As long time readers have already noticed, for the past couple of weeks I haven’t posted much. I’m aware—even I have noticed my own silence in almost uncomfortable ways, and felt that familiar tug:
“Shouldn’t I be posting something? Shouldn’t I be showing up more?”
But as I shared in my last blog post (and also in this one on solitude), I’ve been listening. And what I heard was clear: “Be still. Go within. Sit with God.”
So I have. I continue to honor the call to pause—even when it feels uncomfortable. Even when Easter passed without a blog post from me. Even when part of me wanted to explain myself. But what I’ve come to realize is that the silence wasn’t absence. It wasn’t neglect.
It was invitation. And that invitation turned into something I couldn’t have planned: a 3:33 a.m. wake-up call—both physical and spiritual—on the tail end of Easter weekend. What began as indigestion quickly turned into one of the most clarifying spiritual purges I’ve ever experienced.
I won’t go into all of it here (I’ll get there in a bit), but what I want to talk about today is what that experience taught me:
There’s a difference between dodging and discernment. And learning to recognize it in real time, no matter how uncomfortable it feels? That’s what spiritual maturity looks like.
Discernment vs. Dodging (When They Feel the Same)
I’ve written before about discernment—how to recognize it, how to listen for it, and how it often whispers when everything else is screaming. (You can find those posts here.) But in the experience described above, it wasn’t theory. It wasn’t a clean-cut “ah yes, this is discernment” moment. It felt like avoidance. It felt like dodging. That’s what made it hard to name at first.
Yesterday, I found myself rescheduling a yearly wellness check appointment, made my son’s pediatrician almost exactly one year ago that I’d forgotten to log in my calendar and forgotten completely about by the time I received the text reminder for it.
I agonized over it. I still had two days to rework my own schedule, but rescheduling was a reasonable choice—there were thunderstorms in the forecast and I wasn’t feeling my best, as it was—but still, I sat with that itchy, anxious feeling:
“Am I just trying to get out of this? Am I self-sabotaging again? Is this fear disguised as wisdom?”
But here’s the thing—discernment often feels like dodging when you’re used to overriding your own needs. When you’ve spent years pushing through, proving you can do it anyway, and being proud of how much pressure you can absorb, pausing feels suspicious.
It feels lazy. It feels like failure. But it’s not.
What I realized, after sitting with it, discussing it with God, and getting hit with divine confirmation from every direction, was that I wasn’t dodging anything at all.
I was obeying timing.
I was following peace.
And yes, sometimes that means saying no to something you could do. Not because you’re avoiding it, but because it’s not necessary right now. There’s a difference.
Dodging is rooted in fear.
Discernment is rooted in wisdom.
One avoids responsibility. The other aligns with right timing. And if you’re not sure which one you’re in? Look at the fruit. Look at what the choice produces. If it brings peace, clarity, and alignment—it’s probably discernment. If it brings chaos and guilt and spiraling? It’s probably not.
The Biblical & Spiritual Foundation of Discernment
Discernment is more than a gut feeling—it’s a spiritual skill. It’s not the absence of fear, and it’s not always loud. In fact, it’s often a quiet conviction, a knowing that contradicts logic, urgency, and the pressure to perform. And the Bible is full of people who had to learn this the hard way.
Proverbs 3:5–6 reminds us to “trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding”—which is exactly what true discernment requires. Sometimes that means going against what even you think makes sense. Sometimes it means stepping back from what you could technically handle, simply because the Spirit says: not now.
Hebrews 5:14 goes deeper:
But solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil.
Discernment doesn’t happen by accident. It’s trained. Lived. Earned. It shows up after practice—after missteps, after moments of uncertainty, after obedience that doesn’t make sense until hindsight arrives.
Jesus himself modeled this again and again:
He didn’t just do—he withdrew.
He didn’t heal every person in every village. He moved by timing, not demand. He didn’t apologize for resting. He didn’t run after people who walked away.
Discernment led him to pause when others pushed, to wait when others rushed, and to move when others hesitated.
If you’ve ever been told that discernment means always acting, always doing, always being “on”—you’ve been taught dogma, not divine wisdom.
True discernment honors the moment. It listens first. It responds with peace, not panic.
And when your relationship with God deepens, you learn this firsthand: obedience doesn’t always look like action. Sometimes it looks like stillness.
Dogma vs. Discernment
Here’s where it gets tricky—especially for those of us who were raised inside rigid religious frameworks: dogma loves urgency. It thrives on guilt. It teaches that obedience equals action, that hesitation equals sin, and that “doing nothing” is never the right answer.
So when discernment says wait, the programming kicks in.
You start hearing all the old voices:
“You’re just being lazy.”
“God doesn’t need your excuses.”
“If you’re not doing something productive, you’re failing.”
“You’re supposed to push through and show up—faith means showing up.”
But that’s not discernment. That’s fear dressed in Sunday clothes.
Discernment doesn’t demand performance. It invites alignment. It doesn’t shame you into action—it leads you in peace. And when you’ve been raised (or conditioned) to equate exhaustion with holiness, discernment feels like rebellion.
Stillness feels dangerous. Saying “no” feels like letting someone down—even when no one’s asked anything of you. I’ve lived that. I’ve written about it before—how easy it is to confuse obedience with hustle, how discernment gets misbranded as avoidance, and how hard it is to hear God through the noise of performance pressure. (Again, here are some posts where I really dug into this.)
But here’s the thing: dogma trains you to move from shame. Discernment trains you to move from Spirit.
And if God is not the author of confusion, then every time you feel frantic, pressured, or frantic about saying no to something you never wanted to do anyway—that’s not God talking. That’s fear. That’s programming. That’s someone else’s voice pretending to be divine.
Discernment is what happens when you stop listening to that voice and start listening to the one that says:
“You’re allowed to rest. You’re allowed to not explain yourself. You’re allowed to follow peace over pressure.”
And it takes time.
It takes mistakes.
It takes waking up at 3:33 a.m. with indigestion and realizing that sometimes, what feels like avoidance was actually alignment all along.
The Resurrection Weekend Purge
Easter weekend came and went without a single blog post from me. We didn’t even attend an Easter service at a single church. That alone would’ve bothered the old version of me—the one who felt like every spiritual milestone had to be documented, processed, published—performed. But this time, I stayed quiet. I stayed still.
And then, in the early hours of the Tuesday morning that followed—at exactly 3:33 a.m.—I woke up feeling like I was dying.
Chest pressure. Reflux. Gut pain. A body that was screaming. What I thought was just bad food choices turned out to be something more—something spiritual. What I didn’t know at the time was that I was about to have one of the most profound spiritual clearing experiences I’ve ever had.
I didn’t panic. I didn’t spiral. I didn’t even wake up my husband. I sat with it. I prayed. I reflected. And slowly but surely, I started to feel better—not just physically, but emotionally, energetically, spiritually. Like something had been lifted. Like something was finally being let go.
And in the hours that followed, the universe confirmed it over and over again.
There were clear synchronicities—tiny divine winks and unmistakable alignments—that let me know a light had been shined on the truth of my path. That I wasn’t behind. I wasn’t avoiding. I wasn’t failing.
I was exactly where I needed to be, doing exactly what God wanted me to do.
The rescheduled appointment wasn’t about fear. It was about peace.
The silence wasn’t absence. It was alignment.
The physical symptoms were temporary—but the lesson was eternal.
And the story wasn’t about “missing” Easter.
It was about living resurrection, from the inside out.
Closing Thoughts: A New Kind of Obedience
What this experience reiterated to me—what experiences like this are unceasingly teaching me—is that obedience doesn’t always look like action.
Sometimes it looks like pausing. Sometimes it looks like not pushing. Sometimes it looks like rescheduling an appointment—not only not explaining why, but not needing to.
And sometimes it looks like waking up at 3:33 a.m., choosing stillness over panic, and realizing that God is still speaking in the silence—and that this middle-of-the-night “health emergency” was exactly why God was guiding certain actions to be taken beforehand, in the first place.
To reiterate:
Dodging comes from fear.
Discernment comes from peace.
And learning to tell the difference—especially when the difference is subtle—is part of walking in spiritual maturity.
If you’re in a place right now where you’re asking:
“Am I resisting? Or am I resting?”
“Am I giving up? Or am I following peace?”
“Is this avoidance? Or is this alignment?”
Follow up by asking yourself these questions:
“What’s the fruit? Does this bring anxiety, spiraling, and shame? Or does this bring peace, clarity, and release?”
That’s the D-word.
And that’s what this resurrection season taught me.
The Twin Tree Project 