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.

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.