Last week, we explored what happens when the answer to your prayer is ‘no.’ That piece leaned, quite naturally, into the grief of death — the kind of ‘no’ that tears through your life like a storm you didn’t see coming. Today, let’s talk about what happens after the no; not the moment of breaking, no…but the long, hollow, silent stretch that follows — the part nobody prepares you for. The waiting season.

There is a strange kind of ache that accompanies unanswered prayers. I do not refer to the sharp pain of loss, but the dull, lingering pain of uncertainty — the pain of waking up each day wondering if the universe heard you at all. You ask because what do you do when you have lost your faith, lost your faith not out of rebellion or bitterness, but out of exhaustion or disappointment? When the no was so loud, so deafening, that it drowned out every affirmation, every manifestation, every desperate plea you threw into the universe with your whole chest.

Some of us are social butterflies. We know many living people, and as a result, we know many dead people too. It comes with the territory of being fully alive. So you pray, fervently, anxiously, fiercely, against premature death only to discover that sometimes, no matter how loudly your heart screams, death still comes. And worse, death is final. Some of those ‘no’s’ will never make sense…not today, not decades from now. Eventually, though, you learn to make peace with them, to let them live gently in a corner of your heart marked ‘maybe one day.’

The waiting season is not only about death. It finds you at the start of a new career that you thought would fly — you planned, you invested, you manifested, and still it refuses to take off. They say nothing good comes easy, but sometimes nothing good comes at all. What then?

It finds you in love, too, because yes, ideally love is black and white, but real humans live in the grey. There are marriages that should never have happened, relationships held together by hope, history, and a fear of starting over. Sometimes two people are simply wrong for each other, and walking away, despite all the counselling, all the tears, all the unlearning, is the bravest thing they will ever do. Staying would have been easier. Leaving is the death no one mourns publicly.
The waiting season stretches across all these moments —the death of a loved one, the death of a dream, the death of a relationship.

It is the uncomfortable space between what used to be and what will one day become. It is a hallway with no visible door. A tunnel where you cannot see even a speck of light ahead. A long, long pause in the story of your life.

And yet… for reasons we seldom understand, this is the part that shapes us the most. Waiting is where faith is rewritten. It is where identity is stripped bare. It is where pride dissolves. It is where illusions die. It is where we learn that control was always a myth. Waiting reveals you to yourself. You begin to discover the things you truly believe when nothing is happening. You learn the tone of your own soul when the world goes quiet. You recognise which voices in your life are anchors —and which are storms. It is in the waiting season that you confront the version of yourself you can no longer be. And slowly — through small mercies you didn’t ask for, something begins to shift. A laugh escapes your mouth unexpectedly. A burden lifts, not all at once, but enough to breathe. A friend calls at the exact moment you were breaking. A sunrise looks different today, and a door you definitely were not looking at suddenly opens. Then you realise not in a grand revelation, but in a quiet moment that you are still here. Still living. Still becoming. Still capable of receiving a yes in a future you cannot yet see.

So what do you do after the no, but before the next door opens? You wait. Not passively, not hopelessly, but with a soft kind of courage; the kind that trusts that the hallway is not your home, and the tunnel is not your grave.

The #Unshakable truth is this:
The waiting season is not a punishment. It is preparation. And one day —sometimes suddenly, sometimes quietly, a door you didn’t pray for will open, and you will understand why the others didn’t.

See you next week.

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