The Awakening EP 1

Every spiritual transformation begins with an awakening.

In this episode, Bianca explores the first movement of The School of Holy Restlessness, the moment when God begins to open your eyes. What once felt normal no longer satisfies. What once fulfilled you begins to feel empty. And deep within, something starts calling you higher.

This awakening is not accidental. It is the work of the Holy Spirit drawing you into deeper truth, deeper awareness, and deeper relationship with God.

Through biblical insight and spiritual reflection, this episode unpacks what it means to be awakened, why it can feel uncomfortable, and how to respond when God begins to stir your heart.

If you’ve been feeling a shift, an unexplainable hunger, a disruption in your comfort, or a quiet pull toward something more, this is where it begins.

This is your awakening.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome back to Endorsed by Heaven. It's your girl, B Mills, and we're about to do this thing. Um, I'm really excited about season two. This has been something that God has been pressing on my heart. I actually wrote a paper about what season two is gonna be on, and I just want to share it with you all because I think we all need to know and we all need to hear it. And so it's called the School of Holy Restlessness. And everybody that's listening, you have officially been enrolled to the School of Holy Restlessness, and it's about how the Holy Spirit reorders our desires on the way to God. And to begin this episode, we're gonna go all the way back like fourth century back, and we're gonna examine the writings of this great theologian named Augustine of Hippo, right? And he wrote something called the Confessions, and we're gonna unpack this because uh this fourth century theologian figured out why we feel anxious about getting a promotion. Like that sounds kind of wild. You know, we get the thing that we want, we pray, we ask God, we get all of the things that we want, and yet we still have this unease about it. And I argue that Augustine actually provides a completely uh different paradigm about this exact feeling, right? So the mission of our deep dive today is to explore this concept that our deepest, most frustrating dissatisfactions aren't actually a failure on our part. Instead, they are a part of what I will call a divine pedagogy or a curriculum of grace. Now, a pedagogy is a simple method of teaching, and I'm suggesting that this restlessness isn't a symptom of doing something wrong, rather, it is a prolonged season of learning. It is a curriculum designed, right, to teach the human heart what it actually wants. Now, according to this framework, that persistent unease is actually revelatory. Right? And I would like to break that learning process down into distinct sequential movements, right? And there are going to be six movements, and this episode is going to be about the first one. So you gotta come back to get the rest of the movements, but today's movement is called the awakening now, the awakening or the gradual failure of satisfaction, right? Uh how this curriculum actually starts is you know, I think of a spiritual awakening. Um people normally want to say it's some dramatic lightning bolt crisis, a near-death experience or hitting rock bottom. But I don't really want to explain it like that. Right? I want to point out that it actually rarely starts with a dramatic crisis. It's very subtle before the soul actively seeks anything higher or transcendent. It experiences a quiet erosion of confidence in everyday things. It's like it's like having a slow leak in a tire, right? The things that used to work to make you happy, they just stop working as well. The pleasure is still there, the success continues to accumulate, but the soul itself feels untouched, right? It's an ache that isn't sharp enough to force you to change your life entirely, but it's persistent enough that you can't just ignore it. So, how does Augustine actually describe this feeling? Because from the way uh most like to frame it, it sounds incredibly modern, right? But in the confessions, Augustine uses this striking phrase to describe his own internal state before his conversion. He writes, I was dispersed in times whose order I did not know. Now, I know I just said that, and a lot of people were like, What? What are you saying? Right? Dispersed in times, like, sir, bring us back to the modern times. Now, that perfectly captures the modern feeling of being completely scattered, right? It's like, okay, if I can explain it for you, it's like having 15 tabs open in your brain all at once. You are everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Your attention is fragmented between your past regrets, your current stress, and your future anxieties, right? And to all y'all listening, you know this feeling. It's not even a theological feeling group. It's purely experimental. Like it's the exhaustion of just trying to hold your life together. And it's so easy to interpret that scattered, hollow feeling as evidence that you're entirely alone, or if you are spiritually inclined, that God is absent, right? Like you've been abandoned. But Augustine realizes later in his life that it was the exact opposite. Looking back on that fragmented time, he writes this incredible line: You were within me, but I was outside myself. Okay, wait. So it's not that we are broken or abandoned. We're just looking in the wrong direction. It means the restlessness isn't a symptom of the divine being distant. It's a symptom of the soul looking outward towards lesser goods. And those goods are failing to satisfy you because they were never designed to hold that much weight. Right? Does that make sense? Like the problem isn't that you've been left behind, it's that your desires have turned away from its true center. To put this in perspective for you, thinking about your own life, it's a profound reminder that grace doesn't always show up to soothe us right away. Sometimes it does the opposite. Sometimes grace mercifully unsettles us and makes us deeply uncomfortable so that we don't permanently settle for things that simply cannot sustain us. If getting that shiny new job title actually filled your soul completely, you would stop seeking anything greater. You're just plateau. Now that is the core of the awakening. As former satisfactions lose their power, you realize how fragile pleasure really is. Joy arrives quickly and departs just as fast. Augustine admits, right, that in this phase, he became a great problem to himself. Like he stood in this painful middle ground, restless, knowing what he had was insignificant, but not yet knowing what he actually wanted. So he was in this middle place. Like, I know, bro, what I have is just not, it's not it. But what do I actually want? I actually still don't know. Now, here's where it gets really interesting because once you realize that your usual go-to sources of satisfaction are failing you, you don't just magically stop wanting them. Which which then would bring us to the next movement. But like if you could dive into this awakening uh season of your life, if you're there, do you find yourself in a place where everything that you have achieved, everything that you've ever wanted, all the things that you thought would make you feel home, you still kind of feel empty. Have you felt present everywhere and yet nowhere at the same time? Psalm 42 says, My soul thirsts for God. Now, frame this not as a lack of faith, but as its highest activity. The psalmist here thirst is the proof of life, a diagnostic tool revealing that the soul is oriented towards the living God? Is your soul oriented towards the living God? Are you awakened? Do you feel restless in places? Is there an ache that is calling you to come home? Is the spirit unsettling you not to punish you, but to refuse to let you settle for what you what cannot sustain you? Is there dissatisfaction within you? Dissatisfaction that isn't a sign of distance from God, it's the sound of him knocking on the door of your false comforts. When the things that used to satisfy you no longer do, guess what? The spirit is awakening you to a deeper reality. Your longing is the compass of your soul, proving you are made for more than this world can offer. So, in this week, I want you to look and ask, am I awaken? Alright y'all, that's it for today. I'll be back next time for movement number two. I hope you guys are ready. Have a great time listening to this, and I know I may say a lot that may be confusing, but I want you to really, really listen. Take the time to listen, take the time to take notes, write it down, ask God, pray, and allow the Holy Spirit to do a work in you. Have a good time, guys.