Beyond the Silence: Seeing God in the Uncertain Seasons

By Cystal Virgin

The silence is not absence. Every step forward, even the ones that feel like setbacks, is part of a path being laid out by someone who can see further than we can.

A few months ago, I got news I didn't want.

I don't need to go into the details — most of you reading this have had a moment like it. The kind where you were hoping for one thing and got another, and the disappointment sits somewhere deep and quiet where you don't quite have words for it yet.

In the hours after, I found myself watching my two little girls. Just watching them. My five year old, bossy and tender in equal measure. My three year old, still baby-soft around the edges in ways I'm not ready to let go of. And something shifted in me — not all at once, but slowly, the way light changes in a room without you noticing until it's different.

For a few days, I saw them differently. More clearly, maybe. More gratefully. I held them a little longer. I was more patient than usual, more present. The grief had cracked something open, and through it I could see what I already had in a way I hadn't been seeing it before.

I've thought about that a lot since. How sometimes the waiting teaches us to love what's already in our hands.

The Struggle I Don't Talk About Much

I'll be honest with you about something I don't share often: growing our family has been harder than I expected.

We have two beautiful daughters, and we are deeply grateful for them. But the road to a third child has been long and uncertain — full of tests and appointments and questions that don't have clean answers yet, and negative results that hurt no matter how much faith you're carrying when you open them.

It is a quiet struggle. Most people who know me wouldn't know. And I think that's true for a lot of women sitting in similar seasons — carrying something heavy and real while life continues on the outside looking mostly normal.

I'm not writing this for sympathy. I'm writing it because I think some of you know exactly what I mean. And I want you to know you're not alone in it.

What I Know, Even Without Answers

Here is what I believe, even on the hard days:

God knows me. He is aware of my struggle — not in a distant, observing kind of way, but in the close, personal way of a Father who loves His child and has not forgotten her.

I believe that every new piece of information, every appointment, every result — even the disappointing ones — is God's way of moving me toward answers. The path isn't always direct. It isn't always comfortable. But I have a calm, settled knowing in my heart that my family is not finished growing. I don't know how. I don't know when. But I know it the way you know something that lives deeper than logic.

That kind of faith isn't something I manufactured. It's something I've been given — built slowly over years of watching God show up, in my own life and in the lives of people I love. It doesn't mean the hard moments don't hurt. They do. But they haven't shaken what I know to be true about who God is and whether He hears me.

He does. I'm certain of it.

What the Waiting Is Teaching Me

I used to think waiting was passive — something you endured until the real thing arrived. I'm learning it's anything but.

The waiting has taught me to hold my daughters differently. To receive them as the miracles they actually are rather than the given I sometimes treat them as. It has taught me that gratitude isn't just a feeling that shows up on good days — it's something you can choose to practice on the hard ones, and it changes what you're able to see.

The waiting has also deepened my belief in God in a way that comfortable seasons rarely do. When you have no choice but to trust — when the outcome is genuinely outside your control and all you can do is keep showing up and keep praying — you find out what your faith is actually made of. Mine, it turns out, is sturdier than I knew.

I don't have all the answers yet. But I trust the One who does.

For Anyone Else in a Season of Waiting

Whatever you are waiting for — a baby, a healing, a relationship, an answer that hasn't come — I want to offer you what has carried me:

God is not unaware of you. The silence is not absence. Every step forward, even the ones that feel like setbacks, is part of a path being laid out by someone who can see further than we can.

Keep going to the appointments. Keep asking the questions. Keep praying even when the prayers feel like they're going nowhere. And on the days when the grief cracks you open a little — let it. Sometimes that's exactly how gratitude gets in.

Your life is in good hands. I really believe that.

And so is mine.