I sometimes wonder if the greatest spiritual discipline is not fasting or silence or waking up at 5 a.m. to read Greek words out of a study Bible.
I think maybe it’s just staying.
Staying married when the house smells like coffee grounds and old arguments. When love stops performing tricks for you. When two exhausted people keep passing each other in dim kitchens carrying groceries, children, grief, unpaid bills, and the silent weight of their own becoming. Staying long enough to discover that intimacy is not built from perpetual passion, but from surviving seasons where the romance feels lackluster and choosing tenderness anyway.
Staying in the church when the sermons sometimes miss you completely and the worship feels dry as dust in your mouth. Staying because somewhere beneath all the awkwardness and failure, Christ still walks among ordinary people.
Staying in friendship long enough to be known beyond performance.
Staying with the text when it confuses you instead of reshaping God into someone easier to digest.
Staying in prayer when it feels like talking into the dark.
Everyone is obsessed with the next thing now. Next city. Next relationship. Next identity. Next revelation. Next escape hatch.
We mistake movement for transformation.
But God rarely builds people through constant exits.
A seed stays buried before it becomes anything worth harvesting. Roots grow in hidden places. Depth requires permanence. Commitment is what modern people call stagnation right before it bears fruit.
And sometimes I think the reason we keep leaving is because staying forces us to confront ourselves. There are distractions everywhere now. Infinite ways to avoid the slow work of becoming holy.
But God is almost always somewhere inside the thing you are trying to leave.
Not every situation should be endured forever. Some things truly are dead, abusive, corrupt, or rotten at the root. Wisdom matters.
But most people today are not starving from too much suffering.
They are starving from a lack of endurance.
The soul matures the same way oak trees do.
Slowly.
B🤍
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