69 | The Difference Between a Waiting Season and a Stuck Season

Are you in a waiting season — or are you actually stuck? These two things can look identical from the outside, but they feel completely different on the inside — and they require completely different responses.

In today's episode, I'm sharing three honest questions that will help you tell the difference. Because for a lot of Christian authors, the language of "waiting on God" has quietly become permission to stay exactly where they are — circling the same mountain, month after month, wondering why nothing is changing.

This isn't a lack of faith episode. It's a wake-up-with-love episode. And if something in your author business has felt heavy, flat, or stuck for longer than feels right — this one is for you.

🔥 The Revive to Thrive Way™ early bird price closes midnight 31st March — anointedscribe.com/revivetothrive

👉 Listen now to uncover the secret to becoming an anointed scribe!

Mentioned in this episode: Episode 68 | What I Wish Someone Had Told Me When I Nearly Gave up

Transcript

Have you been telling yourself that God just has you in a waiting season?

That the quiet in your author business is part of his plan and you just need to be patient?

What if I told you there's a very important difference between a waiting season and a stage stuck season?

And that knowing which one you are actually in could change everything about what you do next?

See, for years I called it a waiting season. I told myself I just needed more patience,

more faith, more trust.

But if I'm honest,

I wasn't waiting. I was stuck.

Trapped even.

So, today I'm going to help you figure out which one you're actually in.

Grab your favorite beverage, friend, sit back and take a listen.

This is the Anointed Scribe Podcast.

I'm Urcelia Teixeira, ex real estate agent turned award winning Christian fiction author.

When I wrote my first novel on a bucket list whim, I had no idea it would spark a spiritual journey that would redefine my calling.

But you know what, friend? Self publishing wasn't easy. I got caught in the hustle, chasing rankings and sales while desperately trying to stay rooted in Christ.

Now, by God's grace, I'm building my author business his way. And now he's called me to help you do the same.

Welcome to the Anointed Scribe Podcast, where faith meets business for Christian writers. Let's write, publish, and grow our author business God's way.

Are you ready? Well then, let's get started.

Hey, it's your author friend, Urcelia. And welcome back to the Anointed Scribe Podcast.

If you're joining me for the first time today, welcome friend. You picked a good one to start with.

Today we're talking about something that I think quietly affects all almost every Christian author at some point. And yet almost nobody talks about it directly.

Because on the surface, it can look like faith, it can feel like surrender.

And saying I'm just in a waiting season sounds so spiritual when you say it out loud, right?

And maybe you are in a waiting season.

But maybe, and I say this with all the love I have,

maybe you're not. Maybe what you are calling a waiting season is actually something else entirely.

And the difference between the two matters more than you might think.

So,

no strategies today,

no frameworks, no five step plans, just an honest conversation between two authors.

Because this one's been on my heart for a while.

So let's get stuck in now. What does a real waiting season look and feel like?

Let's start with a real thing. Because genuine waiting seasons exist. Absolutely they do. And I don't want to take that away from anyone who is genuinely in one A real waiting season has some very specific characteristics, though.

There's peace in it.

Not comfort, necessarily.

Waiting is seldom comfortable, right?

But there's peace, a deep,

settled peace underneath the uncertainty,

like you're standing on solid ground, even though you can't see very far ahead.

There's also a sense of active preparation.

In a real waiting season,

God is usually doing something in you while you wait.

You are growing. You are being shaped. You might be learning something, letting go of something,

or being positioned for something you can't quite see yet.

But you know something is coming. You sense it in your spirit. The waiting feels purposeful,

even when it's hard.

And crucially, in a real waiting season,

you generally have a sense, even even when it's faint, that God is in it with you.

You might not have all the answers, you might not know the timeline, but you know you are not alone.

That is a waiting season.

So let's talk about what a stuck season actually feels like. And to best explain this, I'm going to describe it with a typical scenario which goes something like this. And I know this because this came from my journal,

just condensed into this next scenario. So here's how it goes.

It's been months,

maybe longer, and nothing is moving.

Your book sales are flat, or worse still, stuck on the same number.

Your email list isn't growing.

You're writing. You're releasing your books. You're doing what you're supposed to be doing when you're an indie author and it feels like you're pushing against a wall that won't budge.

And underneath it all,

there's this low hum of anxiety,

a quiet dread when you open your KDP dashboard,

a familiar spiral when you see another author celebrating a successful launch,

a creeping doubt about whether you heard God right about this calling in the first place.

You're doubting God and you're doubting yourself and every decision in between.

Plus, you're exhausted.

Not the kind of exhausted that a day off fixes,

the kind that comes from giving everything you have for a long time and still feeling like it's not enough.

Still feeling that nothing you do moves the needle.

Still feeling like everybody else knows the secret except you.

But you've been calling it a waiting season because that's the most faithful sounding explanation available. And in fact,

it's the only explanation you have left.

Because saying I think I'm stuck feels like you don't have enough faith.

Because admitting that something might actually need to Change feels scarier than just waiting a little longer, right,

friend? I'm sorry to have to be the one to tell you this, that you are not in a waiting season.

This is not a waiting season you're in. This is a stuck season. If you resonate with any of what I've just said, you're in a stuck season.

And they require completely different responses.

But it's easy to confuse the two, especially if the enemy is hard at work keeping you in your stuck season.

So why do we confuse the two? Let's start there. Here's why this confusion happens so easily and. And why it's not your fault that it does.

We have been taught, and rightly so, that patience is a virtue,

that God's timing is not our timing,

that we shouldn't run ahead of him. And all of that is true.

But somewhere along the way, for a lot of Kingdom writers,

that truth got twisted into something slightly different.

It became, don't do anything.

Don't change anything.

Just wait and trust, and eventually God will move it for you.

And so we wait and we keep doing what we've always done, because changing course feels like a lack of faith.

It feels like we're taking the wheel, right?

And so months pass and the wall does. Doesn't move.

And we add another layer of I just need to trust more. On top of the anxiety and the doubt and the quiet desperation,

I know this pattern intimately. I lived inside it for years.

I called it waiting, when what I was actually doing was circling the same mountain.

The same thoughts, the same strategies,

the same results over and over again.

I was stuck in my wilderness, and the waiting language gave me permission to stay stuck.

And it felt so spiritual that I couldn't even see what was happening.

And if you tuned into last week's episode, you'll know my full backstory by now. And just how long I told myself I was in this waiting season, when actually God was showing me exactly what to do.

He had been showing me for a while. It was right there in front of me, and I never even saw it.

And if you're here today for the first time and haven't heard my story from last week, I'd strongly encourage you to go back and to listen to it after this episode.

But let me catch you up real quickly so today's topic makes a little bit more sense for you.

Essentially, there were three areas I had to work on first, before God could increase my readership and my sales,

I had to go fix what was broken underneath the hood so that my support system would actually be able to handle what God wanted to do with me and my author business next.

And by the way, you guys, discerning and figuring those three areas out took me nearly 18 months of back and forth with God, of doubting, of circling, of going back and forth into it.

But with my Revive to Thrive Way program, you don't have to go through all of that because I've given it a structure that takes you through it step by step without all the second guessing and without feeling your way through the dark alone.

Which reminds me,

if I can just quickly come in, the Early Bird pricing window is still open for the rest of this month through midnight on the 31st of March,

when it'll increase by $100.

And something I forgot to mention last week, even with the Early Bird pricing, you still get the three bonuses valued at over $200.

So you're essentially getting more than $200 in extras on top of an already reduced price.

Sorry, I just threw this in here. I just didn't want you to miss out on it. But if you haven't already, go check it out@anointedscribe.com revivetothrive the link is in the show notes too,

but here's how it relates to today's topic. Before I went in and made these three changes, made these three shifts, I'll teach you in the Revive to Thrive program,

I was trapped in the stuck season years and it's an awful, awful place to be in. And I know now, after God leveled up my author business,

that it was vital to make those shifts because I would have never been able to handle the growth that came next.

So let me share with you the three questions that tell you if you're in a waiting season or a stuck season.

How do we actually know?

How do you tell the difference between a waiting season you need to stay in and a stuck season you need to move out of? I want to give you three questions to sit with today,

not to answer quickly. I'd actually encourage you to take these to your journal and to God in prayer, and to give them some real time. But these are the questions that cut through the noise for me and for the authors I've walked alongside.

Question 1 Is there peace underneath the waiting, or is it just exhaustion?

This is the most important one. Peace and exhaustion feel different.

Peace can coexist with uncertainty.

It doesn't require you to have all the answers. Exhaustion, on the other hand,

is what happens when you've been running on empty for too long.

If what you feel when you think about your writing and book marketing is primarily heaviness,

dread or depletion. That's not the fruit of a God led waiting season.

That's a signal that something needs attention,

that something needs to shift.

Question number two Are you being shaped or are you just frantically spinning your wheels?

In a real waiting season,

something is happening even when nothing seems to be happening. Does that make sense?

Although you don't see the external growth,

you can feel the internal growth.

You can usually look back over the last few months and identify growth in your faith, your craft, your understanding of your calling, your purpose.

You have these light bulb moments that set off the next step.

But in a stuck season,

the months blur together.

You are constantly busy, working hard, but when you look back,

you can't quite say what changed or grew.

Same thoughts,

same fears, same patterns on repeat.

And if that's the honest answer, friend, you are not waiting. You are circling. You are circling that mountain. Just like I did.

Question 3 Is God quiet or have you stopped listening?

Now this one requires some real honesty. Sometimes what we interpret as God being silent is actually us being too busy,

too anxious,

or too focused on the noise of the metrics and comparison to hear Him.

And because the enemy wants to keep you in this stuck season,

your heart becomes hardened towards God.

You become desensitized to even the word and here's how awful this is. You don't even realize it.

You either shrug it off or give up, which is exactly what the enemy wants you to do.

But if you're in a waiting season,

it is characterized by ongoing communication with God, with having an open,

softened heart,

even if what he's saying is simply not yet.

If you genuinely can't remember the last time you felt God speak into your author journey,

not because he's absent,

but because the channel has gotten cluttered or your heart has gotten hard,

friend,

that's worth paying attention to.

Okay, so what do you do if you are in a stuck season?

If those three questions landed somewhere uncomfortable for you, if some part of you is quietly admitting that what you've been calling a waiting season might actually be something else,

I want to start by saying that's not a failure. There's no condemnation here. There's not a lack of faith. That's just honest self awareness. And it's the beginning of something changing.

Here's what I know from my own journey and from walking alongside other Christian authors.

A stuck season doesn't resolve itself by waiting longer.

It resolves when the root of the issue gets addressed. Not the strategy. Not the book cover,

not the blurb, not the keywords.

The foundation of your author ministry needs to be fixed first. You have to fix that first before you can build on it.

Before God can take you to your next level.

In fact, you might be thinking you're waiting on God. But the truth of the matter is he is waiting for you. He's waiting for you to address the thing underneath all of your hustling and toiling.

How you see yourself as an author,

how you see your ministry, what you're actually building toward, and whether you are genuinely building it in partnership with with God.

When that shifts, everything built on top of it starts to move differently.

Not overnight, I won't lie. It's not magical,

but it does happen properly,

sustainably differently.

You then get in step with God's timing.

And so here's the good news, friend.

You don't have to figure out how to make that shift alone.

You don't have to circle the same mountain for another six months hoping something changes.

It's the whole reason God created the anointed scribe platform,

friend. I want to leave you with this. Waiting on God is holy.

Staying stuck and calling it waiting.

That's something else entirely.

And only you in the quiet before God can discern who, which one you are actually in.

If today's episode stirred something in you,

if something in those three questions didn't quite sit right, I'd encourage you to do two things.

First, take them to the Lord in prayer.

Talk to him about it. Give yourself the gift of honest reflection.

And second,

head to anointedscribe.com revivetothrive and read through what's waiting for you on the other side of your mountain. The Early Bird price is open until midnight on the 31st of March.

After that it goes up. But more importantly, if this is your season to move,

I don't want the timing to pass you by.

You were not called to keep circling the same mountain, friend.

Head to anointedscribe.com revive to thrive because for such a time as this,

you were called to thrive as God's anointed scribe.

I'll see you next week,

friend. If today's episode stirred something in you,

if you found yourself thinking, yes, this is exactly where I am, I want you to know you don't have to navigate this alone.

There comes a point where information is isn't enough and what's really needed is a deeper reset, a rebuilding in the right order.

The Revive to Thrive way is a guided spirit led experience for Christian authors who are done, striving,

done forcing growth, and ready to build from a place of clarity,

alignment and peace.

It's the exact shifts I made myself that changed everything for me in my author life.

If you sense that this might be your next step, go to

anointed scribe.com/revivetothrive.