“With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.”
Matthew 19:26
After I finished writing my third novel, I had the opportunity to query an agent I absolutely adored. In every way—both as a “heart” decision and a “head” decision, she seemed like the right fit. I wasn’t alone in my thoughts. My writing group, my critique partner, my family… We were all optimistic this time would be different.
I sent out my query and while I waited for a response, the characters in another work in progress began speaking to me. I hadn’t planned to delve into that story yet, but when thoughts about it kept me awake at night, I heeded the call and dove in. And it came alive! I came alive! That story, which I had struggled to wrangle for almost three years, suddenly started to come together. Every writer knows that feeling when a story takes off and we ourselves feel as though we’re flying. It’s exhilarating—and all too rare. I reveled in the joy of writing again.
Then I received a response from my dream agent: it was a no. She provided some feedback along with her reply, feedback that, although insightful, was incredibly disheartening. I was gutted.
As I reached for my phone to share the news with others and pour out my disappointment to them, I felt God nudging me to pause. To be still for just a moment, to sit in my disappointment with Him. So I did. I poured out all the words I would have shared with others to Him, then I tried to sit and be silent as I waited for Him.
But one thought kept rising to the surface until I couldn’t hold it in. Finally, I laid it, too, before God: I’m dreading the way this will steal my joy in writing.
Because isn’t that the inevitable result? When we receive discouraging news, when the plans don’t come together as we envisioned, when our dreams and hopes are deferred… Doesn’t it inevitably steal our joy? Rob us of our confidence? Send us crashing back down to the ground?
As my confession lingered in the air between us, I felt God whisper again.
“It doesn’t have to.”
Even now, those words bring tears to my eyes, because there is freedom in them. Room for God to work. Hope and promise.
Friends, we face unexpected, insurmountable, disheartening things all the time in this world. They steal our confidence, our hope, our joy, even sometimes our faith, and we feel we’re helpless to stop the natural progression. But our God is a God who stands outside of boundaries.
He’s a God who fed five thousand from a boy’s small lunch. Who raised the dead to life with a single word. Who, again and again, shows us that He exists beyond the natural order and the natural progression. And in Him, we aren’t at the mercy of those things either.
I’ve never heard such freeing words.
I let them seep into the cracked spaces. Let myself trust that God had a plan for this story, and the next, and the next, that couldn’t be hindered by anything in this world. That He had made me to write and to find joy and communion with Him in the writing–and nothing could steal that away.
With the words came an invitation. I felt as though He encouraged me to take a step back, to write just with Him. To linger in this fleeting place where only He and I get to share these stories, before they become crowded with agents and publishers and critics. It felt like both an encouragement and a promise.
I don’t know what you might be facing in your life just now, nor what the inevitable outcome might be. But if you’re staring discouragement and heartbreak in the face, afraid that what is happening will shake you to your core or cause you to lose sight of what God has given you, let me whisper these words over you, too: It doesn’t have to.
We are not at the mercy of any of these things. We’re secure in the hands of the God who meets us in the pain, in the unknown, in the inevitable–who turns those things around and makes them, instead, a door to something more. An invitation to linger with Him. A promise that the inevitable doesn’t have to be.
This devotional was first shared with my newsletter subscribers in June 2025.
