PROGRESS
Day 21 — Headwind: Sabbath
You started this journey asking why is this so hard? You may still be asking it. That’s not a failure of the last twenty days — it’s an honest account of where most of us still live. The winds haven’t stopped. The headwinds haven’t become tailwinds. The destination is still out there, somewhere past the horizon, and the sea between here and there is still rough.
But something has changed.
Three weeks ago you didn’t have a name for what you were carrying. Now you have nine. You know the difference between a wind that disorients and a wind that wounds and a wind that forms — and you’ve learned, slowly, that God is present and purposeful in all three. You’ve stood at the broom tree and been fed before you were asked to move. You’ve sat in the belly of a fish and discovered that prayer works from the dark. You’ve felt the charcoal fire and heard a question that restored rather than indicted. You’ve learned that the stillness God asks for in a storm is not weakness — it is the courage of a crew that trusts the Captain to hold what they cannot.
You are not where you were. That is progress.
Not arrival. Progress. The anchor word for today is not finished — it is further. The bow has been moving. The tacks have been forward motion even when they felt like retreat. The wind you dreaded has been filling the sail whether you felt it or not. And the God who set the heading before the voyage began has not for a single moment taken His hands from the helm.
Today is not a day for more content. It is a day to stop and mark what God has done — not because the journey is over, but because progress deserves to be named before the next leg begins.
A Practice for Today
Choose what fits. These are offerings, not obligations.
Be still. Find twenty minutes of genuine quiet — not productive silence, not prayer with an agenda, just stillness. Let the journey settle. You’ve covered a lot of water. Give yourself time to feel how far you’ve come.
Take a slow walk. Go outside and move slowly. Pay attention to what’s around you — the ordinary, unhurried world. Let the motion of your body be the only motion you’re managing today. Notice what surfaces when you stop trying to make something happen.
Write a letter. Write to God — not a prayer, a letter. Tell Him what the last twenty-one days have done in you. What shifted. What you’re still carrying. What you’re beginning to believe that you didn’t when you started. Don’t edit it. Just write.
Tell someone. Find one person today and tell them one true thing about what this journey has done in you. Not a summary of the series. Something personal. What the wind has taught you. What you’re holding differently. Speaking it out loud to another person makes it more real than keeping it between you and the page.
A Closing Prayer
Father, I’m grateful. Not because the storm has passed — it hasn’t, entirely — but because I’m not the same sailor I was when it arrived. You’ve been doing something in the weather that I couldn’t have asked for on a calm day. I don’t fully understand it yet. But I can feel the difference in how I’m standing on the deck.
Thank You for the winds that named what I was carrying. Thank You for the presence that met me in the places I felt most alone. Thank You for the second word that came after the failure, the bread that came before the journey, the whisper that asked more of me than the fire ever did. Thank You for being at the helm when I let go of it — and for never having left it even when I was fighting You for it.
The journey isn’t over. I know that. But the heading is good, the Captain is trustworthy, and the wind — even this wind — is in Your hands.
Keep me sailing. Amen.
A word from the author before you go.
I didn’t write this series from a place of having arrived. I wrote it from the deck — in the middle of my own weather, with my own unresolved questions, my own winds that haven’t entirely stopped. I told you that at the beginning, and I want to say it again now because I think it matters: the things I’ve written about here are things I’m still learning. The tack is still hard. The long middle is still long. The whisper is still sometimes almost too quiet to hear.
But here’s what I know, after years of being in the weather: God wastes nothing. Not the disappointment, not the failure, not the silence, not the weariness, not the resistance that pressed hardest against the thing I was most sure He’d called me to. Every wind I’ve named in these pages has been a wind I’ve sailed in. And in every one of them — sometimes only in retrospect, sometimes only barely — I’ve seen the bow moving forward.
That’s what I want for you. Not resolution. Not calm seas. Just the settled knowledge that the wind is not the enemy. In the skilled hands of the Captain, the wind can be harnessed to propel your journey. The Captain has the helm, and the heading He has set for you is good.
The series is finished. The journey isn’t. Keep sailing.
— Steve
To read all the posts in this devotional series, visit: https://www.thisistheway.live/t/headwind
© Steve Peschke / This Is The Way