The Slow Work of Abiding
2 Timothy 2:13
“If we believe not, yet he abideth faithful: he cannot deny himself.”
The Lie
There was a time when I believed that if God was truly present, the moment would change.
The anxiety would lift.
The baby would settle.
My thoughts would slow.
The tears would dry faster.
If He was there, surely I would feel it.
But He didn’t fix the moment—and I didn’t feel Him.
For a long time, that felt like failure. Like I was doing something wrong because I wasn’t sensing comfort when I thought I should.
This is yet another place where motherhood exposes the gap.
The nursery floor at 2am does not feel spiritual. It feels human—overstimulated, lonely, foggy. Sometimes resentful, sometimes numb. And in those moments, the idea of “going to find Scripture” can feel like just another task, another demand—another thing to do right.
The lie that creeps in during hard seasons is that if you don’t feel Him, He must not be there.
The Truth
The deeper truth is this: His presence is not measured by your nervous system. It is not the same as sensation. Nowhere are we promised that God’s nearness will always register emotionally.
We are promised His presence—not the feeling of it.
And those are not the same thing.
Sometimes His presence does feel like peace.
Sometimes it feels like clarity.
Sometimes it feels like strength.
And sometimes? It feels like nothing at all — but “nothing” does not mean absence. It just means you are human in a hard moment.
For years, I wanted God to fix the moment immediately—to interrupt it with relief and prove He was near by changing how it felt.
TRUTH BOMB: There is no short-cut in the journey of faith.
We want answers because we want the discomfort to go away and the tension to resolve.
But what if the discomfort is not the problem to solve?
What if it is the place where something deeper is being formed?
The Lesson
Now I’m learning something slower and steadier: He is not always the One who removes the moment—but He is the One Who remains in it.
Remaining is quieter than I expected. It doesn’t compete. It doesn’t rush. It doesn’t shout over the noise.
IT SIMPLY STAYS.
The Response
When I design these small anchors of Scripture, I sometimes wonder the same thing you might: will this even help in the hardest moment?
Because I know what it feels like to not want to do “the spiritual thing.” I know what it feels like when encouragement sounds hollow because your body is exhausted and your mind is loud.
I’m not trying to create something that fixes the 2am moment.
I’m trying to create something that forms reflex over time. Not emergency oxygen—but formation.
Something you see enough times that, later—maybe not even in the crisis itself—the truth begins to surface more naturally. Not forced or frantic—just familiar.
Security makes change possible, but it doesn’t come from a single powerful moment. It grows slowly, through repeated exposure to what is steady.
So maybe the question isn’t,
“Why don’t I feel Him?”
Maybe the gentler question is,
“Can I trust that He is here, even if I don’t feel Him?”
And sometimes the only honest answer is: “I don’t feel it. But I will believe.”
This is faith growing muscle.
One day, you may look back on a season that felt empty and realize you were not alone. You were carried in ways you couldn’t detect at the time.
He was steady when you were not. Not because you felt Him, but because He is faithful—not just by choice, but by nature.
Because He cannot be otherwise.
If you are in a moment right now where everything encouraging sounds hollow—you are not broken. You are human.
And even when you cannot hold on to what is true—He.Holds.You.
