Friend, I know I haven’t been writing much lately.
It’s not for lack of trying. Believe me, I’ve tried.
I have a hundred essays sitting unfinished in my Notes app to prove it.
Every so often I decide this is it—this is the week I’m going to get back into the habit. A verse, a Bible story, or an illustration catches my attention and I sit down with it and start to write a few paragraphs. I write and re-write, I edit, contemplate more Scripture...and close my iPad and walk away.
For awhile I thought it was writer’s block.
But I don’t think that’s quite it.
The truth is, I am struggling to write from the middle.
Lately the things that have caught my attention have been verses about contentment, waiting on the Lord, foggy valleys and an optometrist’s chart clicking into focus. And every time I’ve tried to write, I’ve hit a stalemate.
When I first began writing, it felt simpler. I had notes in the margins of my Bible, applications I wanted to share or some ordinary illustration of Biblical truth that I noticed in the chaos of my days. When I began, the words seemed to fly off my fingers. I wasn’t trying to make writing into anything bigger than it was. I simply saw something that encouraged me and wanted to share it in hopes that I could be an encouragement to someone else.
But somewhere along the way, something changed. I began putting pressure on myself each week to find something to share, and then I feared that I was forcing my writing. When my fountain of ideas began trickling, I began wondering, had I gotten this all wrong?
Transitions are hard.
And I’ve been going through a lot of them lately.
Learning to live without my mom was one. It wasn’t easy not having her to talk to daily, to mentor me and help me work through my thoughts.
Then my youngest children started half-day kindergarten and my mornings were open. I remember someone asking me that year, ‘what are you going to do with yourself?’ And without hesitation I said, ‘I’m going to write.’
Now another year has passed and my children are in school all day. And once again, I find myself staring at an open stretch of time and wondering...what’s next? After so many years where the immediate need and the next step in front of me was obvious, I keep looking at my life as though a chapter is closing and asking God what He intends to write next.
I wanted desperately to be an encouragement to women. I wanted to be taken seriously. I wanted to feel like I was using whatever gifts and abilities God had given me for His glory. And because I cared so much about those things… I started watching for proof.
We like proof, don’t we? We pray and look for evidence that our prayers were heard. We obey and watch for signs that we’re headed in the right direction. We invest our time into something and look for results that reassure us that it mattered.
But sometimes we’re measuring the wrong things.
And when I didn’t see the results I had hoped for with my writing, I began questioning the whole thing.
Maybe I wasn’t actually a writer. Maybe I wasn’t any good at this. Maybe I had misunderstood God all along and He hadn’t called me to this at all.
It didn’t help when I looked around and observed other women who wrote devotional content. I examined their lives and felt disqualified. Or I examined their daily writings and knew I couldn’t compete with AI-written prose.
Underneath that though, I knew comparison was the thief of joy. I knew that it was not wise. I knew that I was being a help to at least a handful of women and that should have been evidence of God’s blessing. I knew all the right answers to my discouragement.
…but they measuring themselves by themselves, and comparing themselves among themselves, are not wise. — 2 Corinthians 10:12b
But knowing those things didn’t stop the doubts.
And that became part of the problem.
Because what authority do I have to write about comparison when I still compare? How can I write about contentment when I’m still learning to be content? How can I write about trusting God with an uncertain future when I would very much like Him to make my path more clear? How can I encourage another woman to trust and obey while I’m quietly asking God if my own obedience is misguided?
I love writing. I especially love sharing lessons that I have learned. There’s something comforting, too, about reading how someone made it through a struggle and how God helped them along the way. It’s reassuring to be able to look at the messy threads of another woman’s life and hear her testimony how God wove all those strands into something beautiful.
But lately, so many of the things in my life just feel like tangled threads. So many things aren’t tied neatly with a bow.
And so often when I look at my life, I don’t always know how to hold it up as an illustration and say, “see? This is what happens when you trust God.”
I can’t tell you with absolute certainty that if you surrender something to the Lord, you’ll stop desiring it. I can’t tell you that obedience will lead you where you hope to go. I can’t tell you that trusting God is easy or comfortable.
But the authority in devotional writing shouldn’t come from the person mastering the subject.
If I have to wait until I understand the mechanics of prayer before I write on the power of it; if I have to conquer comparison before I can encourage another woman to stop looking at others, I should probably delete half of everything I’ve ever written.
The authority comes from the Word of God, whether I fully understand it or not.
So if good writing has to follow a formula of “I learned this Bible lesson, so let me teach it to you,” I’m not your girl.
Most of the time I feel more like saying, “I am struggling with this, but God has reminded me what His Word says. I don’t really understand it all, but I’m trying.”
There are so many things that I’m still learning.
I can’t point to my life and say ‘see how God’s truth applied here, see what I learned, and how you can trust Him too.’
Because so much of it is part of a story that He is still writing.
I don’t know what God’s will is for the next chapter of my life. I don’t know why I have a law degree, why I love to read and write and learn and grow. I don’t know why I have been given some opportunities while other things that I have longed for have slipped past. I don’t know why God gave me five daughters, or why I lost two others before I ever had the chance to know them. I don’t know why I had to lose my mom when I still needed her so much.
I don’t know why.
These are tangled threads that I see when I examine my life. And maybe someday I’ll be able to look back and understand how some of them are weaving together. But maybe some of them I will never understand on this side of eternity.
But maybe what I see as a mess is actually the message.
To put a Biblical point on it, I have been looking at the life of Gideon.
Look at this with me—
And there came an angel of the LORD, and sat under an oak which was in Ophrah, that pertained unto Joash the Abiezrite: and his son Gideon threshed wheat by the winepress, to hide it from the Midianites. And the angel of the LORD appeared unto him, and said unto him, The LORD is with thee, thou mighty man of valour. And Gideon said unto him, Oh my Lord, if the LORD be with us, why then is all this befallen us? and where be all his miracles which our fathers told us of, saying, Did not the LORD bring us up from Egypt? but now the LORD hath forsaken us, and delivered us into the hands of the Midianites. — Judges 6:11-13
When we meet Gideon, he’s hiding. When the Angel of the Lord says ‘the Lord is with thee, thou mighty man of valor,’ Gideon’s response feels remarkably familiar. God is with us? If God is with me, where is the proof? Why has all of this happened? Where are the miracles? I know who You are, God. I know how You delivered us from Egypt. I’ve heard the stories, so why doesn’t what I see match what I know?
I see Gideon holding all the tangled threads and fighting discouragement. I see him trying to reconcile the truth he knows about God with the circumstances he sees. And I can relate.
I struggle. I battle doubts and discouragement. I plead Scripture and pray with hopeful anticipation that this time, somehow, I’m going to say ‘amen’ and the answer will come. This time I’ll finally understand what God is doing. But time after time, there is no answer.
I want the fog to lift.I want things to make sense.I want clarity.
But I don’t get a fleece. I have to have faith.
And oh, how I want that fleece. I want something I can see. Something unmistakable. Something to tell me, ‘yes, this is what God is doing. Yes, you’re on the right path. Yes, keep investing here. Yes, this thing matters.’
I want confirmation before I give my commitment.
I want to see proof before I persevere.
But faith doesn’t work like that.
Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. —Hebrews 11:1
Not seen.
That’s the part I keep resisting.
I want the explanation.I want to see.
Gideon wanted an explanation too, but look at what happens next— “And the Lord looked upon him, and said, Go in this thy might...” (Judges 6:14)
Gideon didn’t get an answer, he was given an assignment.
Gideon asked, ‘why?’ and God said, ‘Go.’
Most of the time, God doesn’t show us where the road goes. Sometimes we’re given just enough light to obey Him in the next step. Maybe I’ve been waiting for clarity when what I actually need is just enough faith for today.
That can apply to much bigger things than writing.
But for me, for now, it applies to writing.
Maybe it applies to you, too, somehow. Maybe you are trying to understand what God is doing, obeying without seeing results, praying and waiting and wondering.
I can’t tell you how everything will turn out.
But I can tell you that I’m running this race alongside you. I can tell you what I’m struggling to understand and show you what God says. I can remind you of His faithfulness while I remind myself.
I can’t tell you the ending yet, but I hope I can encourage you from the middle.
