Don't Give Up. GIVE IN

There is a question nobody prepares you for, not really. You hear speeches about resilience, you read quotes about perseverance, but when you are truly in the middle of a season that is testing everything in you, the question arrives quietly and honestly.

Do you give up? Or do you give in?

In this episode of YomisMusings, I share two personal seasons of uncertainty,  and what both taught me about trust, timing and the unexpected doors that open when you stop trying to force the ones in front of you.

This is an episode about leveraging your own history of survival and letting other people's stories fuel your faith. For anyone in a season that feels impossible right now, this one is for you.

The light always comes.

Transcript

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You're listening to Yombi's music. Honest reflections on life, faith, and things that quietly shape us the lessons we don't talk about. There's a question nobody prepares you for. Not really. You hear motivational speeches about perseverance. You read quotes about resilience. You watch other people come through hard seasons and you upload them from a distance. But when you're in it, like truly in it, the question arrives quietly, and it is more honest than any of those speeches ever were. Do you give up or do you give in? And before you answer, I want to make sure we understand what those two things actually mean. Because they're not the same. Giving up is walking away, closing the door, deciding that this, whatever this is, is bigger than you, and you're done trying. It's like a full stop at the end of a sentence that still had more to say. Giving on the other end is surrender of a different kind. You're not abandoning the journey, but you'll be losing the illusion that you can control how it unfolds. It is accepting that you're in a hard season, that it's painful, that you do not have all the answers, and that you cannot see the end from where you're standing. And despite all this, you're choosing to stay anyway. Choosing to trust and to keep putting one foot in front of the other, even when the path ahead is not clear. One is defeat. The other one takes courage. I want to tell you about two seasons of my life. Both happened many years ago, but both brought me to a place where I genuinely did not know how things were going to work out, and they taught me something I have carried ever since. The first was during my university years. I was living away from family in a country I'd moved to, essentially building my life from the ground up. I was working to pay my own way through school fees, living expenses, everything. And there came a point where a deadline arrived and I had nowhere to turn. Something no one in that room could have known. Something that told me quietly but unmistakably that whoever was watching over my life was very conscious of exactly where I was, that had not been forgotten, and that help was coming. And it did, from the very place I had already approached and reading off. I met the deadline, and the door I thought was closed opened at the last possible moment. The second season was more complex. Anyone who understands what that means knows the weight of it. It comes as a letter, a deadline, a countdown, and years of building a life suddenly comes under question. At the time, I was just months away from qualifying for something that would have changed everything. So I began exploring every possible option, thought about going back to school, finding another sponsor, but each part had its own complexity, cost, and of course uncertainty. What struck me was not just the difficulty of the situation. It was the way people showed up. Friends, community, family, people who didn't have to. They came through in ways I hadn't asked for and couldn't have predicted. They helped me hold things together when I couldn't hold them alone. And then the resolution came. Not through any of the parts I'd been frantically mapping out. It came through a door I hadn't even seen. Someone looked at my case, understood the full picture, and said, actually, there's another way. A way that turned the very timeline I thought was working against me into the thing that works in my favor. The rest, as they say, is history. But here's what I want you to take from both of those stories because the details are mine, but the lesson belongs to anyone who has ever been in a season that felt impossible. Your history of survival is evidence. Every hard thing you have come through, every deadline that somehow got met, every door that opened when you had stopped expecting it to, every season that felt permanent but wasn't, that is not just your past. That is your proof. Proof that you have been through difficult seasons before. Prove that what felt unsurvivable was survived. Prove that the resources, the people, the unexpected solutions have shown up before and they can show up again. When you are in a hard season, the temptation is to treat it as though it is the only data point, as though this difficulty is uniquely permanent in a way that previous difficulties were not. But that is not true. And your own story, if you will go back and really honestly, will tell you that. This is also why other people's stories matter. Not as comparison, not as pressure, but as testimony. When someone tells you how they came through something that looked impossible, something in you that was starting to believe your situation was uniquely hopeless begins to shift. Because if it happened for them, the possibility that it can happen for you becomes real again. And that is faith being fed by evidence. The thing I keep coming back to in both of my stories is that in both seasons, the resolution did not come through the part I was trying to force. It came through something I hadn't planned for, something that required me to stop trying to engineer every outcome and trust that there was a wisdom at work in my situation that was greater than my own frantic problem solving. And that is not being passive. It is a very specific kind of courage. The courage to keep moving without needing to control where you end up, to do what's in front of you, to explore the options, to let people in where possible, the courage to stay open and to hold on to somewhere underneath all the uncertainty, the quiet but unshakable belief that this is not the end of your story. Here's what I know about seasons. They change, that is their nature. Not because everything always works out the way you planned, not because difficulties always resolved neatly or quickly, or in the way you were hoping for, but because nothing, not the hardest thing, not the longest wait, not the most impossible looking situation, nothing stays exactly as it is forever. The light comes. Maybe not when you expect it, maybe not through the door you were watching, but it comes. So when you find yourself in the middle of a season that is testing everything in you, don't give up. Giving. Surrender the need to control every outcome. Drawing what you know about yourself, the evidence of every hard thing you have already survived. Stay open to solutions that don't look like what you were expecting, and hold on, not desperately, not frantically, but with a quiet, grounded, hard one face that has been here before and knows these two shall pass because the light will always come this way. And that's the musing for today. And until next time, keep thinking.