The Season You Didn't Choose and What God Is Doing In It

Have you ever looked up from the busyness of life and thought, "who am I anymore?" In this first episode of the Open Hands mini series, Jaclyn Lepien opens up about what it means to live in a "Selah" season. The pauses, the waiting, the quiet grief of a life that feels like it's on hold. Drawing from the meaning of Selah (pause, praise, and to weigh in the balance), Jaclyn shares what she learned through years of homeschooling, stepping back from ministry, and slowly losing herself in the middle of a season she didn't choose.

This episode is for anyone who feels stuck, overlooked, or like their dreams are sitting in a waiting room. You'll walk away with three anchors for surviving and growing through seasons you never planned for.

In this episode:

• What "Selah" actually means — and why it changes everything
• The quiet grief no one talks about in hard seasons
• Why your view of God determines how you survive the waiting
• Three practical steps to loosen your grip and open your hands

Mentioned: Knowledge of the Holy by A.W. Tozer

Transcript

Welcome Back And A New Series

0:07

Hey friend, welcome back to Lapine Life. I am Jacqueline, and if you've been around for a while, you may have noticed that things have been quiet around here. We took a longer break than we planned. Life has a way of doing that, doesn't it? You think you're going to pause for a minute and then you blink, and six months have gone by. We went through the holidays. Michael started his master's, work took over, and in the blink of an eye, we were navigating Caden's graduation. But here's the thing, I want to be honest with you. The break wasn't just about our schedules and the season that we were in. In a lot of ways, it became its own kind of lesson. And that lesson is exactly what this new series is going to be about. So today I'm starting something a little different. This is a solo series. It's just me, no video, no Michael. And it comes from something that I started writing back in 2022. I wasn't really sure why or what I was writing. I just started writing and it's kind of a diary of what God had been teaching me through just years of waiting and surrendering and slowly, very, very slowly learning to open my hands. So I'm calling this series Open Hands. And if you think that you've ever felt stuck in a season that you didn't choose, or like your dreams are on hold, or like you're giving everything to everyone around you and losing yourself somewhere in the middle of that, then this is for you. So without further ado, let's jump into it.

The Quiet Question Who Am I

1:52

Okay, a few years ago, after a long day, I was just going through my nightly routine, wandering around my bathroom, you know, doing the ordinary things you do before going to bed, and a thought hit me out of nowhere. The thought was, who am I anymore? I would love to know, do you ever have that kind of thought? That kind of thought that surfaces when you're finally quiet enough to hear yourself think? I was busy with work that didn't feel meaningful. I was managing every inch of our family's schedule. If you are the parent that handles all of the activities and things, you know what that's like. I was homeschooling three kids, being a good wife, keeping the wheels on the bus, going around and around. And somewhere in all of that, there wasn't a single minute going toward me. And even just like saying that out loud, it feels so selfish. But I had sort of lost myself in the chaos of all of the things.

Selah As Pause Praise And Weighing

2:58

And then this word just came to my mind in the middle of that nighttime routine, and the word was Sela. For anyone that's familiar with the Psalms, you've heard it before, and it's kind of how I felt. I've read it countless times. I knew it as a kind of pause or a musical rest between the verses and psalms. And standing there in my bathroom, it landed differently than it had before. And it these words just bounced into my mind. You are living in Selah. Okay. At first I thought, okay, a pause, a waiting season. And yes, that was part of it. I was homeschooling three kids. I had stepped back from full-time church ministry work. I was home and present and invested, and it was so beautiful. It was a genuinely beautiful season, but it also felt like part of my story where the music had stopped playing. And here's what I learned when I went deeper into the word, Selah. I learned that Hebrew scholars have actually debated what Selah means. Some say it means pause. That's the general consensus. Others say it's an imperative verb or a command that means praise, lift up, exalt. And then there's a third meaning, which is one I had never heard before, and that is to measure or weigh in the balances, like Job weighing the value of wisdom. So those three meanings hit me. And I was living in all three of those meanings, whether they are truly what say love means or not, the meanings of them as I kind of looked it up just resonated with me. I was in a pause. I was in a meaningful, chosen, sometimes hard waiting season. And through that, I was learning to praise. Not because everything felt good, but because God was the only one who could meet me in the middle of loneliness. And I was weighing in the balance. I was holding my ambitions, my calling, my dreams. I was holding all of that up against God's timing and letting Him decide what stayed and what got set down for a while. I want to be honest about something because I think it matters.

The Hidden Grief Of Waiting

5:26

This season was not all peace and contentment, like how I had thought about Selah before. There were these stretches of real loneliness. Times that I wanted to walk away from everything. Times that I felt completely lost, like that time, standing in my own bathroom, not even knowing how old I was because I was so busy tracking everyone else's life that I'd forgotten my own. There's a quiet grief that comes with a Sela season that doesn't get talked about enough. You can be deeply grateful and deeply tired at the same time. You can treasure your children and miss who you used to be. You can be in the center of God's will and feel like you're disappearing. If that's where you are, I just want you to know that that's not failure. That's the honest middle of a good, but maybe hard season. And here's something that I've been sitting with, and it gets at the deeper question underneath all of this.

A Small View Of God

6:36

AW Tozer wrote, Michael quotes this all the time, A.W. Tozer wrote, What comes to our mind when we think about God is the most important thing about us. I've turned that sentence over a hundred times because I think it's an important thought to everything, including why Selah seasons are so hard. When I was in the middle of mine, that exhausted, a little lost, quietly grieving the version of my life that had felt like it was in a pause, my view of God was small. Not consciously, like I would have told you I trusted him, but functionally, I was acting like he had forgotten me. Like the pause meant he'd moved on to someone else's story, and mine was just sitting in a room, waiting room somewhere. But that's not who he is. Think about that for a second. He is sovereign, which means nothing in your life is outside his awareness or his care. He is good, not just in a like pleasant feel-good way, but in the deepest possible sense. Goodness is his nature. He can't be anything else but good. And he is faithful. Not faithful when things are going well, but but uh faithful as a fixed, unchanging characteristic of who he is. When I started to actually think about those things and sit with those truths, not just knowing them, but weighing them and letting them reshape how I saw my season, the Sela started to feel different, not easier, it didn't get easier necessarily, but it gained purpose. It was a purposeful season. Like something was happening beneath the surface that I couldn't see yet. The pause wasn't a punishment, it was a preparation. The waiting season wasn't abandonment, it was formation. And the more clearly I saw who was holding my season, the easier it became to stop griping and stop gripping it so tightly.

Open Hands And Risky Trust

9:10

Which that brings me to kind of the image that has become the centerpiece of everything that I want to share in this season. If you think about things when they don't go how we think they should go, we grip on so tightly. And I just want you to imagine open hands. That's what I'm titling this mini-series. Open hands requires a lot of trust. And trust is a very tricky term. Trust is really simple to define as a noun. It's believing in the reliability of someone or something. And I can say that as a noun and define it for you so easily. But when I say trust as a verb, that kind of trust is something that you actually have to do. And that's where it gets risky. As kids, most of us naturally trusted. We trusted openly without even thinking about it. And then life happened. And somewhere along the way, for a lot of us, that open-handed trust began to close. One little finger at a time. A disappointment here, a hurt there, a season that didn't go the way you planned, a prayer that fell unanswered, and slowly and quietly your fist closed around your heart. I know mine did. Open hands are a posture of surrender. When you grip, you're in control of whatever you're holding. When you open your hands, you're saying, I trust you more than I trust my own plan. You're releasing control to someone you believe is more capable of holding it than you are. And that's not a one-time decision. It's a slow and sometimes often painful, but always worth it to process. And it really does happen one finger at a time.

Three Anchors For Selah Seasons

11:18

So here's where I want to land today. If you're in a Selah season right now, a season that feels paused, feels slow, or like you've been set aside, I want to give you three things to hold on to. First, name the season. Name the season for what it is. Not as a failure, not as a detour. I want you to name it as Sela, a divinely appointed pause, or maybe even pruning that has purpose even when you can't see it yet. There is something sacred about calling a hard season what it actually is, instead of just pushing through it with gritted teeth. Second, I want you to revisit who God actually is, not what he's done for you lately, but who he is. Those aren't just vocabulary words, they're the foundation that your trust gets built on. If your trust keeps collapsing, it might be worth asking whether it's built on your perception of what he has done, what he does, or the concreteness of who he is. I'm gonna say that one more time because I kind of stumbled over it. Here's your rawness for the episode. If your trust keeps collapsing, it might be worth asking whether it's built on your perception of what he does or the concreteness of who he is. Because what he does can feel confusing in a hard season. Who he is never changes. A great resource for this is A. W. Tozer's book, Knowledge of the Holy. It's where the quote comes from that I quoted earlier. What we what comes to mind when we think about God is the most important thing about us. In that book, he just outlines God's attributes, and it is a great read if you would love to learn more about just who God is. Third, loosen your grip a little bit. That's easier said than done. Whatever you're gripping right now, a dream, a timeline, a version of your life that you thought you'd have by now, a comfort zone, a false security. Just think about what you're gripping right now. You don't have to release all of the trust today in one moment. It's a process, and I know, trust me, I know it takes time. You just have to start with one small act of surrender, one honest prayer that says, I don't understand this, I don't understand this season, but I'm choosing to trust you in it. That's enough. That's where it starts. And then do it again tomorrow. If you can make that a habit to daily recognize who God is, and then say a prayer of surrender, naming whatever it is that you're gripping on to, you'll begin to gain a posture of fully open hands and find peace in the middle of that chaos.

Next Topic And How To Support

14:58

Well, thank you for being here today. Truly, if you've been waiting for something, for a season to shift, for a dream to come back to life, for God to show up, I hope that today felt like a breath of fresh air. Next time we're going to talk about something that I think trips up more people than almost anything else: the difference between your calling and your career, and what happens when you spend years trying to make them fit into the wrong mold. If this episode resonated with you, would you share it with one person who might need it? And if you haven't subscribed yet, please do. This series is going to build on itself and you won't want to miss this one. I'm Jacqueline Lapine. Thanks so much for sitting with me today, and I will see you next time.