There are seasons we would never have written into our own story. Not because they are dramatic … often they are quiet, unglamorous, and long … but because they ask for a kind of faithfulness that no one sees and no one claps for. To live by faith is not about answering the question of whether your chose a season or not. The question is whether you will steward the season you’re in anyway.
It is easy to be faithful when the season is desirable – when there is growth, recognition, momentum, a story worth telling. It is much harder to be faithful in the season that feels like a waiting room, or a wilderness, or a holding pattern you never agreed to. And yet, for most of us, those are the seasons that end up doing the deepest work in us. Not because they are pleasant. But because they are the only places where faithfulness has to be practised without reward.
Stewardship is measured in the unseen
Perhaps the biggest misunderstanding of stewardship is when we reduce it to money or talent or platform. Stewardship, at its root, is about what you do with what you have been entrusted and that includes time, and seasons, and suffering, and the quiet ordinary days that no one takes a photo of, likes, applauds or rewards.
A season is a trust. It has been given to you for a reason you may not yet understand. And the question God seems most interested in is not did you enjoy it? but what did you do with it while you had it? Did you become bitter, or did you become more faithful? Did you wait well, or did you waste the waiting? Did you steward the hidden season the way you would have stewarded a visible one?
Faithfulness without an audience
Here is the hard part of a season you didn’t choose: hardly no one is watching. The world does not pause to acknowledge the mother who keeps showing up, the man who keeps his integrity in a job that will never promote him, the person who keeps praying through a silence that will not break. These people are not on any stage. And that is precisely where their faithfulness is tested and … forged.
You will probably not get a public reward for how you handle this season. But you are not stewarding it for the public. You are stewarding it before God, who sees what is done in secret, and who is far more interested in who you are becoming in the waiting than in what you are producing.
So do not despise the season you did not choose. Do not rush it, and do not resent it. Steward it. Water the small things. Keep your word. Keep your prayers. Keep showing up where you are planted, even when the ground feels hard and the fruit feels far away. One day you will look back and understand that this season – the one you never wanted – was the very place God was doing some of His most faithful work in you.
And wherever you may find yourself planted this season, make sure your stewardship is aligned with the will of God.
One, Perfect Love ❤️