BRISALO

Yesterday was my last day at Hallmark, my full time Corporate job for the last (almost) four years.

Also yesterday: I sat with one of my best friends — a woman of deep, steady faith — and we closed out the final session of a Bible study I wrote. Together. Just the two of us, piloting something I’d been carrying for a long time, with someone who could hold it carefully. We finished the Book of Esther on the same day I finished a chapter of my own.

I keep turning that over. Not as coincidence. As Providence.

Providence is one of the threads woven all the way through Esther — and it’s one of the things I love most about that book. God’s name never appears in it. Not once. And yet His hand is everywhere. In the timing of a banquet. In a king who can’t sleep. In a moment that looked like catastrophe and turned out to be the hinge point of an entire people’s survival. Providence doesn’t announce itself. It just shows up, quietly, and you notice it later — or sometimes, if you’re paying attention, right in the middle of it.

Yesterday, I noticed it right in the middle of it.

I wasn’t cut from Hallmark and devastated. I want to be honest about that. There was something in me that recognized it immediately as a blessing — as a breath — as a door I might not have opened myself, opened for me.

That doesn’t make it simple. But it makes it sacred. And there is a difference.

The weeks leading up to yesterday were already full of the kind of moments that remind you what you’re made of and who you’re made for. Game nights with family that went too late and were worth every minute. A girl gang day with friends who make me laugh until my sides ache. A Friday afternoon with my sister. New work taking shape that I’ve dreamed about for a long time (more to come on that in the weeks ahead).

And in just a few weeks — Alaska. I am going to experience close to 24 hours of daylight. I am going to watch whales breach out of the ocean. I am going to stand in front of a glacier. I am going to ride a train through the beautiful scenery on my 49th birthday. I have wanted to take this trip since I was eighteen years old, and it is about to happen. Not in spite of this season. In the middle of it. That’s not an accident. That’s Providence giving me a gift of The Gentle Pause – with a sense of humor and a very good sense of timing.

Here’s what I’m continuing to lean into: finding joy in the hard is not the same as pretending the hard isn’t real. It’s more like — you hold both. You let yourself feel the disorientation of an ending you didn’t choose, and you also let yourself feel genuinely, unashamedly excited about watching a humpback whale do something magnificent, and experiencing a lifelong dream. Both can be true. Both are true.

Joy isn’t what you earn after the grief passes. Sometimes it’s what gets you through. And sometimes the thing the world says should bring you grief – doesn’t, and that is okay too.

I’ve spent so many years thinking I had to earn the exhale. Wait for the resolution. Deserve the good thing before I let myself enjoy it. But Providence doesn’t seem to work that way. It just keeps placing gifts in the middle of uncertainty and waiting to see if we’ll receive them.

I’m trying to receive them. Palms up. Not fists down.

Whatever you’re in the middle of right now — whatever chapter feels like it’s closing without your permission — I hope you can find something in the next couple of weeks that you let yourself be genuinely excited about. Not as an escape. As evidence. Evidence that life is still moving, that good things are still coming, and that someone who loves you very much has been arranging the details all along.

Just like He did for Queen Esther.

Always Rooting For You with Big Hugs and Love, Stacy