I wasted years waiting to feel sure.
Sure it was the right decision. Sure it was the right time. Sure I would not regret it. Sure I was ready.
I thought certainty would arrive first, and then I would take the leap. Then I would trust myself. Then I would begin.
But looking back, very few of the important things in my life happened that way. Most arrived wrapped in uncertainty. Most involved taking the next step before I felt ready. Most involved trusting something I could not yet fully name without having all the answers first.
So I did what the world told me to do. I tried to think my way through life. And when thinking did not work, I tried the other things.
I talked to trees. I sat and pondered. I cloud gazed. I journaled unconscious thoughts. I looked for signs from the Universe. I listened to my body. I sat in the quiet and waited for something — anything — to tell me which way to go.
Something I was not expecting happened: it worked. Not perfectly, not even cleanly… but something was there in the stillness. There was something in the sitting, and in the wonder of creation, that genuinely quieted the noise inside me. All this time, God has been SO much closer than I believed.
There was something in all of it that gave me enough peace to take the next step, and for a long time I did not know what to do with that. How could it have been Him? See, I had long ago given my life to Jesus… but nobody told me those two realities — the 3D world and the Spirit world — were allowed to coexist.
They told me that was blasphemy.
They labeled it sin.
I think we have gotten this backwards.
We look at the world’s tools — the stillness practices, the wonder, the listening, the turning toward creation for comfort and clarity — and we call them dangerous. They’ve been labeled by some as New Age. Christians most often call them deception. To be fair, sometimes they are, when they are pointed in the wrong direction.
I want to suggest something that took me years of surrender to understand: the world did not invent those things. God did.
For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse. (Romans 1:20)
Creation speaks. It has always spoken. When someone sits beside a tree, or on the back of a horse, or beside the ocean, or on top of a mountain with a breathtaking view, and feels something ancient and settling move through them, they are not imagining it. They are existing inside His handiwork without the map to know whose house they are in.
The door is real. The peace is real. The quiet voice is real. They just do not yet know His name.
That was me, too, for longer than I want to admit. I was brushing up against the Holy Spirit in the stillness and calling it the Universe. I was hearing something in the quiet and not knowing how to tell the difference between my ego, my soul, my self, and Him.
The impressions were real. The confusion was in not having the framework to name what — or rather, Who — I was actually encountering. The more I truly surrendered to God, the more I began to understand something that quietly rewired everything I thought I knew.
I had always been taught that I needed to invite Jesus into my heart. And yes, willingness is required. A yes answer is required, but I had it backwards. I was treating salvation like I was the host and He was waiting on my porch. Like I was the one extending the invitation and He was hoping I would get around to it.
Scripture does not say that.
Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you. (John 15:16)
We love him, because he first loved us. (1 John 4:19)
He knocked first. He chose first. He loved first.
Revelation 3:20 is not a picture of Jesus waiting politely outside a stranger’s door hoping to be let in someday. It is a picture of the Lord of all creation standing at the door of what already belongs to Him — you — and giving you the dignity of choice.
You are not inviting a guest. You are accepting the invitation of the One whose house you already are.
What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own? (1 Corinthians 6:19)
You are His temple. You were always His temple. The moment you said yes to His invitation, He moved in. Not as a visitor. As the Lord of the house.
That is the reframe that changed everything for me.
Once I understood that the Holy Spirit was not some distant force I had to conjure or coax or earn, and that He was already dwelling, already present, already speaking from inside the temple He had taken up residence in, I stopped trying to think my way to certainty. I started learning to be still enough to hear.
Be still, and know that I am God. (Psalm 46:10)
And those worldly tools? The tree sitting and the cloud gazing and the journaling and the stillness? They did not go away. They got redeemed. Because creation is not the enemy of God. Creation is the evidence of God.
When I sit with a tree now, I am not looking for the Universe. I am honoring what He made. I am learning from it the way He always intended. I am letting His handiwork do what Romans 1:20 says it does — declare Him.
The practices did not change. The Person changed everything.
Without Him, those tools curve back inward. They become ego. They become self-trust dressed up as enlightenment. They become “my truth” and “what feels right to me” and the Universe serving my desires. There is no anchor outside the self, so the self becomes the god.
That is where the world’s version goes wrong. It in not in the stillness, but in who the stillness is pointed toward.
With Him, stillness becomes waiting on the Lord. Wonder becomes worship. Listening becomes discernment. Creation becomes cathedral. The same posture, the same quiet, the same turning away from noise… but now it leads somewhere.
Now it leads to Someone.
I have started to remember that some answers do not arrive because we think harder. Answers arrive because we keep living surrendered to Him.
Sometimes the answer comes in a conversation. Sometimes it is in a moment of unexpected peace. Sometimes it comes in hindsight, when you look back and see His hand in what felt like chaos at the time. And sometimes, just when you have stopped straining and simply rested in Him, He sends several answers all at once.
Trust comes before certainty. Surrender comes before clarity. The courage to keep going comes before the confirmation that you were right. And sometimes the certainty never comes at all — and that is okay, because He is already in the house. He already knows the way.
Our job is not to feel sure. Our job is to remain in Him.
I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing. (John 15:5)
You were not designed to think your way through life. You were designed to abide. To stay. To remain. To let the One who already dwells in you lead from the inside out.
So the next time you feel drawn to sit in the quiet, to turn toward creation, to listen for something you cannot quite name, do not be afraid of that. Follow it all the way to the One it is pointing toward. Let the world’s signpost lead you to the Lord it was always meant to reveal.
He invited you first. He is already in the house. Be still and know.
If you have never accepted His invitation; if you have spent years listening for something in the quiet and have not yet put a name to what you have been hearing… that still small voice has a name. His name is Jesus.
He is not waiting for you to get it together. He is not waiting for you to feel ready. He is standing at the door of the temple you already are and He is knocking.
You only have to say yes.
Twin Tree Project 