The Stories of Undramatic Seasons

I started a note of possible blog topics on my phone when I was diagnosed in February 2024: ideas, titles, single sentences, paragraphs—each a little seed waiting to be planted. I added to it every day; there was so much going on in my head that the note eventually grew long enough to require several swipes to reach the bottom. Those topics burned within me once, and yet never made it beyond that note.

Those topics no longer burn within me, so the list of ideas has languished for nearly two years. The note isn’t even on my phone anymore—I moved it off the cloud and onto to my laptop. I haven’t added to it in quite some time. It still surfaces in my thoughts, though. I often debate forcing myself to resurrect it and pick an item to write about, but that kind of writing never yields anything good for me. A chore merely to be done.

My most prolific writing times are when I’m off on traveling adventures or in a profound spiritual crisis. On the desktop version of the blog you can view the archives in the left column, a year-by-year count of my posts. My wordiest years were 2010–2012 (150 posts cumulatively) and then 2024-2025 (75 posts cumulatively). On the other end of the spectrum, however, in other multi-year stretches, I was lucky if I posted in the low double-digits. Some individual years, I didn’t even make it out the single digits. Between 2010 and 2012, I was went to Kenya twice—those trips released a steady flow of stories and reflections. And most of you know how 2024-25 went: writing these last two years has been like breathing—an unparalleled volume of words rose from wells deep within; I was in a writing zone all of its own.

Now it’s 2026, and that well of words seems to have run dry, which is why it has maybe seemed like crickets around here. No crisis. No traveling. Just the steady state of living. That’s not to say there isn’t anything happening in my life. There’s the return of the buzzards. (My free morning entertainment has finally migrated back.)  There’s the shenanigans of a dumb baby groundhog that strayed into my garage—just last night!—that I spent far too long trying to capture and return him back to the wild. (He eventually made his way out after some exhaustion on both sides.) There’s wedding cookie table “university". (Who knew, right?) I am back to driving again after my last seizure in March. (My days as an adult teenager are now over.) And, of course, there’s always my health. (Hello, perimenopause! By all means, yes, please pull up a seat at the table. So not glad you are here.) 

But words? They have been hard to come by, as has motivation at large. Anything that even remotely hits the slightest tremor on the writing Richter scale feels ordinary and uninspired, dictated by an unspoken threshold in my mind for what is worthy and unworthy to write about. I haven’t even been writing in my own personal journals, let alone for a public audience.

I don’t know that I have ever pre-ordered a book before in my life, but if there are things registering on Tish Harrison Warren’s writing Richter scale, I’m reading it. She released her new book What Grows In Weary Lands: On Christian Resilience earlier this week. I pre-ordered it back in January. I honestly forgot I did, so when it arrived this week, current me thanked past me for the surprise. (Let me tell ya, it’s a real walk in the park when you hit midlife and brain cancer all at the same time.) The prologue and the first chapter alone were worth the buy because she might as well have taken the words right out of my own brain. 

There was one particular snippet that immediately jumped off the page for me, the nudge to finally sit down and write this very post. She writes about how she had been in a season of extreme weariness, running on fumes. She shared about how she had gotten into a fight with her husband and daughter and stormed out of the house. She went for a drive and at one point just cried out into the void at God, “I don’t know what to do!” She then drove home, put her kids to bed, made amends with her daughter and husband, and went to sleep. What struck me was her next line: "And in our moment in history, such an ending to this small story does not seem brave or profound or worthwhile. Because of this, we end up not telling the stories of these weary yet undramatic seasons—unless those stories end in a total dismantling and reinvention of our lives.”

Who wants to hear about the day in and day out realities of laundry, working the same job for thirteen years, spending a Friday night, single, home alone, catching a groundhog stuck in your garage, and paying bills? Monotony is just that—monotonous. The same is true in the spiritual landscape. Praying for that one particular person for thirteen years? Reading the same verses for your whole life and still not able to fully recall them? Going to church every Sunday, only to find you’re still struggling with some of the same sins and vices? Bor-ing. Who wants to sit down and watch those scenes? 

Eugene Peterson says it well in his book A Long Obedience in the Same Direction:

There is a great market for religious experience in our world; there is little enthusiasm for the patient acquisition of virtue, little inclination to sign up for a long apprenticeship in what earlier generations of Christians called holiness. Religion in our time has been captured by the tourist mindset. Religion is understood as a visit to an attractive site to be made when we have adequate leisure.

A long obedience in the same direction means there are stories we don’t tell because quiet, day-to-day living and faithfulness isn’t glamorous. I have been captured by a tourist mindset of my own life, believing my life and my writing were valuable because they were sensational in their own right, worth tuning in for, which is disturbingly and embarrassingly self-absorbed.

Day-to-day faithfulness isn’t glamorous. And yet that day-to-day is where we spend our lives. It’s the liminal space between the high highs and low lows of life that we tread the most—and that space between is where we acquire that thing called holiness. It’s often quiet and unnoticed, unhurried, a “patient acquisition,” and a “long apprenticeship,” as Peterson said.

Perhaps the ordinary act of watching buzzards each morning—finding God’s care even in ugly birds—is as valuable as the extraordinary act of listening to a neuro‑oncologist tell me I have rare brain cancer—and still believe in God’s care for me in an ugly diagnosis. Both shape my long obedience toward God and holiness; both contribute to spiritual growth if I have eyes to see them.

We each have our stories of undramatic seasons, but may they each be part of a much larger story being told of not only our patient acquisition of holiness, but also of the God who is sovereign over that patient acquisition—and is willing to wait for us.