FRIDAY: A PAUSE AT THE CROSSROADS

The Sacred Hesitation

Some choices feel like grand, cinematic moments—the ones where everything is clear, the road ahead bathed in light. But more often, crossroads are quiet. They come as an ache of restlessness, as a subtle shift in the air. They appear in the spaces between breaths, in the way your feet hesitate before the next step.

The instinct is to move. To reach for certainty. To name what has not yet been revealed. But some moments are not meant to be rushed. Some thresholds must be honored before they are crossed.

Jesus knew this kind of waiting. He stood in the wilderness before stepping forward. He lingered in the garden before walking toward what would come next. He knew what it meant to feel the weight of a turning point and to let it rest before moving.

So today, we do the same.

Not because we are afraid.
Not because we are lost.
But because waiting has its own kind of wisdom.

We pause at the crossroads—not as a place of indecision, but as a place of reverence.

Sacred Invitation: The Weight of Waiting

Find a place to sit where you can see the world moving—a window, a park bench, a doorway. Watch the way the world does not rush. How trees do not force their blooming. How water does not fight against its own current.

Let yourself settle into this same unhurried rhythm.

Ask yourself: What would happen if I stopped trying to push forward? If I let the moment be what it is?

Do not force an answer. Simply hold the question.

Embodied Practice: The Pivot Point

Find two small stones, or simply close your hands into gentle fists.

One represents something you are carrying—a thought, a fear, an expectation that clings.
The other represents something ready to be released—something that no longer asks to be held.

Feel their weight. Let yourself name what they hold.

Then, when you are ready, open your hands.

Not as an act of abandonment, but as an offering.
A whisper of trust:
"I do not enter the wilderness carrying everything I once did."

Let your hands rest open.

Closing Reflection: Trusting the Slow Work of God

Some paths are straight. Others are winding.
Most are not visible until we have already begun to walk.

Whisper to yourself:
"Not all paths are clear. Not all roads are straight. But even in the waiting, I am being led."

Let this be not a resolution, but a resting place.

Patient Trust

By Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something
unknown, something new.

And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability—
and that it may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you;
your ideas mature gradually—let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don't try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances
acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.

Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.