I’ve been sitting with a quiet question lately, one that keeps returning no matter how many times I try to set it aside:
Is the desire to keep showing up here, on this blog in this little corner of Twin Tree, something God is asking of me right now? Or is it simply my own determination refusing to let go?
I have always believed that faith looks like movement – that even in hard seasons we keep walking, keep planting, keep speaking life because God is still God and the work is still His. I still believe that. I will always believe that. But I’m learning there’s a difference between a challenging season and a life that has simply changed shape.
Chronic pain and fatigue have been part of my story for a long time. What once felt like an emergency has, over years and especially over recent months, settled into something quieter and more permanent. People who struggle with chronic pain or chronic health conditions will understand this well. For those who may not understand it so easily, think of it like this, because this is the best way I can describe it:
You “get used to it,” but that isn’t necessarily a good thing. The body that used to alarm me at an 8/10 pain day now just folds the laundry through it. The heart that does something strange gets a quiet “wait and see.” The bone-deep exhaustion that used to stop everything gets reduced to a polite “I’m just tired,” and a deep, inner push to just keep going. Things that once would have sent the old me into crisis now barely warrant a mention.
I stopped hoping for pain-free a while ago. The new hopes are smaller and more practical: less pain than yesterday. A few decent hours. Enough energy to shower. The ability to cook dinner. Making it through an outing without paying for it for three days afterward.
That shift scares me more than the pain itself sometimes. It has become a mind**** of sorts, at this point. The scariest thing chronic pain has done is quietly rewrite what I consider an acceptable quality of life. At first I thought, “I can’t live like this.” So I searched. I made appointments. I tried treatments. I kept believing someone would help. And then enough time passed, and somehow the unbearable became the baseline.
The medications only added more new issues, so I stopped taking them. I started employing more natural remedies and praying for the strength to allow them to be enough to make what was actually wrong bearable. I stopped asking “How do I get back to normal?” and started asking “How do I make today survivable?”
I don’t want to make excuses. I never have. Consistency has always been a struggle for me at Twin Tree because of the physical realities I carry, and I’ve never wanted that to become a story of why I couldn’t rather than a story of what God could still do through limited strength. I still believe He is able to heal completely, despite what modern medicine insists about “management only.” I will not give the diagnosis more power than the One who holds my body and my future.
But there is a tension I can no longer ignore. I know that God led me, and called me, to create and write for Twin Tree. Lately, though, I’ve been asking Him, “am I being faithful by continuing to push posts out, even when the cost is high? Or am I refusing the rest You might actually be inviting me into? Verse & Vision often goes out late. I rarely post anything beyond Verse & Vision lately. I know that is not honoring the call. Where do you want me? What are you asking of me?”
I don’t have a clean answer yet. I only know that I want whatever I do next, whether it looks like continued writing or a quieter season, to come from listening rather than striving. From faith rather than fear of falling behind. From the quiet confidence that the work of Twin Tree was never mine to sustain by sheer force of will.
Maybe the most honest thing I can do right now is simply name where I am: standing between the desire to keep planting and the growing awareness that sometimes the most faithful next step is to stop digging for a while and just sit under the trees already growing.
I’m still listening, and waiting on Him. It is not easy. I am still doing my best, even when was is produced doesn’t look or feel like “my best” to me. My faith is not weakening, and I do not doubt God. I, though, am weak, and I doubt myself. That is the truth, and those who follow what I share here deserve to hear it outright.
I am so very grateful for those who continue to visit Twin Tree – especially those who continue to reach out. Thank you for your concern, and your encouragement. Please keep me, and my family, in your prayers.