Here is one of the defining paradoxes of modern life.
We have more control over our circumstances than any generation before us. We can curate our environment, manage our reputation, optimise our health, insure against almost every conceivable risk, and monitor our children’s location from a device in our pocket. We have more tools for managing our world than anyone in human history ever possessed.
And we are more anxious than any generation on record.
Those two facts are not in spite of each other. They are because of each other. The more we build our security on what we can control, the more we have to lose — and the more terrifying the thought of losing it becomes. The pursuit of control is not the path to security. It is, in the end, its own kind of prison.
Jesus knew this. And he had something disruptive to say about it.
Look Again
The crowds following Jesus in Matthew 6 were not wealthy people with complicated portfolios. They were ordinary people living genuinely precarious lives — subsistence farmers, day labourers, fishermen. They knew what it meant to worry about food and clothing. And Jesus said this:
“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?” — Matthew 6:25–26
Notice what Jesus does not say. He does not say: nothing bad will happen to you. He does not promise the absence of difficulty or the guarantee of comfort. What he does is redirect the gaze. Look at the birds. Look at the lilies. Before you look at your circumstances, look at your Father.
The disruption of security is not the removal of uncertainty. It is the reorientation of trust.
“But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.” (Matthew 6:33) The issue is not what you have or don’t have. The issue is what you are seeking — and whether the God you claim to trust is actually the foundation of your security or merely an addition to it.
The Illusion We’re Protecting
The problem with control-based security is not just that it fails us when circumstances shift — though it does, always, eventually. The deeper problem is what it costs us while it appears to be working.
To maintain the illusion of control, we grip tightly. We refuse to be vulnerable. We manage outcomes rather than living openly. We plan obsessively for every contingency rather than holding our plans with open hands. And in doing so, we cut ourselves off from the very things that make life rich: genuine risk, genuine love, genuine trust, genuine faith.
Nassim Taleb, in Antifragile, makes a distinction that is profoundly useful here.1 Some things are fragile — they break under pressure. Some things are merely resilient — they absorb pressure and recover. But some things are antifragile — they actually gain from disorder, uncertainty, and stress. They are made stronger by the very things that would destroy something fragile.
The security that Jesus offers is not fragile. It does not depend on circumstances remaining stable. Nor is it merely resilient — bouncing back after hardship. It is antifragile: a trust in God that can be deepened by adversity, because its foundation is not in what happens around us but in the unchanging character of the One who holds us.
The writer to the Hebrews anchors this:
“Keep your lives free from the love of money and be content with what you have, because God has said, ‘Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.’ So we say with confidence, ‘The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid.'” — Hebrews 13:5–6
The ground of Christian security is a promise, not a circumstance. And a promise made by the God who raised Jesus from the dead is not subject to market conditions.
God Uses Everything
There is a distinction worth pausing over — one that goes to the heart of what it means to trust God with security.
There are things God sends. And there are things God doesn’t send — suffering He did not design, circumstances born of human failure or evil or simple randomness — that He nonetheless uses.
This is not a trivial theological point. It is the point on which genuine trust is actually tested. It is easy to trust God when life is going well and you can trace his hand in the blessings. The harder, deeper question is: Can I trust God in what I cannot explain? Can I find him in the things he did not ordain?
Joseph had every reason to answer no. Betrayed by his brothers, sold into slavery, falsely accused, forgotten in prison — none of this was God’s intention in any direct sense. And yet Joseph, looking back across the wreckage of a decade, said to the very brothers who had destroyed his early life: “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good.” (Genesis 50:20)
God used this. Nothing was wasted. Not even the worst of it.
Paul, writing from a Roman prison — not exactly a place of comfort or control — said: “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.” (Romans 8:28) All things is a sweeping claim. It does not mean all things are good. It means all things are workable for God — that there is nothing in your life, however broken or painful or confusing, that is outside his redemptive reach.
The cross is the ultimate evidence. The worst thing that has ever happened — the murder of the Son of God — became the means of the world’s salvation. God did not send the cruelty of Calvary. But he used every moment of it.
This is the foundation of genuine security: not that life will make sense as it unfolds, but that nothing is outside the purposes of a God who is present in every moment — including the moments that feel most abandoned.
The Practice of Attentiveness
This is where the ancient Christian practice of the Examen becomes profoundly practical.
Developed by St Ignatius of Loyola in the sixteenth century, the Examen is a daily prayer of review.2 At its heart is a single conviction: God is findable in everything. Not just in the spiritual highlights, the answered prayers, and the moments of clarity — but in the ordinary, the difficult, the confusing, and the painful. The practice asks: Where was God today? Where did I notice his presence — and where did I miss it?
The Examen trains a particular kind of attentiveness. It forms the soul to look for God in all things, because Ignatius believed that God is at work in all things — including things we would not have chosen. Reviewed through the lens of the Examen, even a hard day becomes a place where God was active. Even a conversation that went wrong becomes a moment to ask: What was God doing there? What was he offering me?
This is not spiritual denial or toxic positivity. It is a hard-won theological conviction: that the God who holds the universe together does not take days off. He is present. He is working. And if we learn to look, we will find him — in the expected places and the unexpected ones.
John Mark Comer, reflecting on his own daily practice of the Examen, writes that it fundamentally shifted his relationship with anxiety — not by removing uncertainty, but by training his attention away from worst-case scenarios and toward the actual presence of God in the actual moments of his actual life.3
That is the disruption of security. Not a better set of circumstances. A different place to stand.
Three Postures
Release the grip
What are you controlling that you need to release? Somewhere in your life, almost certainly, there is a plan you are holding too tightly, a future you are trying to manage, a relationship you are trying to orchestrate. Jesus’ invitation is not to be passive or irresponsible. It is to seek first — to give the primary energy of your attention to God and his kingdom, trusting that the rest will find its right place.
Open hands are not weak hands. They are the hands that can receive.
Practice finding God in everything
Begin the Examen. Even a simple version: at the end of each day, spend five minutes asking two questions. Where did I feel most alive and connected to God today? And: Where did I feel most distant, most anxious, most resistant? Over time, this practice does something quiet and profound — it trains you to notice that God was present in both answers. The moments of distance are as much a part of his curriculum as the moments of closeness.
The soul that learns to find God in everything — including what it did not choose — is a soul that cannot easily be destabilised.
Anchor in the unchanging
Circumstances will shift. Plans will change. Things you did not expect will arrive, some of them unwelcome. The question is not whether that will happen. The question is what you are standing on when it does.
“Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.” This is the bedrock. Not a feeling. Not a season of spiritual warmth. A promise made by the God who keeps his word — the same yesterday, today, and for ever. (Hebrews 13:8)
Let the things that can be shaken be shaken. What remains is what was always worth standing on.
“Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.” — Matthew 6:34
Jesus is not dismissing your tomorrow. He is returning you to today — to the present moment where God actually lives and where trust is actually exercised. Not the hypothetical future where everything might go wrong. Today. This moment. Where God is already at work, already present, already using everything.
You were not made for the false security of control. You were made for the true security of a God who holds you — in what he sends and in what he doesn’t send, in what you understand and in what you cannot, all the way home.
Post 5 of 7 in the Disruption series. Next: the question of what your life is actually for — and the surprising freedom of having that answered for you. The Disruption of Purpose.
Footnotes
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (Allen Lane, 2012), pp. 3–18. ↩
- Ignatius of Loyola, Spiritual Exercises (c. 1548). For an accessible introduction to the Examen, see James Martin SJ, The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything (HarperOne, 2010), pp. 88–110. ↩
- John Mark Comer, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry: How to Stay Emotionally Healthy and Spiritually Alive in the Chaos of the Modern World (Hodder & Stoughton, 2019), pp. 144–148.
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Paul Benger 