The Lord will fulfill his purpose for me; your steadfast love, O Lord, endures forever
Nobody talks about the in-between. We celebrate the beginnings. The new job, the new relationship, the fresh start, the answer to prayer finally arriving. We acknowledge the endings even the painful ones get recognition. But the space between the ending and the beginning? The season where one chapter has clearly closed and the next one hasn’t opened yet?
That season is where a lot of people are living right now. And it is one of the loneliest, most disorienting places a person can be.
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You are not who you were. The old identity the old role, the old relationship, the old version of your life is gone. But you are not yet who you are becoming. The new thing hasn’t taken shape. The next chapter hasn’t started and you are standing in the gap between two versions of your life wondering what on earth you are supposed to do with yourself right now.
This newsletter is for you. The person in the in-between. And I want to start by saying something that took me a long time to believe:
The in-between is not nothing. It is something and God is not absent from it He may be more active in it than in any other season.
The Sermon
The Israelites spent forty years in the wilderness. Not because God was slow and not because He lost the address of the Promised Land. Forty years because what they needed to become the people capable of inhabiting what God had promised could only be formed in the wilderness. The in-between was not the obstacle to the destination. It was the preparation for it.
Moses spent forty years on the backside of a desert before the burning bush. Joseph spent years in a pit and a prison before the palace. David spent fifteen years running from Saul after being anointed king before he ever sat on the throne.
Every single one of them was in the in-between. Every single one of them could not see from inside it what we can see looking back. And every single one of them was being formed by the very season that felt like delay.
Psalm 138:8 is the prayer of a person in exactly this place: “The Lord will fulfill his purpose for me.” Not has fulfilled will fulfill. Future tense. A declaration made in the middle, not at the end.
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David is not writing from the throne looking back. He is writing from the wilderness looking forward choosing to declare the faithfulness of God before the evidence has arrived. Choosing to trust the purpose before the purpose is visible.
That is the posture the in-between requires. Not comfortable certainty, but chosen trust. The decision to believe that God is fulfilling His purpose even when you cannot see the shape of it from where you’re standing.
The Real Word
Here is what nobody tells you about the in-between: It is not empty. It only feels empty because you are measuring it by the wrong standard. You are measuring it by productivity by what it is producing, what it is building, where it is going. And by that measure it looks like nothing.
But God is not measuring it by productivity. He is measuring it by formation. And formation the slow, unglamorous, underground work of becoming the person God is making you into happens most profoundly in the seasons that look most like nothing.
The question in the in-between is not: when does this end? The question is: what is God building in me right now that I could not receive in any other season?
The stillness is not emptiness, it is the soil. Something is growing underground that will only become visible when the next chapter opens and you will look back at this in-between and see, clearly, that it was not wasted. It was essential.
The in-between is not the gap in your story. It is one of the most important chapters in it.
What to Do Right Now
Stop trying to rush out of it. The in-between has a length and it will be what it is. The energy you spend trying to force the next chapter to open faster is energy you could spend receiving what this chapter has to offer.
Ask God what He is building. Not when is this over what are You doing in me right now that I’d miss if I wasn’t paying attention?
Stay faithful in the small things. The in-between is not a vacation from faithfulness. It is where faithfulness is tested in its purest form when there is no visible reward, no clear direction, no applause for showing up.
And hold Psalm 138:8 until it becomes more real than the uncertainty: The Lord will fulfill His purpose for me. Not might, but will. The purpose is already in motion. You are already inside it. Even in the in-between.
A Real Story
After sixteen years in corporate finance Daniel was laid off at forty-four. No warning and No plan B. Just suddenly in the in-between not the person he had been professionally and not yet knowing what came next.
He said the first three months were the hardest of his adult life. Not because of the finances because of the identity. He had no idea who he was without the title. Without the role. Without the thing that had told him every morning who he was and what he was for.
He started seeing a counselor who asked him one question that changed everything: what has God been trying to say to you that the busyness of the last sixteen years made it impossible to hear?
Daniel sat with that question for weeks. What surfaced quietly, persistently, unmistakably was a calling to work with at-risk youth. Something he had felt in his twenties and buried under the career.
Two years later he runs a nonprofit that has changed hundreds of young lives. He said: I would never have heard it if the in-between hadn’t gone quiet enough for me to listen. The layoff felt like losing everything. It was actually God clearing the channel.
Reflection Questions
What chapter has recently ended for you and have you given yourself permission to grieve it properly before rushing to what’s next?
What might God be building in you in this in-between that could only be built here?
Write Psalm 138:8 in your own words for your specific situation. What does it mean to declare that God will fulfill His purpose for you right now, from inside the in-between?
Today’s Prayer:Lord the in-between is harder than I expected. I am not who I was and I am not yet who I am becoming and the space in between feels uncomfortably like nothing. But I know You are not absent from nothing. I know You build things in the quiet that the noise would have prevented. So today I am choosing to stay in this season instead of fighting my way out of it. Show me what You are building. Give me eyes to see the formation happening underneath the surface. And let Psalm 138:8 be the ground I stand on the settled declaration that You will fulfill Your purpose for me even here, even now, even in this. Amen.
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