A Year I Did Not Rush: On Stillness, Faith, and Letting Creativity Lead

Late in 2024, I sat with a vision board and a heart that was learning slowly how to trust again. I placed images, words, gentle longings across the big piece of board. I did not ask God for speed. I did not ask for spectacle. I only asked for truth, for alignment, for the courage to follow where the quiet might lead.

Today, as I look back across 2025, I see more than a dozen quiet ticks of success. None of them arrived loudly. None of them came through striving. Every single one arrived through slowing.

This year did not reward hustle. It rewarded surrender.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped trying to be in control of the outcome and instead became faithful to the daily invitation:

to pray, to meditate, to journal, to sit in the presence of God without performance.

And in that stillness, something extraordinary happened.

I began to receive.

Not in the way the world measures success, but in the way that changes you from the inside out.

One of my deepest wishes had been to work with a particular woman mentor ~ someone whose wisdom felt both grounded and spacious. I had released that desire to God without timeline or demand. And then, as only grace can arrange, I was gifted six weeks of walking alongside her.

Those six weeks became a doorway. Through it came new conversations, new courage, and eventually a business mentor team I could never have orchestrated on my own. Step by step, I was gently led into allowing Studio Kre’at to move from a quiet knowing inside my chest and into something real in the world.

Not forced.

Not rushed.

Born.

The studio has given me more than I imagined. It has opened space for portraits intimate, sacred exchanges between artist and subject. It has taken me back onto country roads, where the landscapes feel like prayers in motion, where the women who came before me seem to walk just ahead, leaving warmth in the dust. It has given me creative language for memory, ancestry, healing, and hope.

And what surprises me most is this ~ none of this arrived through pushing.

It arrived through permission.

Permission to rest when my body asked.

Permission to wait when clarity had not yet formed.

Permission to create without proving.

Permission to let God lead the timing.

🕊 You may like to pause here for a moment yourself and ask gently:

• Where did I try to rush this year?

• Where was I invited to slow, even when I resisted?

• What quiet successes unfolded that I may have overlooked?

• Where is God inviting me into deeper trust rather than greater effort?

You do not need perfect answers. Only honest ones.

For much of my life, I believed that momentum was built through effort alone. That if I just worked harder, pushed further, tried more, things would eventually break open. This year taught me something radically different:

Stillness is not the absence of movement.

Stillness is alignment with the right movement.

What has unfolded through Studio Kre’at, through writing, through faith, through creativity, feels less like something I built and more like something I was entrusted to carry.

And I am still carrying it quietly.

I share this not to place a bow around the year, but to speak to those who feel behind, tired, uncertain or simply invisible in their becoming.

If you are in a season where you feel you’ve stopped moving forward, I want to gently offer this truth:

You may not be stalled.

You may be being rooted.

Roots grow in darkness. They grow slowly. They grow without applause. And yet, when the time comes, everything visible depends on what was formed there.

And here, quietly, I offer a prayer for you and for me:

God of the slow unfolding,

You who move through breath and season and soil,

Teach us to trust the work You do in hidden places.

When we are tempted to rush, anchor us in presence.

When we feel behind, remind us we are being held.

When we grow tired of waiting, restore our sight for what is already growing.

Bless the work of our hands, even when it feels unfinished.

Bless the quiet yes in our hearts before the loud yes of the world.

And lead us gently into the year ahead,

Not with fear of what we must prove,

But with faith in who You are becoming through us.

Amen 🙏

As I now turn my heart toward 2026, I am not building a vision from pressure. I am building it from presence. From the quiet yes that forms when I sit before God and listen instead of striving to be heard.

I do not know all the shapes the coming year will take. But I know the posture I will hold it with.

Open hands.

Listening heart.

Willing spirit.

Unhurried creativity.

If you are standing on the edge of your own reflection right now, looking back on a year that confused you, stretched you, emptied you, or softened you ~ I invite you to ask a different kind of question as you move forward:

Not “What must I achieve next?”

But “What kind of person am I being invited to become?”

Because sometimes the greatest success does not look like progress to others. Sometimes it looks like learning how to stop long enough for your soul to breathe again.

And from that breath… everything begins.