Worth the Weight: Building Spiritual Muscle During a Season of Waiting
Hey loved ones!
For me, 2024 was such a beautiful year of reflecting and regrouping from 2023. And now, here we are fresh into 2025. So much can transpire in a year's time. 365 days of fluctuating opportunities, failures, false starts, endings, beginnings, trials, and triumphs. Happenings that can greatly shift life's trajectory. As we witness things changing around us, we're prompted to move with the change, but what happens when you can't see or feel the change? What happens when everyone around you seems to be moving forward but you seem to be at a standstill?
I've had to sit with these questions most recently as I've watched my world seemingly move on without me. Yet, in that quiet place of witnessing I came to discover that while my life appeared to be at a standstill, my internal world was going through some major reconstruction. 2023 was a year marked by a lot of grief for me. Grief of loved ones transitioning as well as the ending of several relationships. It was a year that illustrated more clearly my relationship to my perception of loss. 2020 was the first time I'd ever experienced the painstaking heart rift of losing someone close to me in a way that seemed permanent. While I'd experienced lesser degrees of grief, I'd been a foreigner to physical death. So when 2023 came, I can't say I was prepared to revisit that pain. I had just started to feel like I was gaining some sort of footing.
Grief has no favorites, it will touch all of us at some point I'm sure, but this post is not about grief, this post is about the liminal space I was ushered into by grief. This post is about the space one is held within when in between two versions of the self. The space of becoming, the threshold or portal between one state of being to the next. I'm no stranger to this space and it's likely you aren't either; however this season I've been learning how to navigate liminal space in a way that isn't counterproductive to my growth, decreases internal turbulence, and supports peace of mind. I wait different.
I remember hearing the saying "when you pray for patience get prepared to be disrupted" and for me that meant err on the side of caution. With that heard, I steered clear from that prayer, as if I could side step the lesson all together…
Honestly, who was I kidding? Like, be forreal sis.
Surprise Surpriiise! You don't have to pray for patience to be enrolled in the class that teaches it. Life gone serve it to you everytime. And oh how I've failed forward! Praying for everything but patience, I asked God to prematurely remove things from me and then would get frustrated when they persisted assuming I wasn't being heard when in reality I was ignoring God's "no". I was expecting to be pulled out of situations through prayer when the behaviors that led me into the situations had not changed. I was doing a whole lot of talking and not enough listening. It's no wonder I felt stuck. It was like me praying at my seed to grow without listening for the instructions to dig, plant, and water it. And we all know prayer without works is dead. Whew chiiile, but let me tell it. It wasn't so much that I wasn't working, it was more so me picking what work I was willing to do and frankly waiting wasn't on my "to do" list. So I kept praying about my problems with closed ears and each request stacked one lesson onto another into the life school queue.Them lessons started to get heavy y’all. They started weighing on my heart and shifting its posture to the point where I became lost for words. I got quiet and that silence became an essential form of prayer. A prayer of presence. In this, I could listen and become reacquainted with my Creator's voice.
Waiting differently started with listening as prayer. Not just with my ears or even my mind, but with my whole being. It required my heart, mind's eye, and body. Listening became an active process of seeking out my Creator's voice and signature in all things. It went beyond tuning into the sound of God but even deeper into the feeling of God's essence through the recognition of fruit. It became an observational practice of silent communing. I went from coming to God with lists, to seeking out what I could learn about the nature of my Creator through the nature of creation. This shift made all the difference in how I navigated the liminal space.