Episode 17: The Next Loving Thing: When It Feels Like One Thing after Another

In this six-episode series of the Be Still podcast, Still Becoming: Six Conversations about Spiritual Maturity, Lisa explores the ways God may be asking us to keep growing—not simply so we can follow Jesus faithfully for most of our lives, but so we can finish well.

Because life can test our faith in ways we never anticipated. When our hearts break, our stories take unexpected turns, and God doesn’t give us the answers we want, what happens to our faith? Through Scripture, great books, and honest reflection, Lisa explores what it means to grow in faith, embrace spiritual maturity, and remain faithful to Jesus through every season of life.

What happens when one thing after another has left us depleted—and then love asks something more of us?

In this episode, Lisa explores what it means to remain available to love when we feel we have reached the end of ourselves. Drawing from Matthew 14—the feeding of the five thousand in the immediate aftermath of John the Baptist's death—and Claire Keegan's Foster, she considers the quiet, often hidden self-forgetfulness that marks a mature life with Christ.

Jesus doesn't ask the disciples to produce what they don't have. He asks them to place what they do have—five loaves and two fish—into His hands. Spiritual maturity isn't becoming a person with inexhaustible resources. It is the increasing freedom to love from within our own poverty, trusting that what feels insufficient can become something more when surrendered to Christ.

Often the road to sainthood isn't dramatic. It is simply doing the next loving thing—making the meal, staying gentle, listening again, noticing the person in front of us—without needing anyone else to know what it cost.

Perhaps the question isn't whether we have enough. Perhaps it is what we will do with the little we