I built a membership once. Poured my heart into it. It only ever had 3 people in it.

And for a long time, I thought that meant I had got it wrong.

If you are in a waiting season right now... if you have named something, planted something, decided something, and then watched absolutely nothing happen... I want to sit with you here for a minute. Because I know exactly what that silence feels like.

The silence after the step

Nobody warns you about this bit.

We talk about dreaming. We talk about stepping out in faith. We talk about naming the thing and planting the seed and being brave enough to say it out loud.

But nobody tells you what happens next. Which is, very often... nothing. Nothing visible, anyway.

You named it. You planted it. You decided. And then the silence came. And it did not feel holy. It felt like you had made a terrible mistake.

I know this place. I lived in it for longer than I like to admit.

Before Creative Sanctuary existed, I built something else entirely. I had spent 34 years as a speech and language therapist. I had been delivering therapy online for years before COVID made it a thing. And I thought... well, I know how to do this. I should teach other therapists how to set it up.

So I built a course. 3 people signed up and I earned nearly £7,000. I looked at that and thought, right. This is obviously the thing.

So I built a membership around it. A proper one. Maven Business Haven. I poured everything I had into it.

It only ever had 3 people in it.

And I waited. I waited for it to grow. I waited for the audience to arrive. I waited for the thing I had built to become the thing I had imagined. And it just... didn't.

"Why didn't it grow?" I kept asking myself . Then I realised that it was probably because I didn't know how to talk about it. But if you ask me to talk about the Creative Sanctuary...well, I can and I do with livestreams and workshops like the last one I did this month ( Grief to Grace).

Two rooms in the waiting season

Here is what I have learned since then. There are at least 2 kinds of waiting, and they feel very different.

Some of you are waiting for a dream to start. You have named something. You might have started building, or you might still be holding the idea in both hands, not quite ready to put it down or pick it up properly. And it has not moved yet. That is 1 room.

But some of you are not waiting for something to begin. You are waiting for something to stop hurting. A loss. A season of grief. A relationship that changed shape. A chapter that closed and you were not ready. And dreaming feels impossible right now because you are just trying to get through.

Both are waiting rooms. And God meets us in both.

"The LORD is close to the brokenhearted; he rescues those whose spirits are crushed." Psalm 34:18 (NLT)

If you are in the second room this morning, I am not going to try to tie your grief into a neat bow. But I want you to know that this space holds you too.

The 3 AM whispers that feel true but are not

Can we talk about what happens in the middle of the night?

Because I think this is where the real battle is. Not in the daylight, when you can distract yourself and keep busy and tell people you are fine. But at 3 AM, when the whispers start.

"God has forgotten me."

"I must have misheard."

"It is never going to come."

All 3 feel entirely true at 3 AM. None of them is.

I had every single one of those thoughts while I was sitting with an empty membership and a head full of teletherapy content that nobody seemed to want. Sometimes all 3 in the same night.

And here is the thing I wish someone had told me then. A delay is not a no. A delay is not a punishment. And a delay is not proof you got it wrong.

It might be proof you got the timing wrong. Or the audience wrong. Or the product wrong. But that is not the same thing as getting the calling wrong.

What was actually happening underground

"This vision is for a future time. It describes the end, and it will be fulfilled. If it seems slow in coming, wait patiently, for it will surely take place. It will not be delayed." Habakkuk 2:3 (NLT)

I love this verse, and I keep coming back to it. Because what Habakkuk is saying is not that there will be no gap between the promise and the fulfilment. There will be. But the gap is not God being slow. The gap is part of the plan.

When I look back at Maven Business Haven now, I do not see a failure. I see roots.

Everything I learned building that membership became the foundation for Creative Sanctuary. The tech. The way I learned to write for women going through hard things. The understanding of how to hold a group of women in a learning space online. Even the graphic design. Even the way I learned to show up on camera when nobody was watching.

All of it was growing underground while I was up here looking at an empty room, wondering what had gone wrong.

My husband reminded me of something recently that I have not been able to put down since. Creative Sanctuary has been running for about a year. And there are more women inside it now than were ever in that other membership in all the time I ran it.

Same woman. Same effort. Same heart. Completely different outcome. Because this time, it was the right thing. And the delay was not the end of the story. It was the training ground.

"Weeping may last through the night, but joy comes with the morning." Psalm 30:5 (NLT)

You are in very good company

If you are in a waiting season, you are standing alongside some extraordinary people.

Joseph waited years in a prison for a promise. Abraham and Sarah waited decades for a child. Jesus waited days before He went to Lazarus, and He could have gone straight away. He chose to wait. The delay was deliberate.

And on Holy Saturday, the whole world waited in silence, not knowing Sunday was coming.

The delay was never the end of any of their stories.

One small practice for this week

Take your journal and 10 quiet minutes.

Pray. Just this... "Lord, I trust you in the waiting." You might not fully mean it yet. That is fine. Say it anyway. Offer it as an act of faith, not a statement of feeling.

Sketch a closed bud. Then draw the roots beneath it. Make the roots bigger than you think they should be. Let them take over the page. Because that is the truth of what is happening underneath your waiting.

Write 1 sentence. Finish this... "While I wait, I will still..."

Waiting is not the same as doing nothing. You are not sitting here passively. You are choosing to stay. You are choosing to trust. That is active. That is brave.

The door that is still open

The doors to Creative Sanctuary are closed right now. But if something in this post has stirred something in you and you do not want to wait alone, you can try 3 of the workshops from inside the Sanctuary for just $9.

Creative Spaces is a small, gentle bundle of 3 creative workshops... each one a different way to slow your mind, hold your pen, and finally hear Him.

Think of it as a quiet sample of what is growing inside.

https://creativesoulspace.com/creative-spaces-9

And if you want the free companion workbook for this whole Created to Dream series, grab your Dream in Colour journal here:

https://creativesoulspace.com/dream

Whatever you are waiting for this morning... wait well. You are not forgotten.

Bev x📖 The two books behind this series, if you would love to go deeper (affiliate links): Created to Dream by Rick Warren: https://amzn.to/4gfREC9 Dream Big by Bob Goff: https://amzn.to/44JOqjb

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A Space to Bring Your Whole Self

And if you're not quite ready for a retreat but want to begin doodling with God today, start here: creativesoulspace.com/quiet — it's just $7 and it's the gentlest possible first step.

Come and find me at https://christianartjournaling.com/creative2026  ~ there's a whole community of women here who are finding their way back to God, one mark at a time.