How to Hear God When You're in the Middle of a Season You Didn't Choose

I am writing this one from inside it.

Not from the other side, where everything has resolved and I can tie it up neatly and tell you what God did and how it all worked out. I'm writing this from the middle — from the place where the unwanted season is still very much underway and the ending isn't visible yet and I'm doing my best to keep my hand in God's and my feet moving forward one day at a time.

So if you're in the middle of something you didn't choose, I want you to know this isn't a post from someone who has it figured out. This is a conversation between two women on a couch, both holding their coffee a little tighter than usual, being honest about how hard it is to hear God when the noise of an unwanted season is so loud.

How the Season Found Me

My current unwanted season didn't arrive all at once. It crept in the way most of them do — one hard thing at a time, until I looked up one day and realized I was surrounded.

It started with my health. A pseudo-tumor in my brain. Vision loss. A surgery I needed, a recovery that's been longer and more layered than I anticipated, a body that's been telling me for longer than I want to admit that something needed to change. And when your body starts talking that clearly, eventually you have to listen — even when listening means making decisions you weren't ready to make.

One of those decisions was around our Apartment Life ministry. For years my family has served in this role, living on-site in an apartment community and building relationships with our neighbors as an act of ministry. It's meaningful work and I'm grateful for every season of it. But somewhere along the way, the demands of it began quietly draining what I didn't have left to give — my time, my energy, my joy. My health crisis made what had been a quiet tension impossible to ignore any longer. So we made a decision — not to walk away entirely, but to step out of another fixed two-year commitment. We're still here, still serving, but with the freedom to step away when we need to rather than being locked into a term that doesn't bend for seasons like this one.

And there's still a real transition on the horizon, even without a full stepping-away — new rhythms, new limits, a new normal that hasn't fully taken shape yet. My focus is coming back to my family in the way it should have always been centered, and that's genuinely good. But even a softer transition is still a transition. And transitions, even the right ones, can feel like loss.

I'm holding all of this at once — the relief and the grief, the rightness of the decision and the uncertainty of what comes next, the gratitude and the anxiety sitting side by side in my chest like uninvited houseguests who don't seem to be leaving anytime soon.

If any part of that resonates, friend — if you're also holding more than one hard thing at once in a season you didn't fully choose — pull up a chair. You're not alone in this.

What The Book of Ruth Teaches Me About Being Honest With God

There's a woman in Scripture I keep returning to in this season, and her name isn't the one we usually focus on when we read her book.

We know the book of Ruth. We know Ruth — her loyalty, her faithfulness, her beautiful declaration of commitment to Naomi. Ruth is extraordinary and her story deserves every bit of attention it gets. But I want to talk about Naomi, because Naomi is the one in the unwanted season. Naomi is the one who didn't choose any of it.

She left her home country with her husband and two sons because of a famine — already an unwanted disruption. She buried her husband in a foreign land. Then she buried both of her sons. And she was left in a country that wasn't hers, with two daughters-in-law she loved but couldn't provide for, with no path forward she could see.

When she finally made the journey home to Bethlehem, the women of the city recognized her and called out her name: Naomi. And this is what she said back:

"Don't call me Naomi. Call me Mara, because the Almighty has dealt very bitterly with me. I went away full, but the Lord has brought me back empty. Why call me Naomi, since the Lord has afflicted me and the Almighty has brought calamity upon me?" (Ruth 1:20–21, BSB)

I want to sit with this for a moment, because I think we tend to rush past it.

Naomi didn't perform contentment she didn't feel. She didn't offer a tidy theological explanation for her suffering. She stood in her hometown, in front of people who knew her, and said out loud: I went away full and I came back empty. The Almighty has dealt bitterly with me.

That's not a crisis of faith to me. That's faith honest enough to say the hard thing directly to God and about God, without dressing it up. Naomi turned toward God even in her bitterness. She didn't walk away from Him. She named what she was carrying in His direction.

And here's what I find so remarkable about the rest of her story: God didn't correct her bitterness before He moved on her behalf. He didn't require her to adjust her theology or clean up her feelings before He began working. He just kept working. Quietly, providentially, in the ordinary movements of a daughter-in-law going to glean in a field — God was already weaving redemption into the fabric of a season Naomi couldn't yet see.

She went home empty. She couldn't have imagined what full was going to look like on the other side.

Does This Season Even Have a Purpose?

There's a passage in Ecclesiastes I've returned to more times than I can count in unwanted seasons, and it's probably one you already know:

"There is an appointed time for everything, and a time for every purpose under heaven." (Ecclesiastes 3:1, BSB)

What follows is that familiar list of opposites — a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot, a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance.

I used to read this as a comfort about the future — this hard season won't last forever, a better time is coming. And that's true. But I've come to understand it as something deeper than that. It's not just saying seasons change. It's saying every season — including the ones we didn't choose, including the ones that feel like loss, including the ones where we're being uprooted rather than planted — has been appointed. Has a purpose. Is held within the sovereign knowledge of a God who exists outside of time and can see what I can't.

A time to uproot is still an appointed time. A time to mourn is still a purposeful time. The season you're in right now — the one you wouldn't have chosen, the one that feels like too much — isn't outside of God's awareness or outside of His purposes. It's held in the same hands that appointed it.

That doesn't make it easy. But it does make it meaningful.

What Actually Helps Me Right Now

I want to be very honest with you about something, because I think it needs to be said.

There are seasons when you can't bring yourself to open your Bible for an extended study. When the energy isn't there, the focus isn't there, the spiritual appetite isn't there — and the guilt about all of that sits on top of the already-heavy weight of the season itself. I know this because I'm in one of those seasons right now.

What's been keeping me tethered to the Word lately is small. Some days it's nothing more than the verse of the day on the Bible app — one verse, read once, maybe prayed over briefly before the day takes over. That's the whole thing. That's the whole practice on the hardest days.

And I've had to make peace with that being enough for this season.

Not because I've stopped believing that deep, sustained time in Scripture is valuable — I believe it with everything in me. But because a lamp for your feet gives you enough light for the next step, not the whole road. And right now, one verse is sometimes all the light I have capacity to hold. I'm learning to receive it as the gift it is rather than measuring it against what I think it should be.

If that's where you are — if your Bible time has shrunk to something that feels embarrassingly small, if you're processing your season in small bites because that's all you can digest right now — I want to give you permission to be exactly where you are. God isn't disappointed in you. He's present with you, in the small thing, in the one verse, in the thirty-second prayer that's really just I need you today.

A few things that have actually helped me stay connected to God in the middle of this, in case they help you too:

One verse, received slowly. The Bible app verse of the day, a verse a friend texted, a passage that surfaced in a conversation — one verse, read slowly and carried through the day, can do more than a chapter read quickly and forgotten. Let it sit with you. Let it do its work.

Honest, unpolished prayer. Naomi said call me bitter and God kept working. You're allowed to bring your anxiety, your grief, your tension, your confusion, and your not-okay-ness directly to God without cleaning it up first. He already knows. Saying it out loud is for you.

Small moments of noticing. In an unwanted season, God's presence often shows up in small, easy-to-miss ways — a moment of unexpected peace, a conversation that landed at exactly the right time, a tiny mercy in the middle of a hard day. Paying attention to those doesn't require energy you don't have. It just requires a willingness to look.

Grace for the season you're actually in. This one is less a practice and more a daily decision. The season you're in right now isn't the season you'll always be in. You're allowed to meet God at the level of capacity you actually have today, without apologizing for it.

He Is Already Working

Isaiah 43:19 carries a promise I'm holding onto with both hands in this season:

"See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland." (BSB)

A way in the wilderness. Streams in the wasteland. God speaking these words to a people in an unwanted season, in exile, far from home — and telling them to look for the new thing already springing up around them.

Naomi went home empty and couldn't see what God was already doing in the ordinary movements of her daily life. She didn't know that the daughter-in-law walking beside her was about to step into a field that would change everything. She couldn't see it. But God was already making a way.

I can't fully see what God is doing in this season either. But I've lived long enough with Him to know that He works in the middle of the unwanted seasons, not just after them. The redemption is already being woven. The new thing is already springing up, even when I can't perceive it yet.

That's what I'm holding onto. And if you're in an unwanted season today, I want to offer it to you too — not as a tidy answer, but as a genuine hope. He sees you in this. He hasn't stepped away from your story. And He is already at work in ways you can't yet see.

Keep your hand in His. Take the next small step. Let the one verse be enough for today.

He's already making a way.

If this resonated, I'd love to have you subscribe and become a member of my community — you'll get The Sunday Sabbath in your inbox every week, plus the ability to reply and share your own story right here on the blog. Come sit on the porch a little longer.

If this stirred something in you, I'd love to hear it — reply and tell me what this brought up for you, or share your own story below. This is a space to process together, not just read alone.