Blooming in Your Season: What it Really Means in the Waiting
I have a dinner plate hibiscus in my yard. If you’ve never seen one, the name tells you everything you need to know. The blooms are literally the size of a dinner plate, bold and pink and breathtaking, and they arrive late summer into fall like a gift I didn’t earn.
This is what blooming in your season really looks like when you’re waiting on God.
Every time I pull into my driveway, every time I walk past them, they stop me. They bring such joy to my heart that I find myself just standing there, taking them in.
So when I asked the garden shop what to do with them over winter, I wasn’t prepared for the answer. “Cut it all down until you have just a few small stubs left sticking out of the ground.”
“The whole bush?”
“The whole bush.”
And so, I did. And I stood there looking at what was left, these little bare sticks poking out of the dirt, surrounded by mulch, looking like nothing. Looking like something that was finished. And I thought, are you going to come back? Are you going to bloom again? Because we just cut off a lot.
That image stayed with me. Because I think that is exactly what many of us feel like in our waiting seasons. We feel cut down. We feel like what was once beautiful and full has been reduced to bare stubs, and we are standing there in the cold looking at what’s left wondering if anything is ever going to grow again.
Here is what I’ve learned about gardens, and about God. The cutting is not the end. It is the preparation.
What Happens Underground
Before anything blooms, something has to happen that nobody sees.
The soil has to be prepared. You can’t throw a seed into hard, compacted ground and expect anything to take root. The earth has to be broken up, turned over, made ready to receive something. That is what God does in us during the waiting. He breaks up the hard places, the places that have grown rigid from disappointment, from prayers that seemed to go unanswered, from hoping and feeling let down. He is not being harsh with us. He is making us ready.
And then there are seeds. Here is something we don’t always think about. Words are seeds. Every word spoken over us, every word we speak over ourselves, drops into the soil of our heart and begins to grow. Jesus said it plainly: out of the heart, the mouth speaks. What we are saying reveals what has already taken root inside us.
So, what are we planting?
God is the gardener of our heart, and He wants rich soil for us, soil where good things can take root and flourish.
The Weeds in Your Thought Life
A garden left untended doesn’t stay empty.
Weed seeds find their way in too. The wind blows them in. They may have been lying dormant in the ground for a long time, just waiting for the right conditions. You didn’t invite them. You didn’t plant them intentionally. There they are, taking root alongside everything else.
That is exactly how it works in our thought life.
Not every thought we carry was planted on purpose. Some were blown in by hard seasons, by words spoken over us that were never true, by disappointment that settled into belief, by fear that moved in during a vulnerable moment and never left. We didn’t choose them. They found soil, and they started to grow.
And here is what neuroscience tells us, and what God’s Word has always known: the more we think a thought, the deeper its roots grow. Every time we return to that thought, every time we rehearse it, turn it over, give it our attention, we are feeding its root system. We are making it stronger. The thoughts of I’ve been waiting too long, nothing ever changes for me, maybe God is working in everyone else’s life but He’s forgotten mine, they don’t just sit there. They grow. They spread. And the longer we let them, the harder they are to pull out.
I found out just how true this is in my own yard.
I noticed something growing behind my air conditioning unit. Then I found more of them along the side of my house, working their way into my garden beds. At first I genuinely wondered, did my gardener plant something here that I don’t know about? It was getting big. It was filling in. It almost looked like it belonged there. I actually pointed it out to someone and said, what do you think that is? Is that something?
And they said, that’s a weed.
I said, no. It can’t be a weed. It’s starting to look pretty.
It was a weed. A large, established, deeply rooted weed that had been allowed to grow unchecked long enough that it had started to look like it belonged. Long enough that I almost claimed it as something intentional.
How many of us are doing that with our thoughts?
Some of the most destructive things growing in the garden of our heart have been there so long they feel like part of who we are. We stop questioning them. We make peace with them. We think, that’s just how I am. That’s just my struggle. That’s just how I think about myself. We have lived with them so long they start to look almost normal, almost like something our Gardener planted on purpose.
He didn’t plant them. And if we leave them alone, they will not stay pretty. Weeds left to themselves overcrowd, cause confusion, and eventually cause destruction. That weed by my air conditioning unit, had I left it, would have worked its way into the system and damaged it. What looks harmless when it’s small becomes invasive when it’s ignored.
And here is the other thing about weeds. They never just stop. I pull them and a week later there are more. Guarding the garden of our heart is not a one time event. It is a season by season, day by day practice of asking, what is growing here? Did my Gardener plant this? Or has this just been allowed to grow because I stopped paying attention?
The Purpose of Pruning in a Waiting Season
Weeding removes what was never supposed to be there. Pruning is different. Pruning cuts back what is actually good, what has bloomed before, what you love, because the gardener knows it needs to be cut in order to come back stronger.
That is a hard thing to sit with.
Sometimes the waiting season is the pruning. God is not ignoring you. He is not withholding from you. He is cutting something back, intentionally, carefully, because He sees what is coming and He knows you need to be ready for it. The pruning may be painful. It may look like loss. It may look like those little sticks in the ground, bare and exposed and not much to look at.
The gardener has not abandoned the garden. He knows exactly what He’s doing.
Maybe He is pruning something in you right now and you don’t even know what it is yet. That is worth bringing to Him. Lord, what are you cutting back in me? What are you making room for? We don’t always know the answer unless we spend time in His presence, quiet enough to hear.
What Blooming Really Means
After all of that, after the prepared soil and the pulled weeds and the pruning, after the waiting and the wondering and the bare sticks in the ground, what does blooming actually mean?
It doesn’t always look the way we imagined.
We picture the dramatic moment, the obvious breakthrough. Sometimes blooming looks like finally being able to exhale. It looks like waking up one morning and realizing the grief is still there, but so is joy, and both can be true at once. It looks like becoming more fully yourself, the person God designed before the waiting ever started.
Blooming is not the end of the hard. It is evidence that the underground work was not wasted. Every prayer whispered in the dark. Every morning you returned to His Word when you didn’t feel like it. Every weed you pulled, every hard thing you brought to Him, every season you endured the pruning without walking away. You planted that. God saw it. And He is faithful to bring forth what was planted in good soil.
What you have planted will bloom.
For Your Own Garden
Before you close this, take these questions to your journal and to prayer.
What is actually growing in the garden of your heart right now? Not what you wish were growing, but what is truly there?
Are there weeds that have been allowed to spread, thoughts and words crowding out what God wants to grow in you?
Is it possible that what feels like a cutting back is actually a pruning, something God is doing intentionally to prepare you for what’s next?
And finally, what have you planted in this season that you haven’t given God credit for yet?
The gardener has not forgotten your garden. The bare sticks in the ground are not the end of your story. Spring is coming.
Follow me on Instagram: @famiagreen
I have a dinner plate hibiscus in my yard. If you’ve never seen one, the name tells you everything you need to know. The blooms are literally the size of a dinner plate, bold and pink and breathtaking, and they arrive late summer into fall like a gift I didn’t earn.
This is what blooming in your season really looks like when you’re waiting on God.
Every time I pull into my driveway, every time I walk past them, they stop me. They bring such joy to my heart that I find myself just standing there, taking them in.
So when I asked the garden shop what to do with them over winter, I wasn’t prepared for the answer.
“Cut it all down,” they told me. “The whole bush. Cut it all the way down until you have just a few small stubs left sticking out of the ground.”
I said, “The whole bush?”
“The whole bush.”
And so I did. And I stood there looking at what was left, these little bare sticks poking out of the dirt, surrounded by mulch, looking like nothing. Looking like something that was finished. And I thought, are you going to come back? Are you going to bloom again? Because we just cut off a lot.
That image stayed with me. Because I think that is exactly what many of us feel like in our waiting seasons. We feel cut down. We feel like what was once beautiful and full has been reduced to bare stubs, and we are standing there in the cold looking at what’s left wondering if anything is ever going to grow again.
Here is what I’ve learned about gardens, and about God. The cutting is not the end. It is the preparation.
What Happens Underground in a Waiting Season
Before anything blooms, something has to happen that nobody sees.
In seasons of spiritual growth, much of the work happens beneath the surface.
The soil has to be prepared. You can’t throw a seed into hard, compacted ground and expect anything to take root. The earth has to be broken up, turned over, made ready to receive something. That is what God does in us during the waiting. He breaks up the hard places, the places that have grown rigid from disappointment, from prayers that seemed to go unanswered, from hoping and feeling let down. He is not being harsh with us. He is making us ready.
And then there are seeds. Here is something we don’t always think about. Words are seeds. Every word spoken over us, every word we speak over ourselves, drops into the soil of our heart and begins to grow. Jesus said it plainly: out of the heart, the mouth speaks. What we are saying reveals what has already taken root inside us.
So what are we planting?
God is the gardener of our heart, and He wants rich soil for us, soil where good things can take root and flourish.
The Weeds in Your Thought Life
A garden left untended doesn’t stay empty.
Weed seeds find their way in too. The wind blows them in. They may have been lying dormant in the ground for a long time, just waiting for the right conditions. You didn’t invite them. You didn’t plant them intentionally. There they are, taking root alongside everything else.
That is exactly how it works in our thought life.
Not every thought we carry was planted on purpose. Some were blown in by hard seasons, by words spoken over us that were never true, by disappointment that settled into belief, by fear that moved in during a vulnerable moment and never left.
And here is what both neuroscience and Scripture reveal: the more we think a thought, the deeper its roots grow. Every time we return to that thought, we strengthen it.
Waiting on God can feel like nothing is happening, yet beneath the surface, something is always growing.