Every May and June, I watch the same scene play out in churches across the country. Graduates in caps and gowns are honored from the pulpit, prayed over, handed a Bible or a gift card, and applauded by a sanctuary full of people who love them. It is a beautiful moment. Then, by October, many of those same young people are nowhere to be found.

If you have pastored for any length of time, you know this story. You may be living it as a parent, a grandparent, or a Sunday school teacher who poured years into a kid who now rarely darkens the church door. The quiet exodus after high school is one of the most painful realities in the modern church, and it deserves more than hand-wringing or finger-pointing. It deserves honesty, humility, and a plan.

Why the Drift Happens

Graduation is not just the end of high school. It is the end of the structure that held a young person’s life together. The parents who woke them for church, the youth group that was built into their weekly schedule, and the friends who sat in the same row all disappear at once. Almost overnight, faith goes from something they were carried into to something they must choose on their own.

At the same time, they are juggling a new job, a dorm room or first apartment, a class schedule, or a military deployment. Sunday morning becomes the only day to sleep in. A college professor or coworker asks a hard question about suffering, science, or Scripture, and the answers they received as children suddenly feel thin. Some drift out of exhaustion. Some drift out of doubt. Some drift because no one ever helped them see why the faith of their parents could become their own.

Most of the time, it is not a dramatic rejection of God. It is a slow fade. They miss one Sunday, then three, then a season, and eventually the church becomes a place they used to go.

Where the Church Must Take Responsibility

It would be easy to place the entire burden on the young adult, but that would not be honest. Sometimes the church has failed them, and we should say so plainly.

Some churches have treated youth ministry as entertainment, offering pizza and games but little Scripture, so students graduate with a love for the fellowship hall and no foundation beneath it. Some have answered honest questions with shame or a quick “just have faith.” Some have made the faith feel like a list of rules, or a political tribe, rather than a living relationship with Christ. And some young people have never been truly known by the adults in the building. They were a face in the crowd, so no one noticed when they left.

And then there is the hardest truth. Some young people have been hurt by the church itself, through spiritual abuse, manipulative leadership, or sexual abuse that was ignored, minimized, or covered up to protect a reputation. When a young person has been wounded by those who were supposed to shepherd them, walking away is not rebellion. Often it is self-protection. We must never ask the wounded to simply return to the place that harmed them. We owe them repentance, accountability, and the kind of safe church that takes such wounds seriously. Jesus reserved his strongest words for those who cause the little ones to stumble, and we should tremble at that.

Keeping the Doors Open

The goal is not to trap young adults in the pew. It is to make the church a place they can always come home to, and a place that walks with them while they are away. A few practical ways to do that:

• Start before graduation. Build relationships between students and older members of the church long before senior year, so the connection does not depend on the youth group.
  
• Make room for hard questions. Let them doubt out loud in a safe setting. A faith that has been tested in a small group is sturdier than one that was never allowed to be questioned.
  
• Give them real roles. Invite young adults to serve, teach, run the sound booth, or sit on a committee. People stay where they are needed, not just where they are entertained.
  
• Stay in touch when they leave. Send a text, a care package, or a note when they head off to college or the military. A simple “we’re praying for you and saving your seat” can mean more than we realize.
  
• Connect them where they land. Help them find a campus ministry or a church near their new school or job, and call that pastor yourself if you can.
  
• Keep the welcome mat out. When they come home for Christmas or a summer, greet them like family, not like a project. No guilt trip, no interrogation.

How Christians Should Respond to Those Who Drift

When someone we love drifts, our instinct is often anxiety, and anxiety tends to come out as pressure, lectures, or silence. Scripture gives us a better pattern. Look at the father in the story of the prodigal son. He did not chase his son down the road, and he did not pretend the son had never left. He let him go, kept watching the horizon, and when the boy was still a long way off, he ran to meet him. There was no “I told you so” in that embrace.

That is the posture of the church toward the wandering. We pray faithfully. We keep loving them in ordinary ways, through birthday texts, shared meals, and showing up when life gets hard. We listen more than we speak, and when we do speak, we do so with gentleness, remembering that Paul urged us to restore others in a spirit of gentleness. We refuse to treat their absence as a scandal to gossip about, and we never make them the subject of a prayer request that is really a complaint.

Most of all, we remember that we are not the Holy Spirit. We can plant and water, but God gives the growth.

Three Things to Consider

If you are in a church and wondering how to help those who have drifted, here are three things worth carrying with you.

1. Listen before you try to fix. Ask a drifting young adult what happened, and then truly hear the answer. You may uncover a wound, a doubt, or a season of exhaustion that no sermon could have addressed. Understanding their story is the first step toward being any help at all.
2. Be a friend, not a recruiter. If every conversation circles back to “when are you coming back to church?”, they will start avoiding you. Love them with no strings attached, and let the relationship be about them, not your attendance numbers. Trust built over coffee does more than any invitation card.
3. Play the long game and keep praying. Faith journeys are rarely tidy. Many who wander in their twenties return in their thirties, often when they marry, have children, or hit a crisis. Be the person they remember as kind and steady when they are ready to come back, and keep praying even when you see no change.

A Closing Word

The young person who has drifted is not a lost cause, and neither is the church that has stumbled in caring for them. God is far more committed to bringing his children home than we are, and he often uses ordinary, faithful people to leave the porch light on.

So this week, think of one young adult who has slipped away from your church or your family. Pray for them by name. Send a short, no-pressure message. And ask the Lord to make your church a place where they would be glad to return. The door is still open, and so is the Father’s.

Something more to ponder,
Grace & Peace
-Pastor Scott.

There’s a moment most of us know. You’re in a conversation, maybe at work, maybe around a table with people you love, and the talk turns. Something you’ve believed your whole life, something you’ve built your life around, gets treated as quaint. Outdated. Maybe even dangerous. And you feel it in your chest before you can even name it: the pressure to nod along with everyone else, the pull to sort of soften the edges, the slippery slide to just let the moment pass – unchallenged.

Nobody told you that following Jesus would sometimes feel like standing in a river while the current pulls the stones out from under your feet.

Because let’s be honest about something. It’s not new. We like to imagine our moment is uniquely hard, that no generation before us has ever faced such confusion, such speed, such pressure. But open up the Bible and you find people standing in rivers all the way down.

The Furnace Is Older Than Us

I just preached on this recently, but take Daniel, a teenager (probably) dragged from his home to Babylon, the superpower of its day. The empire didn’t just conquer his city. It renamed him. Gave him new language, new literature, new menu, new identity. What strikes me about Daniel 1 is how ordinary the pressure is. Nobody holds a blade to his throat. They just give him a new name, a new reading list, a seat at the king’s table. And that’s usually how it happens for us, too right? It happens subtly, slowly, politely, one small adjustment at a time. (Do you remember how you cook a frog? You don’t throw old Kermit into a pot of boiling water – he’ll just jump out – no, you slowly dial up the heat until Frog legs taste like chicken!)

And yet “Daniel resolved not to defile himself” (Daniel 1:8). Notice the word resolved. Literally, he set it in his heart. Before the pressure peaked, before the lions, before the crisis, he had already decided who he belonged to.

Then there are his three friends, standing before a furnace and a golden statue and a crowd bowing in unison. Imagine that scene. Thousands of people, music playing, everyone folding at the waist. And three men just… standing. Not rebellious for rebellion’s sake. Not angry. Just rooted.

Here’s what gets me about their answer to the king: “If we are thrown into the blazing furnace, the God we serve is able to deliver us… but even if he does not… we will not serve your gods” (Daniel 3:17-18).

But even if he does not.

That’s the whole thing, isn’t it? Faith that only works when God does what we want isn’t faith. It’s a transaction. These three (my Veggietales age is showing – Rack, Shack and Benny) – these guys had something deeper. They trusted who God is, not just what God might do for them.

So here’s the first question, and I’d invite you to sit with it for a minute before moving on:

#1 – Do I trust God enough to stand even if the outcome isn’t what I’m hoping for?

The Crowd Is Not a Compass

There’s a strange gravity to the majority. When everyone around you is moving in one direction, your nervous system treats it like information. They can’t all be wrong, can they?

Well. Yes. They can.

The Israelites watched Moses disappear up a mountain, and within weeks the whole camp had melted their jewelry into a calf (Exodus 32). These were people who had just watched the sea split. Just weeks removed from the greatest rescue in their history, and they caved. Not because they hated God, but because the waiting was uncomfortable and everyone else was doing it.

Paul saw this pattern and gave us one of the most quietly radical sentences in the New Testament: “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Romans 12:2). Some translations say it this way: don’t let the world squeeze you into its mold.

Squeeze. That’s the right word. Conformity usually isn’t a dramatic decision. It’s pressure, steady and constant, until one day you realize you’ve been shaped into something you never chose to be.

And notice that Paul doesn’t say, “Resist the world by building a wall.” He says be transformed. The alternative to being squeezed isn’t becoming rigid. It’s becoming alive. Something inside you that keeps growing, keeps being renewed, keeps drinking from a deeper well than the headlines.

Which raises the second question:

#2 What is shaping me more: the voice of Christ, or the voice of the crowd?

Be honest. Look at your screen time. Look at what you read, what you watch, who you listen to, what you rehearse in your head at 2 a.m. Whatever gets the most of your attention is doing the most to shape you. That’s not shame. It’s just physics.

Stubborn Isn’t the Same as Faithful

Now we have to say something that might sting a little.

Standing firm doesn’t mean being obnoxious. It doesn’t mean winning arguments or posting the perfect rebuttal or treating every person who disagrees with you as an enemy to be defeated. Some of us have confused loud with faithful, and the world has noticed.

Peter, who knew a thing or two about both courage and failure, wrote to Christians who were being squeezed hard. His counsel? “Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect” (1 Peter 3:15).

The reason for the hope. Not the reason for the rules, not the reason for the culture war. The hope.

Jesus himself was immovable and tender at the same time. He didn’t water down the truth, and he didn’t use it as a club. He sat with the woman at the well and spoke honestly about her life, and she ran back to town saying, “Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did” (John 4:29). She didn’t feel crushed. She felt seen.

That’s the posture. Grounded enough that you don’t need to panic, and gracious enough that people feel safe near you. When your faith is secure, you don’t have to be defensive. Defensiveness is what fear looks like when it puts on a suit.

And Jesus told us plainly it wouldn’t be easy: “In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world” (John 16:33). Both halves matter. The trouble is real. So is the victory.

You’re Not the First, and You’re Not Alone

If you’re tired, here’s something to hold onto. Hebrews 11 gives us that long roll call of the faithful, and then chapter 12 opens with a breathtaking image: “Since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders… and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us” (Hebrews 12:1).

A cloud of witnesses. Not a jury. Not critics in the stands. Witnesses, people who know what it costs, who ran their leg and are now cheering you on. The ones who stood in the furnace. The ones who were laughed at in the marketplace. The ones who kept going when it didn’t make sense.

And then the verse that anchors the whole thing: “fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith” (Hebrews 12:2).

Fix your eyes. Not on the shifting culture, not on the anxious commentary, not even on your own performance. On Jesus. The pioneer, the one who went first and made the way. The perfecter, the one who finishes what he starts, including in you.

You don’t hold on by white-knuckling it. You hold on because you are held. Jesus said, “No one can snatch them out of my hand” (John 10:28). The grip that matters most isn’t yours.

Which brings us to the third question:

#3 If Jesus is really who he says he is, what would it look like to build my life on that, fully, quietly, without apology?

Not perfectly. Not loudly. Just fully.

The Challenge

So here’s where I want to leave you.

This week, I want you to choose one place where you’ve been quietly drifting. Maybe it’s a conviction you’ve stopped mentioning. Maybe it’s a practice, prayer, Scripture, Sabbath, gathering with other believers, that slipped when life got busy. Maybe it’s a conversation you’ve been avoiding because you were afraid of how it might land.

Name it. Write it down. And then do one concrete thing about it before Sunday.

Read Daniel 3 out loud, slowly, and let yourself stand in that crowd. Reach out to one person who can walk with you, because Scripture never imagines faith as a solo project. Spend ten minutes in silence asking God one simple question: Where have I been bowing when I should have been standing?

And then, whatever happens, hold onto this: the God who walked in the fire with those three men is the same God who walks with you.

The culture will keep changing. It always has. But the One you follow is “the same yesterday and today and forever” (Hebrews 13:8).

Stand. Not stiffly, not angrily. Just rooted.

The river is moving, but you’re not alone in it.
Something more to ponder today!

Peace!
-Pastor Scott.

The email chimes at 11:32 PM.

Then again at 5:45 AM.

There is a budget gap to close, a sermon to craft that somehow needs to be both deeply theological and intensely practical, a marriage in the congregation falling apart, and a committee meeting about the color of the lobby chairs.

And somewhere in the middle of all that noise, a quiet, heavy question starts to whisper in the back of a pastor’s mind:

How much longer can I keep this up?

If you’ve asked that question recently, you aren’t alone. Not even close. We talk a lot about “the calling.” We talk about the joy of ministry, the beauty of transformation, the sacred privilege of standing with people in their highest highs and lowest lows. And all of that is real. It’s beautiful.

But there’s another reality we don’t talk about nearly enough. It’s the dry, hollow feeling of running on fumes. It’s pastoral burnout. And if we want to thrive—not just survive, but truly live into the life God has for us—we have to look this thing right in the face.

The Weight of the Invisible Backpack

Why does this happen? Why do so many gifted, deeply committed leaders find themselves stressed out, apathetic and possibly staring at the ceiling at 2:00 AM, wondering if they should just go manage a hardware store?

It usually boils down to a few hidden realities:

• The Boundless Role: What is a pastor, exactly? A CEO? A therapist? A public speaker? A mediator? A spiritual guru? Because the job description is essentially infinite, the expectations become impossible. When you are expected to be everything to everyone, you end up feeling like nothing to anyone.
  
• The Compounding Emotional Load: Pastors carry things. You sit with a family in a hospital room as they say goodbye, and then you walk down the hall, adjust your tie, and walk into a joyful baby dedication. That emotional whiplash takes a toll. If you don’t process that weight, it stores itself in your body, your mind, and your spirit.
  
• The Illusion of the “24/7” Saint: There is this subtle, dangerous cultural myth that because you work for God, your boundaries don’t apply. So we look at a text message on a Saturday night and think, Well, shepherds don’t abandon the sheep. So we answer. And piece by piece, our private life is swallowed up by the public role.

The Ancient Pattern of the Desert

This isn’t a new problem. It’s a human problem.

Think about Elijah. In 1 Kings 18, he experiences this massive, spectacular spiritual victory on Mount Carmel. It’s the peak of his ministry. Fire from heaven. Total vindication.

And then, exactly one chapter later in 1 Kings 19, a threat comes from Jezebel, and what does Elijah do? He runs. He goes out into the wilderness, sits under a solitary broom tree, and basically tells God, “I’ve had enough. Take my life. I am no better than my ancestors.”

Look at that trajectory. From the mountain peak to total, crushing despair in a matter of verses.

What’s fascinating is how God responds to Elijah’s burnout. God doesn’t give him a theological lecture. He doesn’t tell him to pray harder or accuse him of a lack of faith.

God gives him a loaf of bread, some water, and tells him to take a nap. Twice.

God addresses Elijah’s humanity before He addresses his ministry. Because God remembers what we so easily forget: we are dust. We are creatures with limits.

Even Jesus—the literal embodiment of the Divine—constantly stepped away. The Gospels are filled with phrases like, “He withdrew to a lonely place.” Jesus looked at massive, hurting crowds with infinite needs, and sometimes he just got in a boat and rowed away. If Jesus needed to walk away from the crowd to preserve his connection to the Father, what makes us think we can just push through?

Creating Your Safeguards

So, how do we shift the rhythm? How do we build a life in ministry that is sustainable, vibrant, and deeply rooted? It requires intentional, sometimes radical, boundaries.

1. Reclaim the Gift of “No” Every time you say “yes” to something you don’t actually have the capacity for, you are saying a functional “no” to your health, your spouse, your kids, or your own spiritual life. “No” is not a failure of love; it is a declaration of stewardship over the finite life God gave you.

2. Separate the “Identity” from the “Function” You are a human being who happens to serve as a pastor. You are not “The Pastor” who happens to be a human being. Your worth, your belovedness, and your identity were completely secure before you ever picked up a microphone or sat in a board meeting. When the church becomes your identity, its failures become your existential crisis. Give yourself permission to just be Scott—a child of God, loved exactly as you are.

3. Practice Radical Sabbath Sabbath isn’t just a day off to catch up on errands. It’s a subversive theological act. It is a 24-hour period where you stop producing, stop managing, and stop fixing. You do things simply because they bring joy, rest, and life. Turn off the phone. Leave the email alone. Walk, read fiction, lift weights, work in the yard—do whatever makes your soul feel alive, and let the universe run without you for a day. Trust that God can handle the church while you sleep.

The Invitation

Ministry is a marathon, not a sprint. But it’s hard to run a marathon when you’re carrying a backpack full of rocks you were never meant to carry.

If you are feeling the burn today, hear this: it is not a sign of weakness. It is a sign that you are human. God is not disappointed in your exhaustion. He’s inviting you to the broom tree. He’s inviting you to rest, to eat, to breathe, and to remember that the weight of the world is on His shoulders—not yours.

Take a breath. Step back. The light is still shining, and you are deeply loved.

Hey everyone, let’s talk about something we all go through but rarely enjoy: the middle.

You know exactly what I mean. The middle is that awkward, sometimes exhausting space between starting a journey and actually arriving. It’s the long stretch of highway where the adrenaline of the departure has completely worn off, but the destination is still nowhere in sight.

Think about the start of any grand adventure. The beginning is always fueled by vision, fresh energy, and an upbeat playlist. You are running on the sheer, intoxicating excitement of stepping out in faith. The end of the journey is just as compelling, fueled by pure anticipation. You can finally see the finish line, the relief is palpable, and the promise of rest gives you a sudden, miraculous second wind.

But the middle? The middle is mile 400 of an 800-mile road trip. The coffee is lukewarm, the scenery has blurred into a monotonous gray, and the silence in the car is no longer peaceful—it’s just heavy. The beginning simply requires a leap of faith, and the finish line just asks for a final sprint. But the middle requires grit. It demands relentless endurance and a stubborn refusal to quit when the excitement fades.

This “middle space” isn’t just about road trips, though. It creeps into every significant aspect of our daily lives and our spiritual walks. It’s month three of trying to build a new habit, where the initial motivation is completely gone but the life-changing results haven’t shown up yet. It’s the second year of launching a ministry or a business, where the launch-day applause has faded and you are left staring at the unglamorous, daily grind. We feel it in the hard, sanctifying work of marriage or parenting when the honeymoon phase is a distant memory, but the deep, quiet comfort of a fifty-year anniversary is still decades away.

And we certainly feel it in our faith. It’s that agonizing silence between praying a desperate, tear-soaked prayer and actually seeing God’s hand move in our lives.

It is right here, in this messy middle, where the enemy of our souls loves to pull up a chair and plant seeds of doubt. The middle is incredibly vulnerable. Without the hype of the start or the reward of the finish, our minds start to wander. This is the exact spot where we start asking dangerous, anxiety-ridden questions. We wonder if we actually heard God correctly, or if we just made the whole thing up in our heads. We start agonizing over whether taking that leap of faith was a massive mistake, and we question if it’s even worth it to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

If you are feeling the heavy, unglamorous weight of the middle today, I want you to know that your exhaustion is entirely valid. Feeling tired here doesn’t mean your faith is broken, and it certainly doesn’t mean you’ve taken a wrong turn or that God has abandoned you. It simply means you are in the crucible of endurance—the exact place where your spiritual muscle is built.

In our spiritual lives, the middle is often where we do the most growing, but let’s be honest—it’s also where we do the most groaning. Think about the Israelites for a second. The parting of the Red Sea was a miraculous, thrilling beginning, and the Promised Land was a glorious finish line. But the wilderness? That was a long, dusty, frustrating middle.

Maybe you’re in a “middle” season right now. You’re praying for a breakthrough in your health, your family, your career, or your peace of mind. You know God is faithful, but frankly, you’re just really tired of sitting in the waiting room.

Here is the encouragement I want to leave you with today: God does some of His most profound, beautiful work in the messy middle. The waiting isn’t a waste; it’s a workshop. He is actively shaping your character, deepening your reliance on His strength, and preparing your heart to carry the weight of the blessing that’s coming.

When the middle gets overwhelming, remember that you don’t have to have it all figured out. You just have to stay tethered to the One who holds it all together. Take a deep breath today. He hasn’t forgotten you, and He isn’t finished yet. I hope that you find encouragement in this truth today!

Before you close this tab and step back into your day, I’d love for you to grapple with these two questions:

1. Where in your life are you currently rushing the process instead of trusting the Maker?
   
2. If you viewed your current waiting season as a “workshop” rather than a “delay,” how would that change the way you walk through it today?

Something more to ponder today.
-Grace & Peace
Pastor Scott.

(and avoiding the trappings of this fast-paced life)

You’re probably busy right now.

Maybe you’re reading this on your phone while waiting in line at the grocery store.

Or maybe you’ve got a dozen tabs open on your browser, and this is just one of them.

We live a lot of our lives on the way to somewhere else.

The next meeting.

The next weekend.

The next phase of life.

“Once the kids are finally in school…”
“Once I get through this busy season at work…”
“Once things just settle down…”

We have a tendency to treat the present moment like it’s a waiting room.

Just a beige, sterile lobby we have to sit in until the real thing happens. Until our name is called.

But here’s the thing.

When you read through the ancient stories of Jesus, you notice something striking.

He never seems to be in a hurry.

He’s constantly walking from one town to another, sure. He has places to go.

But he is always, always getting interrupted.

By a woman reaching out in a crowded street.

By a blind man calling out from the dusty side of the road.

By people lowering their friend through a roof right in the middle of his teaching.

And for Jesus, the interruption isn’t a distraction from the work.

The interruption is the work.

He understood something that we so often forget in our hyper-connected, deeply exhausted world.

The divine isn’t just found at the destination.

It’s found in the dust of the journey.

What if we’re missing the profound because we’re too focused on waiting for the spectacular?

We look for God in the earthquake, the wind, and the fire. We look for Him in the grand milestones and the mountaintop experiences.

But God is remarkably comfortable in the ordinary.

In the quiet whisper.

In the breaking of bread around a messy table.

In the face of the person sitting across from you right now.

Grace isn’t something you have to sprint to catch up with.

It’s the air you’re already breathing.

So, take a breath.

Look around.

You don’t have to be anywhere else, or anyone else, to encounter the holy today.

It’s right here.

---

Three Questions to Ponder:

1. Where in your life are you currently treating the present moment like a waiting room for the future?
   
2. If you truly believed the mundane ground you are standing on right now is holy, what would change about how you move through your day today?
   
3. Who or what is “interrupting” you lately, and how might God be gently inviting you to see that very interruption as the actual work you are called to?

Grace & Peace,
-Pastor Scott.

We hate waiting.

We just do.

We have apps to skip the line. We have shipping that gets it to our front door by tomorrow morning. We want the answer, the fix, the breakthrough, the clarity, the open door.

And we want it right now.

Because to us, waiting feels like a glitch in the system. We tend to think of waiting as a gap. A void. An empty, useless space between where we are and where we actually want to be.

Like a waiting room. You just sit there. Staring at a five-year-old magazine. Doing absolutely nothing.

But what if spiritual waiting isn’t passive?

What if waiting on the Lord isn’t a delay in your story… what if it’s a crucial chapter of your story?

What if it is the most profoundly active thing you could possibly do?

See, when the scriptures talk about waiting on the Lord, it’s not about twiddling your thumbs. It’s not about spiritual resignation. It’s about tension.

Think of a seed buried deep in the dark, heavy dirt. From the outside, it looks like nothing is happening. It looks abandoned. It feels like the gardener forgot all about it.

But beneath the surface? Everything is happening.

The shell is breaking. Roots are desperately reaching and digging deep into the soil. True, sustainable growth is occurring. You cannot get the massive, unshakeable oak tree without the dark, quiet, excruciatingly slow work of the seed in the dirt.

It’s in the waiting that our false idols are slowly stripped away. It’s in the waiting that we realize we aren’t actually in control. (And man, we love pretending we are in control, don’t we?) It’s in the waiting that our faith stops being a neat little transaction with the Divine—”I do this for you, God, so you give me that”—and starts becoming a real, breathing relationship.

We finally discover that God isn’t a vending machine. He is a presence.

And sometimes, the greatest, most profound gift He can possibly give us is the uncomfortable silence that forces us to stop talking, stop rushing, and start listening for His heartbeat.

The discipline of waiting isn’t about ignoring reality; it’s about anchoring yourself so deeply in the goodness of God that the rushing world around you loses its grip on your soul. It’s active trust. It’s rebellious hope.

So, if you find yourself in the waiting room right now—frustrated, tired, wondering if God lost your file—I want to invite you to stop trying to escape the wait, and start leaning into it.

Because the soil is doing its work.

As you go about your week, I want to leave you with three questions to chew on. Let these sit with you. Ponder them:

1. In your moments of profound discouragement: When you’re exhausted and ready to throw in the towel, what if this divine delay isn’t a punishment, but a deliberate setup to build a deeper, more resilient reliance on His strength rather than your own?

2. In your season of endless searching: When you are desperately looking for the next right answer, are you willing to sit in the uncomfortable, quiet mystery of “I don’t know yet” and trust that God’s presence is enough for today?

3. In your messy time of transition: In that terrifying, beautiful space between what was and what will be, how can you actively tend to the soil of your soul today, instead of just frantically rushing toward tomorrow?

Something more to ponder today.

-Grace & Peace,
Pastor Scott.