A Letter to the Woman Who Keeps Showing Up

Dear you,

I have been thinking about what it takes to keep showing up.

Not the dramatic showing up — not the crisis that summons extraordinary reserves of faith you did not know you had. I mean the ordinary kind. The Sunday morning when you are tired and the week has been long and the commute to church is cold and you go anyway. The quiet time that has become inconsistent but has not disappeared. The prayer that feels thin and insufficient but which you offer anyway, because you have decided that a thin prayer is better than no prayer, and that God receives both.

I want you to know: that kind of faithfulness is real faithfulness. Not a lesser version of it. Not faithfulness-in-training. The actual thing.

The Christian life is not primarily made of peak experiences. It is made of the ordinary texture of returning — to prayer, to scripture, to community, to the practice of trusting a God you cannot always feel. Most of that returning happens in unremarkable circumstances, in unremarkable ways, by women who are not feeling particularly spiritual and are doing it anyway.

You are one of those women. I see you.

I know some weeks the showing up costs more than other weeks. I know there are seasons when the faith feels like a set of practices more than a living relationship, and you wonder if the practices are enough, and whether you are doing something wrong, and whether something has quietly gone out that you have not managed to relight.

Stay close. The dryness does not mean the root is gone. Seasons change.

The God who called you is not finished with you. He is not watching your inconsistencies and calculating. He is watching you come back — again, and again, and again — and He recognises this for what it is.

It is love.

Keep showing up.

With great respect for the long faithfulness, A witness to your returning