The Story Isn't Finished Yet

This is where I am right now.

Not at the end of something. At the middle of several things simultaneously. That's where creative people almost always are if they're honest about it. A novel in progress. A blog finding its rhythm again after too long away. A speaking calendar taking shape. A brand that is still becoming what it's meant to be. A homeschool year about to begin. A life that is fuller and more complicated and more alive with possibility than I could have predicted when the long quiet season finally ended.

The story isn't finished. Not even close.

I think about this when I'm tempted to measure the present moment against some imagined finished version of things. You know, with the novel completed, the platform established, the work fully recognized, the life tidily resolved into something that makes obvious sense from the outside.

That imagined finished version is a fiction, and not the useful kind. Real stories don't resolve into tidy conclusions. They keep going. They open into the next thing.

What I've learned, slowly and with significant resistance, is the middle is where all the living actually happens. Not the beginning, where it brims with potential, and not the end, with its satisfying conclusion or retrospective clarity. But the middle. Complicated and unresolved and full of loose threads, and where the story is most alive.

I'm in the middle. You probably are too.

And we need to keep telling our story. Thank you for being here for this part of it.

Where are you in your story right now? Beginning, middle, or somewhere you can't quite name yet? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

When the Work Feels Like Worship

There are mornings when I sit down to write and I feel different.

Not every morning, mind you. I want to be honest about that. Most mornings the work is work. It requires effort and attention and the willingness to push through resistance, and it produces something useful if I'm fortunate. It also produces something that needs significant revision if I'm not. That's the ordinary version, and it's the one that shows up most often.

But occasionally something different happens. The resistance falls away. The words arrive with a clarity and an ease that seems to truly be going somewhere. The work stops feeling like something I'm making and starts feeling like something I'm participating in. Like something larger than the manuscript, larger than my own creative effort, moving through me rather than from me.

I don't know exactly what to call that experience, but I know what it feels like.

It feels like worship.

This isn't exactly easy to explain without sounding either mystical or religious, and I'm trying not to be either. But there is something in the act of creating, of taking the gifts and the calling and the unique perspective you've been given and using them fully, at full capacity, toward something true. That connects to the act of praise in a way I find impossible to deny.

We were made to create. When we do it wholeheartedly, something in us recognizes the rightness of it. Something settles. Something sings.

That makes showing up worthwhile, even on the ordinary mornings that don't feel like anything at all.

Have you ever experienced a creative moment that felt like more than just making something? A moment that touched a deeper place? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

Small Acts of Creative Faithfulness

Not every creative act is a grand gesture.

Most of them aren't. Most of them are small.

• A paragraph written before the house wakes up
• A sketch made on the back of an envelope
• A melody hummed into a voice memo while driving somewhere ordinary

Small, unglamorous, unremarkable in the moment. Accumulated over time into something that matters.

I've been thinking lately about the phrase creative faithfulness. It's the practice of showing up consistently for the work, in whatever form that showing up is available to you in a given season. Not the heroic version where you sacrifice everything for the art. The quiet version where you carve out fifteen minutes because fifteen minutes is all you have, and you protect it with everything you have.

This reframing has helped me in the seasons when grand gestures weren't available. When the manuscript wasn't moving and the schedule was impossible and the conditions for serious creative work simply didn't exist. In those seasons, small acts of faithfulness kept something alive that might otherwise have gone quiet.

• a journal entry
• a voice memo
• a single scene written badly just to prove the words were still there

Small doesn't mean insignificant.

In creative work, small and consistent almost always outperforms grand and sporadic. The daily paragraph outlasts the occasional marathon session. The sketch made every morning becomes the body of work that the weekly large-scale effort never quite produces.

Be faithful in the small things. The small things are doing more than they look like they're doing.

What does a small act of creative faithfulness look like in your daily life? The tiny practice that keeps something alive? I'd love to hear in the comments.

The Project That Scares Me

Do you have a project sitting in the back of your mind that you haven't started yet? I do!

I'm not going to tell you what it is, partly because it's not ready to be spoken out loud, and partly because I think most creative people know exactly the project I'm talking about without me having to name mine. I'm sure you have one too. The idea that keeps returning no matter how many times you set it aside. The one that feels more personal than anything else you've made, more exposed, more likely to fail in a way that would cost you in a significant way.

You think you're not ready for it, but you might be more ready than you think.

Fear is a reliable indicator in creative work, but it points in two directions, and you have to learn to read which one it's signaling. Sometimes fear means stop. The project isn't right, the timing isn't right, something needs more development before it's ready to be made.

But sometimes fear means go.

It means you're standing at the edge of something that matters enough to be a bit scary and uncertain, something that has the potential to be the most significant work you've done, if you can find the courage to begin it.

The project that scares you most is usually the one that has the most of you in it. Which means it's the one that has the most to give.

I'm working up to it. Maybe you are too.

Maybe we both just need permission to admit it's there to muster the courage to take that first step.

Is there a creative project you've been afraid to start? One that keeps coming back no matter how many times you set it aside? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

What I Create When No One's Watching

Some creative work exists entirely for an audience.

The polished post. The carefully considered release. The project shaped from the beginning with publication or performance or presentation in mind. That work has its place. Sharing creative work with the world is quite meaningful, and I take it seriously.

But there's another kind of work that happens when nobody's watching. That's where integrity and dedication come into play.

The journal entry that will never be read by anyone else. The scene written just to understand a character better, with no intention of putting it in the manuscript. The creative experiment that exists purely to find out what happens if... No audience, no stakes, no outcome required beyond the learning.

It's where you find out what you actually think, what you're genuinely drawn to, or what energizes you when external validation is removed from the equation entirely. The work you do when nobody's watching tells you things about yourself that the public work can't, because the public work is partially shaped by awareness of how it will be received.

But the private work feeds everything else.

It's also where the most genuinely surprising creative discoveries happen. The ones that eventually find their way into the public work in forms you couldn't have planned. The unseen work over time becomes the foundation of the seen work.

Create something today that no one will ever see. Then, take a moment to discover what it tells you.

Do you have a creative practice that exists just for you? Something that never gets shared? What does it give you? I'd love to hear in the comments.

The Discipline Needed to Produce Greatness

In the world of writing, everyone wants to talk about inspiration.

The moment the idea arrives. Getting into the flow where the words come easily, the work feels effortless, and the creative output exceeds expectations. Don't get me wrong. Those moments do happen. But they're also not where most of the work gets done.

Most of the work gets done in the mundane, ordinary sessions. The ones where you sit down solely because it's Wednesday morning, and mornings are when you write. The ones where the words come slowly and require hard-fought excavation. The ones that don't feel like anything in particular is happening, but as they accumulate over weeks and months, they turn into something worthwhile.

That's the discipline and the more boring aspect of the writing life. It's not always about the dramatic public declaration, the meaningful pivot, or the inspiring story of deciding to take the work seriously. Sometimes, it's just the quiet, unglamorous practice of showing up when nothing in you particularly wants to do the work.

Inspiration is a visitor. Discipline is a resident.

The creative people I most admire are not the ones who wait for the right conditions. They're the ones who create the conditions. Who protect the time, sit in the chair, open the document or the sketchbook or the instrument, and begin. Not because it always produces great work. But because it produces work, and work is the only raw material that can produce greatness.

Show up. Do the thing. Let inspiration find you already working.

What does your creative discipline look like on the days when you don't feel like showing up? I'd love to hear what gets you to the chair in the comments.

Is Creativity a Gift or a Calling? Yes

People ask this as if it has to be one or the other.

Either creativity is something you were given or it's something you were called to do. Like it has to be either a natural aptitude, a talent distributed at birth like eye color or height or a vocation with weight and purpose and intentional direction. The debate implies a choice, as if the answer changes what you do with it.

I think it's both, and I think them working in tandem makes a huge difference.

A gift without a calling can stay perpetually potential. Admired, occasionally exercised, but never fully inhabited. You have the ability but not the orientation, the talent but not the direction. The gift sits in you like an instrument no one plays, capable of music that never gets made.

A calling without a gift is its own kind of frustration. The deep sense of purpose unmatched by the capacity to execute it, the vision outrunning the ability to bring it into being.

When both are present, thought, and when the gift and the calling align, the possibilities become nearly endless. The creativity stops being just a thing you do and starts being a thing you are. It becomes the lens through which you see everything else, the mode through which you process experience and make meaning and contribute something to the world that only you, with your particular combination of wiring and history and perspective, could have made.

But the most important part? It's something you shouldn't take for granted. Something you should steward well.

Whether it arrived as gift, calling, or both, it showed up in you for a reason. The question is what you'll do with it.

Do you think of your creativity as a gift, a calling, or something else entirely? I'd love to hear how you understand it in the comments.

What Grows in the Waiting

Waiting is not nothing.

It feels like nothing, which is part of what makes it hard. But when you're in a season of waiting for a door to open, for clarity to arrive, or for the next chapter to make itself known, the absence of obvious progress reads as absence of movement altogether. Nothing is happening. Nothing is growing. You are simply standing still while life moves around you.

But that's not what's actually happening.

Seeds do their most important work underground, invisible, in the waiting period before anything breaks the surface. The gardener who digs them up to check on the progress interrupts the very process trying to be confirmed. Sometimes the most faithful thing is to leave the ground alone and trust that something is happening in the dark that doesn't need your intervention to succeed.

I've spent a lot of time in waiting seasons. More than I would have chosen. And I've had to learn, imperfectly and repeatedly, the discipline of treating the waiting as part of the work rather than as time lost from it.

What grows in the waiting is often exactly what the next season requires. Patience that couldn't have been developed any other way. Clarity that only comes when the noise of activity quiets down enough to hear it. A deeper understanding of what you actually want, as opposed to what you thought you wanted before the waiting stripped away the less essential things.

The waiting is not wasted. It is actually, in its own quiet and unglamorous way, quite productive.

What you're growing in the dark will matter a great deal when the light comes. Just wait for it.

What has a season of waiting produced in you that you couldn't have grown any other way? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

How to Stand Firm When the Ground Shifts Under You

Nobody gets to choose whether the ground shifts. Only what they do when it does.

I've had seasons where the plan, certainty, or version of the future I'd been building changed in ways I didn't see coming and couldn't have controlled. Most people have. It's one of the more leveling facts of human experience. No amount of preparation, faithfulness, or good intention makes you immune to the ground shifting underneath you.

Where you're rooted when it happens is what matters.

If your stability lives in the circumstances, in the plan going according to plan, in the people around you staying who you need them to be, or in the external markers of a life that's working, then a shift in circumstances is a shift in everything. There's nothing underneath to hold when the surface gives way.

If your stability lives somewhere deeper, the shift is still real. Still painful, still disorienting, still requiring grief and adjustment and the slow work of finding your footing in a new landscape. We all go through real struggle that can sometimes cripple us. But it's not everything. Especially when you have your roots planted in the right place. Those roots underneath the thing that moved mean you have a foundation that didn't move with it.

That's what I write about when I write about faith. Not the absence of difficulty but the presence of strength to weather the storm. Not immunity from the ground shifting but the experience of being held when it does.

I write toward that truth because I've needed it myself. And because every reader who has ever had the ground shift needs to know it's possible to find your footing again.

It is. I promise.

Has the ground ever shifted under you in a way you didn't see coming? What did you find underneath when it did? I'd love to hear in the comments.

Rooted Doesn't Mean Stationary

Being rooted sounds like staying put.

Like settling in, planting yourself, refusing to move. And for some people in some seasons, that's exactly what it looks like. A deliberate, courageous stillness in the face of pressure to drift.

But a tree's roots don't make it stationary. They make it mobile in a different way. They allow the branches to move dramatically, freely, in ways that would be dangerous without the underground stability holding everything in place. The deeper the roots, the more the tree can bend without breaking.

Rootedness in faith and purpose works the same way.

Some of the biggest moves of my life were only possible because of what was anchored underneath. These were decisions that looked from the outside like significant risk, like leaving the familiar for something uncertain. I couldn't have made them without that anchor. The faith that had been built slowly in the quiet seasons. The clarity about what mattered that had come through the difficult ones. The community that held me in place even as the circumstances shifted.

I couldn't have moved without the roots. The roots are what made the movement safe.

I think creative people especially can feel a false tension between being grounded and being adventurous. As if stability and risk are opposites. They're not. The most grounded people I know are often the bravest. And it's all because they're solidly rooted.

You don't have to choose between being anchored and being alive to possibility. The anchor is what makes the possibility survivable.

Has being grounded in faith, community, or purpose ever made it possible for you to take a risk you couldn't have taken otherwise? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

The Season That Felt Like Drought

There are seasons that feel like nothing is growing.

The creative well runs dry. The words don't come. The projects that used to energize you sit untouched while life makes demands that feel more urgent and leave nothing over for the work you love. The silence stretches, and somewhere in the stretching it starts to feel permanent. Like this might be who you are now, someone who used to create, past tense.

I lived in that season. Longer than I expected to, longer than I would have chosen.

What I know now that I didn't know then is that drought seasons are not dead seasons, even when they feel exactly like dying. A tree in drought is doing something underground that it can't do when water is plentiful. It's sending roots deeper, searching further, finding sources of sustenance it never would have reached in the comfortable seasons.

That isn't necessarily what you want to hear when you're in the middle of it. I know I didn't. Regardless of what you know, the drought feels like drought. Dry and depleting and resistant to easy recovery.

But looking back from the other side, I can see what grew in me during that season that couldn't have grown any other way. A clarity about what the work actually means to me, stripped of the external validation that had been quietly propping up my sense of purpose without my realizing it. A deeper understanding of why I write, when writing itself was unavailable to answer the question.

The drought didn't end my story. It deepened it.

I would have never discovered or learned that from inside it. But I'm grateful to know it now.

Have you lived through a drought season (creative, spiritual, or otherwise) and found something after surviving that season that surprised you? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

What It Means to Be Rooted

The word rooted gets used a lot.

Rooted in faith. Rooted in community. Rooted in purpose. It shows up on home décor and inspirational graphics and the kind of quotes that circulate endlessly on social media until the meaning gets worn smooth from overuse.

But the actual experience of being genuinely rooted is far different from the decorative version.

A tree with deep roots doesn't look different from the outside on a calm day. You can't see what's happening underground. The depth only becomes visible when the wind comes, when the storm hits and the tree that looked identical to every other tree on the block is the one still standing after the storm passes.

That's what rootedness actually is. Not the absence of difficulty or uncertainty or seasons that strip everything back to bare branches. It's the underground work. The slow, unglamorous, invisible growth that determines what stays standing when the pressure comes.

For me, rootedness is inseparable from faith. It's the daily return to what I know to be true when circumstances are doing their best to convince me otherwise. It's the practice of going back to the source in prayer, in Scripture, and in the stories that have carried truth across centuries, when everything above ground feels uncertain.

It's also inseparable from story. The stories we tell ourselves about who we are and what we're doing and why it matters are part of the root system. They hold us in place when the ground shifts. And if you're alive in this world? That ground is going to shift.

Being rooted doesn't mean being unmoved. It means you won't get uprooted. And that's the big difference.

What does being rooted look like in your own life? What anchors you when things get uncertain? I'd love to hear in the comments.