There is an ache that settles in when a gift does not look the way we expected. We imagine smooth edges and careful bows, something that announces itself as good before it is ever opened. Yet God so often places His most important offerings into our hands wrapped in inconvenience, in grief, in uncertainty, or in seasons that feel as though they have been mishandled along the way. We look at the shape of what we are holding and assume something has gone wrong, when in truth something holy is being entrusted to us.
But, scripture never promises that God’s gifts will arrive gently. It promises only that they will be good. James writes that every good and perfect gift comes from the Father of lights, yet goodness in the Kingdom has always been more surgical than sentimental. God gives Abram a future and then asks him to walk away from everything familiar. He gives Moses a calling and then leads him into the wilderness. He gives Mary a child and with Him a path marked by misunderstanding, exile, and a sorrow that would pierce her heart. The gift is radiant. The path is not.
We struggle not because God withholds kindness, but because His kindness is larger than our appetite for comfort. There comes a moment in a woman’s life when the life she prayed for finally arrives, yet something inside her still feels restless, unsettled, or strangely exposed. Her body hums with a tension she cannot quite name. Old ways of coping no longer hold her steady, and new ones have not yet taken shape. In this space she is tempted to believe she is broken, when in truth she is being remade.
Jesus spoke of this mystery when He said that unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone, but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Every true gift carries a small death inside it, not the death of what is holy, but the death of what was too small to contain the fullness of what God intends. The enemy sees only loss and whispers that something has gone wrong, yet God sees the shedding of a former self that could never have held the weight of a woman’s becoming.
This is why the body resists before the soul understands. The nervous system senses change and names it danger, even when the change is sacred. It tightens around the unknown, mistaking transformation for threat, because to outgrow what once kept us safe always feels like a kind of loss. Yet God calls this same moment invitation, the doorway through which a woman steps out of what she has been and into who she is meant to be.
So many women spend their lives longing to return to the version of themselves that existed before everything felt so heavy, so uncertain, or so costly. God, in His quiet and relentless mercy, is inviting them instead toward a self that could never have been born without the breaking. What if the season you are walking through is not a detour but a delivery. What if the pressure you feel is not evidence of failure but the slow, sacred work of something being brought to life within you.
This is the heart of the conversation I share in this week’s podcast episode, When God’s Gifts Hurt: Why the Hardest Seasons Are Often Your Greatest Breakthrough, where we explore how God uses difficult seasons to heal the nervous system, clarify identity, and return a woman to the truth of who she is beneath all that has been layered upon her.
If something in you feels tender as you read these words, that tenderness is not an accident. It may be the quiet sound of a gift being unwrapped.
You can listen to the full episode here.
May you have the courage to remain present to what God is doing, even when the paper is torn and the box looks nothing like you hoped, because the most beautiful things so often come this way.
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