The Pause Between Chapters

Last week, I wrote about the stories we tell — the ones that quietly shape how we see ourselves, our circumstances, and what’s possible next.

This week put those stories to the test.

Between a work trip to Boston and a weekend surrounded by friends, I found myself in dozens of small mirrors — moments that reflected back who I am when life feels uncertain. It made me realize that where I’m most tender right now isn’t in the story itself, but in the pause between chapters — the space where the old story is losing shape and the new one hasn’t yet arrived.

At work, everything is unclear. My job may change or even disappear by the end of the year, but no one can tell me when or how. There’s a particular kind of vulnerability in that….the not-knowing, the lack of control, the constant dance between faith and fear. Some days I breathe and remind myself that I’ve been here before. Other days, I catch myself tightening, scanning job boards, trying to out-plan the unknown.

The mind hates pauses. It wants to fill them.

And I’ll be honest…I had at least three full-on panic moments this week of *“Oh my God, I need to find a job now.” Trusting the unknown and believing it’s all happening FOR you — not TO you — is God’s work that I keep having the opportunity to remember. So I went searching for a story that would remind me of that truth.

When I look back to the last major transition in my career, I can see how that same space prepared me. I had followed my intuition NOT to sign on with a company I’d already been through two mergers with. I was in final rounds for a few other jobs, confident something would land.

None did.

I entered a kind of professional free fall — no offers, no timeline, just the hollow sound of “nothing happening.”

At the time, I thought I’d failed — that I’d misstepped or misread the signs. But what I didn’t see was that life was rearranging itself behind the scenes. That pause — that liminal, uncomfortable, ego-crushing pause — was actually the sacred ground where my next chapter began forming.

I followed what I did know: my joy in connecting with people and helping however I could in the moment. Maybe this is my light or why in the neutral zone?

This week, while reflecting on all this, I revisited *Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes* by William Bridges. He describes every transformation as three parts:

1. An ending – letting go of what was.

2. A neutral zone – that uncertain middle ground.

3. A new beginning – stepping into what’s next.

And it’s that second part, the neutral zone, that feels like my home — for much longer and more times than I care to admit. Bridges says the neutral zone is where we shed old patterns, outdated self-concepts, and attachments. It’s the psychological winter before the spring — uncomfortable, but fertile.

Many of us live much of our adult life avoiding that middle space. We cling to the familiar, even when it’s too small, because it gives us the illusion of stability. But if we rush the middle, we drag the old story into the new one, and the cycle repeats.

Lately, I’ve noticed how this same truth shows up everywhere — in career transitions, in relationships, even in corporate change. We rush to fill the gap. To have an answer. To prove progress. But real transformation has its own timeline. It asks for integration, not acceleration.

So this week, I’m practicing something different:

To stop trying to *solve* the space and instead listen to what it’s asking of me.

To let faith be a verb — not a feeling I wait for, but an action I take by following people, not a story or a plan.

Because every major turning point in my life has looked, at first, like a detour.

And every detour has eventually revealed itself as direction.

If you’re in a pause of your own — between endings and beginnings — maybe this is your reminder too:

You’re not behind. You’re becoming.

My Reflection for the Week

What part of your life feels “in between” right now?

What stories are you telling yourself about that pause — and are they true?

How would you show up differently if you believed the pause was preparing you for something bigger than your plan?