How Faith Carries Me Through the Hard Seasons and the Good Ones
Every morning, before the house wakes up and the emails start and I belong to everyone else, I get quiet with Jesus. It is not a big production. Coffee, a few minutes, my real voice. Honestly, some mornings it isn’t even that. Some mornings it’s me praying in the car on the way to a meeting, half a sentence to God at a red light, and I’ve learned that counts too. I tell Him what I’m carrying, I hand over the things I’m scared of, and then I do the part I’m worst at, which is listen. I know exactly how that sounds. But He answers. Not in some booming, movie way. It is quieter than that. A calm settles in, and with it a clear sense of what I’m supposed to do that I know did not come from me.
That quiet is the most important meeting on my calendar, and it is the only one no one else can see. I have protected it in some seasons and let it slip in others, and I can tell you the seasons I let it go are the same ones I nearly came undone.
Where faith met me in the hardest season
A few years ago I hit a stretch that about leveled me. I was angry, I was frustrated, I felt like I was letting down the people who counted on me, and I had no honest idea how to move forward. It felt like I was pouring out so much and pouring nothing back in.
There was no big dramatic moment where the sky opened and God said, hey girl, surrender. It was quieter and slower than that. I just started to feel Him pursuing me, this steady sense that He was not going to let me muscle through it alone. All those years of showing up to church, serving, keeping my faith in the background, it finally became something I actually leaned on instead of something I did. So I carved out the time to sit with Him, and I prayed the most honest prayer I had. Okay. My way didn’t work. Show me what You want for this company, for this family, for my life.
That prayer changed me before it changed anything around me. I stopped trying to be the whole foundation and let myself be carried. I got calmer. I led with more grace and a lot less panic. Nothing about the circumstances fixed itself overnight, but I was different inside them, and that turned out to be the thing that mattered. That is the difference between surviving a brutal year on sheer willpower and being carried through it.
Jesus isn’t only for the falling-apart moments
Not long ago I was on a call where someone in my industry casually rattled off the names of all the big projects they had just landed, the exact ones I’d been quietly chasing for years. I smiled through the whole call and then drove home absolutely eaten up with jealousy. Green. Not proud of it.
Here is the prayer I actually prayed that night. Not, God, give me those projects. Not, God, make me bigger than them. I prayed, “Please take this jealousy off of me, because I don’t want to carry it anymore. Help me be okay that those ones aren’t mine, and put me where I’m supposed to be.” I asked to be changed, not to be handed something.
The very next day, two projects I never saw coming, completely unrelated to that call, landed in my lap. I’m not telling you faith is a vending machine, where you drop in a prayer and out comes a contract. That is not how it works, and anyone selling you that is selling you something. What I’m telling you is that the moment I stopped clutching my need to win and asked for my own heart to be rearranged instead, something in me got lighter. By the time the good news came, it almost felt beside the point.
That took me years to understand. He is just as present on an ordinary, jealous Tuesday as He is in the crisis. And He is just as present in the good news, which is the part most of us are genuinely terrible at. We are wonderful in a crisis. We know how to grit and grind and get everyone to the other side. But we hit the goal and go straight to hunting the next one. We get the answered prayer and forget to even say thank you, because we’re already managing whatever is next on the list.
Faith is what finally slowed me down enough to be in my own life while it is happening. My daughter will be talking my ear off about absolutely nothing, and instead of nodding along while my head is still back at work, I land in the moment and think, look at this. Thank you. When you really believe the good things are gifts and not only things you clawed your way to, you can loosen your grip enough to enjoy them.
Why faith is what lets me enjoy the life I built
We try to control everything. We plan, we lead, we grip the wheel with both hands like the whole thing is ours to hold up. When I finally handed all of that over, fully, not just in the emergencies, the season that came next was better than anything I could have forced into being. I can attest to that.
I am a work in progress. I love Jesus, I’m nowhere near perfect, and I’m figuring it out one day at a time, same as everybody. I still overbook myself. I still forget to breathe. But I come back to that quiet every morning, and it shapes how I move through the whole day, the heavy ones and the really good ones alike.
If your life looks successful from the outside and you still cannot quite enjoy it, I have sat exactly where you are sitting. For me, the thing underneath all of it, holding the whole structure up, is my faith. I am not here to hand you a religion. I’m telling you what is true for me and setting it down gently, in case it helps you too.
Come find me on Instagram and tell me what is carrying you through your season right now, the hard one or the beautiful one. I would genuinely love to know.
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XOXO busy bees,
Melissa