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.

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.