Nobody tells you that life has a brutal sense of timing—and a genuinely unhinged sense of humor.
I lost almost everything that I thought mattered: a lakefront house, a sports car, a wife, a business, a dream, the entire future I was sure had my name engraved on it in a nice serif font. And I’ll be honest, because we all lie about this part. It didn’t feel like “a lesson.” It felt like drowning—except drowning at least has the decency to be quick. I was angry at God. I asked “why is this happening to me” roughly nine thousand times—on my knees, fists clenched, at 3 a.m. with no one awake to answer. The response? Silence. A truly premium, top-tier silence. Five stars. Would not recommend.
Turns out I was asking the wrong question. Not “why is this happening,” but “what is this preparing me for.” Which is a lovely thought to sit with while you’re crying into a bowl of cereal at midnight.
Here’s what I’ve since figured out: we ask for the right things at the wrong time. We want the opportunity before we can carry it, the love before we’ve stopped loving out of fear, the clarity before we’re remotely capable of trusting it. I asked for all three, loudly, with the confidence of a man who had clearly not read the fine print. Heaven said “not yet.” At the time that nearly broke me. Now I suspect it’s the only reason I’m still standing.
I keep landing on Jeremiah 18:1–6. God sends the prophet to the potter’s house, and the clay in the potter’s hands is marred—so he doesn’t toss it. He collapses it and reshapes it into something new. “As the clay is in the potter’s hand, so are you in My hand.”
I used to picture that scene as cozy. Reader, it is not cozy. To reshape clay you have to squash it flat first, which is a fun thing to learn about yourself in real time. All that spinning and pressure isn’t the potter being cruel—it’s the only way you become something that can actually hold anything instead of just holding a grudge. For a solid year I was convinced I was being crushed. Plot twist: I was being remade. Turns out “under construction” and “falling apart” look identical from the inside. Same dust. Same noise. Wildly different insurance claim.
Then one day a short conversation on a road trip handed me the clarity I’d been begging for. No lightning. No choir. No burning bush—which, frankly, after all that buildup, felt a little on-the-nose to skip. Just a few honest words at the right moment—and something finally clicked and, without hyperbole, changed the trajectory of my life.
And slowly, annoyingly slowly—like dial-up in 1998 slowly—I’m coming back to life. I catch myself laughing and have nearly filed a missing-person’s report on the guy who used to do that. My family felt close again. The future stopped sitting on my chest like a wet sandbag and started to feel like somewhere I actually wanted to go. I started building something new—a life, a future, a business venture I can pour my whole self into and enjoy. Doors opened where I’d previously only located walls, exhaustively, with my face. And lifelong love showed up in a healthy form—the kind that doesn’t make you audition for your own worth twice a week. I stopped surviving and started building.
Not because life got easier. It absolutely did not. Because I’d finally become someone ready for the life that had been standing there the entire time, tapping its foot, checking its watch.
The changes have been enormous—bigger than I’d have had the nerve to ask for back when my whole personality was “stuck.”
So if you’re in a hard season, furious, and the next person who says “it’s all part of the plan” is genuinely risking their safety—I get it. I won’t insult you by pretending it doesn’t hurt. It does. But don’t be so quick to call it the end. It might just be the workshop where your future is getting built, loudly, at an inconvenient hour. One day you’ll look back, like I do now, and realize the season you begged to escape is the one that quietly made you into everything that came next. Rude of it, honestly. But I’ll take it.
By Shaun Sima
https://chef-pocket.com/aboutme
