Maybe this comes along with the bizarre territory of growing, but there’s something about this season of stillness that is waking me up like a blow horn to all of my humanness.

It feels like God is standing up in heaven holding a boombox. One of those big vintage ones, propped on his shoulder. And he’s blasting Mr. Brightside to get my attention. He knows I’ll sing every word. And then in the silence when the song ends, like a loud and billowing promise, He tells me to remain. To remain who and how I am in a world that wishes so desperately I wouldn’t. That this is enough.

Could there ever be a more bold promise? I’m convinced there couldn’t be.

We are all terribly strange. We are loud, we are brilliant and we are broken beyond articulation. We are paralyzed by the fact that we are here at all- and we have been trained in the art of moving. But not in that of surrender. We think we are doing something wrong when we aren’t moving, when we aren’t racking up enough footage for our highlight reel. We become humiliated. Maybe because we don’t feel like we have enough small talk material to fill a conversation, maybe because we don’t feel interesting enough, ambitious enough. We talk to each other in bullet point victories, we skip right to the big moments while barely scratching the surface of everything that HAD to happen for us to get there.

We’re always looking for the loopholes to becoming something more, to reaching somewhere new. But what if we just listened to the bold promise that where we are is enough. What if we had one moment of insane bravery and we remained who we are. Right now. Because the person you want to be isn’t going to become that person by skipping over the person you are right now.

God is a brilliant poet. In each season, He writes the lines of our lives so artfully, so abstractly, that we cannot know the meaning until the season comes to a close. We can’t interpret his rhymes until we’ve learned to listen to our own. He has a way of using seasons of in-between to prune. He takes things away and leaves us with nothing but what we are right in that very moment to grab onto.

Then He blasts Mr. Brightside and hopes we’ll still be dancing when the song ends. I hope you will be.

What season are you in? How are you listening to God and remaining who he created you to be?