adrift, little boat

Are you in a transition season?
I feel you, girlfriend.
Yet when I look back on the last six months, I can see the way that God was weaving and fitting the pieces of my life together, when at the time, I didn’t think they made sense. 
To me they were scraps of paper, half written paragraphs, and unfinished poems. I wondered why; why here, why now, this is not what I expected.
Each day I’d walk from my car to the office and ask God, ‘What do I need to learn in this season? What is it about this place of transition that I need, to be able to enter into the new?’

 Our family has walked so many transitions over the past year. 
Change, even when it’s been much anticipated and excitedly expected, can be difficult. It’s tricky finding your feet when the ground beneath you feels like it’s constantly shifting. Constantly feeling like you’re balancing precariously across an unfamiliar path can be exhausting. I have felt exhausted.

Often, it’s not until we look back on certain seasons that we begin to understand the way they fit. The way that God held them all together—going before us, writing our days together and seeing the end when we couldn’t. He knows the messes we’ll make before we make them, and still He’s willing to hold us, and help us. 

 A friend and I walked this week and she described transition seasons so beautifully. She said it’s like being adrift in the ocean, where the fog is too thick to see what comes next, or which direction to go. When sailors face this on their ships they cut the engines, they pull down the sails and they watch the sky. Because you can’t go full steam in any direction when you can’t see what’s ahead.
They watch the sky and wait. They wait, with their eyes fixed up. 

 It’s what I did. I watched and waited. I wondered what God was up to, and relinquished those things I couldn’t control. I voiced my hopes, and asked and trusted that He knew what he was doing. The fog was thick, but I knew that if I watched and waited long enough that the sky would clear and the path would be visible. Today, I feel like I’m sailing gently out of the murky waters. The fog is lifting and I’m beginning to see the path I need to take, and why I needed to drift right here into this moment. 

 Today I want to encourage you that whatever season you’re in, you can trust that God holds you. That He goes before you, and that if you pay close attention, you might just see what He’s up to. This poem from Song of Songs has brought comfort to me recently and I wanted to share:

The season has changed,
the bondage of your barren winter has ended,
and the season of hiding is over and gone.
The rains have soaked the earth
and left it bright with blossoming flowers.
The season for singing and pruning the vines has arrived. 
I hear the cooing of doves in our land, 
filling the air with songs to awaken you
and guide you forth.
Can you not discern this new day of destiny
breaking forth around you?
The early signs of my purposes and plans
are bursting forth. 
The budding vines of new life
are now blooming everywhere.
The fragrance of their flowers whisper,
“There is change in the air.”

If you feel like your little boat is adrift on unknown waters, just cut the engines. Don’t be too hasty to make decisions. Stop and still. Maybe put a hand out, let it float in the calm. Before long, the fog will lift and you’ll know where it is you need to go. For now, rest assured that indeed there’s a new day of destiny breaking forth around you. 

xx

heart and soul in the here and now

There was a job advertised that I wanted. 
It was perfect. 
And everything in me knew that if I applied for it, I would have a really great chance of it being mine. 
In the space of 30 seconds I’d dreamed of what it would feel like to call myself a ‘content editor’ or an editor at all really, and these thoughts contained all the elation and all the excitement and then all of it was sucked out again as reality fell hard and fast. 
The reality is that I’m still a semester and a half from getting my degree. 
I don’t have a spare 20-30 hours a week or a free finger to spin another plate. 

I study full time.
I walk my girls to school every morning, and I drive every afternoon to pick up my high-schooler. Those three little people take up time, and space and emotional energy as I love them into growing up. I have a coffee every afternoon when the hardest worker of us all arrives home, exhausted, and we tea together in the evening, on our bed with books and Bibles or Netflix or nothing but each other. 
All five of us sit around our kitchen island bench every evening without fail and we eat together a meal that I’ve either poured love and creativity into, or hurriedly thrown into the oven and apologetically plated after. 
I nest our house into a home. My people wear clean clothes, and take full lunchboxes to school daily. 
I’m also sold-out-invested-head-over-heels involved in my local church. I volunteer time and energy and effort and brain capacity into working and serving and creating alongside people I call family. 
See? I don’t have a spare 20-30 hours a week to land a job I would love to spend the rest of my life doing and when I realised that, for that moment, the reality crushed me and I resented my season.

But then, in a burst of glory I remembered past seasons I had wanted to hurry through. 
Ones that I think of now with strange nostalgia, and a deep need to slow the clock and number may days. Number them; not to worry about when they’ll end, but to slowly and intentionally appreciate each one. 

Because right now, summer is fading. The mornings are crisp and cool, and the sun seems dimmer in the day, and I know even the crunchy autumn leaves that adorn the trees in gold will fall and leave the branches bare soon. Seasons come and go and in every single one there is so much beauty to behold. The natural seasons remind me that the ones in my life are not endless. 

So I guess what I am reminding myself of is that whatever I’m doing, I’ll put my heart and soul into, in that moment. Until the season shifts.

xx