Trust the Process: On Hope You Can't Explain Yet

Notes from the In-Between: A series about the season where life changes and you don’t yet know what comes next.

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It was Easter this weekend and that got me thinking a lot about Saturday.

We talk about the ending. The moment things fall apart, the decision that changes everything, the day your life becomes unrecognizable. We have language for that.

And we talk about the resurrection. The comeback. The transformation. The moment you can finally say, I made it through. Here is what I learned. Here is who I became.

But Saturday.
The day in between.
The day after the ending and before you know what's coming.
Nobody says much about that day.

It is the longest day. It does not announce itself. It does not come with a timeline or a map or any indication of how long it will last. You just find yourself in it. Waiting for something you cannot name. Hoping for something you cannot prove is coming.

That is where most of us are.

Not at the ending. Not at the resurrection. On Saturday.

There is a story that has stayed with me for years. Not because of the theology of it. Because of the human truth inside it.

Mary Magdalene stayed. When others left, she stayed. Not because she had proof. Not because she could see what was coming. But because she believed in something. Not when. Not how. An inner knowing, wordless, unprovable, stubborn, that was enough to keep her there.

Most of us know that knowing. Even if we have never named it.

The moments that felt like being led by something bigger than you. Like the universe was quietly arranging things just out of sight. Signs that felt too specific to be coincidence. A breadcrumb here. A door opening there. Nothing you could explain to anyone else. But something you felt in your body as true.

And then there are the other days. The ones that just hurt. Where staying is not noble or graceful. Where it is just the decision not to anesthetize yourself. Not to dull the edges of your own life. To be willing to feel all of it, the grief and the hope and the anger and the quiet moments of unexpected beauty, without rushing any of it toward resolution.

It is choosing to be a feeler of your own life. It is choosing love over the fear of what it might cost you. It is going all in on yourself even when you do not know what that means yet. That is what trusting the process actually means. Not the version on the coffee mug or the Instagram caption. Not the thing people say when they don't know what else to say.

The real version.

The one that looks like staying at the tomb on Saturday. When there is nothing to show for it. When you cannot explain to anyone why you are still here, still waiting, still holding onto something you cannot see yet. We have turned trust the process into a passive thing. A surrender. A giving up dressed up in spiritual language.

But that is not what it is.

Trusting the process is one of the hardest things you will ever do. Because it requires you to stay inside the uncertainty without demanding that it resolve itself on your timeline. Without performing okayness you do not feel or rushing to the next chapter before this one is finished.

It means sitting with a knowing you cannot prove.

Not hope as a strategy. Not hope as optimism. Something older and quieter than both of those things. The kind that does not require evidence. You may not even know what you are hoping for. Most honest hope doesn't come with a clear object. It is just the quiet refusal to believe that this is all there is. The stubborn sense that something is on the other side of this even when you cannot see it.

That is not naivety. That is the deepest kind of knowing.

And here is the thing about outcomes.

They are rarely what we prayed for. Maybe because what we pray for is shaped by what we can already see. And what is actually coming for us is always larger than what we know to ask for.

The universe does not answer the prayer you make. It answers the one underneath it. The one you did not even know you were making. Trust the process does not mean everything will work out the way you planned. It means you stay anyway.

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