Trusting your path when you can't see what's ahead
focusing on the next step, not the whole staircase
When I was around five years old, my mom would pray with me every night before bed.
After our prayers, she would hug me tight and tell me that God has a special plan for my life. Each time, without fail, I’d ask her what it was. But her response was always the same: “I’m not sure, you’re going to have to wait and see.”
Even though I couldn’t understand why I had to wait (especially since my next question was usually asking her, well how long until I find out?), I still trusted her words. Through so many difficult seasons in my life, I strongly believed that one day, I’d finally have the answers to all my endless questions.
The last year and a half was harder than I ever could’ve anticipated. Or, as one of my closest friends put it, “a rollercoaster that I’m sure you’d like to get off of.”
I struggled to see what was in front of me, and was faced with the same questions over and over: How can I continue trusting my path when I can’t see what’s ahead? What does it look like to surrender, to rely solely on faith, not on what’s seen but what I know to be true?
The irony of strength is that it causes you to feel the exact opposite. When I picked the word ‘resilience’ in January to live by throughout the year, I never knew how much I’d need to lean on it.
I look at mental strength the same way I see it in the physical sense: it takes time to build endurance and to bounce back faster than you did before. And even when it feels like you’re taking a step backward, every time you try again is proof that your strength is building in ways you can’t see yet.
But the question underneath it all, still remains. How do we keep trusting our path when it’s unclear? When we feel like we’re going around the same mountain over and over again, without an ending in sight?
Trust isn’t found in answers, it’s found in learning how to let go of control.
We cling so tightly to clarity because we think an explanation will help us accept our circumstances or prepare us for what comes next.
I look back on some of the hardest times in my life and realize that even if I found the answers as to why it was happening, it wouldn’t have changed anything. It never would’ve magically brought me from the place I was, to where I desired to be.
That’s the hardest part about the middle. We don’t want to sit with the pain, with the hurt, with every question we can’t find an answer to. We ache for what’s missing by trying to gain control, hoping it’ll guide us toward an outcome.
Trust isn’t found when we finally reach the end or when the full picture reveals itself. It’s found in accepting that we won’t always be able to see what’s next.
We aren’t meant to figure out each part of our journey. Our trust lies in knowing that every moment of hurt, pain, and redirection is necessary to bring us to the next part of our path, even when the timing doesn’t make sense.
You won’t always be in this place.
Another hard reality to accept about the middle. Your mind tries to convince you that you’ll always be in the same place you are now. Because when you keep facing one hard obstacle after another, it’s easy to fall in the trap of thinking that you’ll never move forward.
But that’s far from the truth.
Think about where you were five years ago. Each season of our lives demands a different version of us, and what you wanted then is likely different from what you want now.
Things take shape differently, and even if you’re still waiting for answers, if you’re still in the middle of wondering when it’s all going to come together, the past and time collectively prove the same thing to be true: everything eventually comes together, and never a second too early or too late.
When you finally get to that place, you’ll find yourself asking a different series of questions.
Like how time could pass and suddenly you’re standing right where you never thought you’d be. Or how you kept moving forward, because you remember when you could hardly picture what taking the next step even looked like.
You might not be where you want to be, but you aren’t where you used to be. And there’s something deeply comforting about knowing that as long as you keep pushing forward, you’ll eventually reach the place you wanted to be all along.
Hope is the compass that’ll always point you in the right direction.
We lose nothing but gain everything when we put our faith in something we can’t see.
Even with my innocence at the age of five and wondering when I would have all the answers to the “whys” and “when’s”, I trusted in the unspoken promise of hope. Every single experience from there on out, good or bad, led me somewhere I could’ve never imagined at the time.
There were seasons in my life when I questioned everything. When everything that I hoped would go right, went wrong. When I questioned why certain doors closed before I was ready for them to shut, or why some never opened to begin with. When I questioned what my path would’ve looked like if I would’ve made this choice rather than that choice.
We think we know what’s best for us, but we can’t always see the full picture, especially when we keep trying to walk forward without a sense of direction. But hope fills the absence of the unknown. It never rushes, just patiently waits until we’re ready to take the next step.
Time has a way of proving that some things can only be understood by looking backward. Even when we’re met with broken versions of ourselves, or when we can’t clear the fog in front of us.
Because the most important moment isn’t when we reach the end, it’s everything we learn along the way.
It’s putting trust into every single step we take, believing our path is unfolding even when we can’t see what’s ahead. It’s knowing that hope is our compass guiding us forward, and that one day, we’ll finally have all the answers we were once waiting for. Not in our timing, but the right timing. No matter how long it takes.
Thank you so much for reading! Be sure to check out more of my work at Truth Within Silence and follow along on Instagram.
Beautifully written! “Trust isn’t found in answers, it’s found in learning how to let go of control”. I definitely feel that way. I believe that, above all, this self-confidence, the belief that you’ll be able to cope with the hard times ahead, because they’re definitely coming, is a state worth striving for. I often get the feeling that people work so hard on themselves in the hope that hard times will never come again, and that’s (unfortunately, maybe?!) an illusion
I’ve found that some of the most important seasons of my life were the ones where I couldn’t see what God was doing until much later. Trusting Him without having all the answers is rarely easy, but looking back, I can see His faithfulness woven through every chapter. Thank you for this reminder.