Sitting with What Is Unfinished

Sitting with What Is Unfinished

There is a particular discomfort that belongs to the middle of things. Not the beginning, which carries momentum. Not the end, which carries relief. The middle, which has neither — which asks us to keep going without the clarity of a resolution in sight.

We live most of our lives in the middle of things. The relationship that has not resolved. The healing that is happening slowly. The character work that God began three years ago and has not finished. The prayer that is still waiting.

Paul writes from prison: I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ. (Philippians 1:6) The confidence here is not that the work is done. It is that the work was begun by Someone who does not abandon what He starts.

There is a difference between things that are unfinished and things that are abandoned. We tend to confuse them when we are in the middle — when the silence is long and the progress is invisible, it is easy to assume that nothing is happening. That the work has stopped.

But the one who began the work is not someone who loses interest. He is not someone who starts projects and leaves them when they get complicated. He is completing what He started in you — in the relationship, in the healing, in the character — at a pace and by a method that may not be visible to you from where you are standing.

The discomfort of the middle is real. But it is not evidence of abandonment. It is just what the middle feels like. The one who began this is still working.