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.
