him. It’s all about what he’s doing when you can’t tell that anything extraordinary is happening at all. If you don’t yet have eyes to see it, don’t fret. He’s inviting us to step in just a little closer to him each time.

Photo Credit: Thomas Nelson Publishing, used with permission.

Ruth Chou Simons is a Wall Street Journal bestselling and award-winning author of several books and Bible studies, including Now and Not Yet, GraceLaced, Beholding and Becoming, When Strivings Cease, and TruthFilled. She is an artist, entrepreneur, podcaster, and speaker, using each of these platforms to sow the Word of God into people’s hearts. Through social media, and her online shoppe at GraceLaced.com, Simons shares her journey of God’s grace intersecting daily life with word and art. Ruth and her husband, Troy, are grateful parents to six boys—their greatest adventure.