Some things don’t get easier. You just keep trying anyway.
Trust doesn’t come naturally to me. My past made sure of that. There are days I want to stop trying — stop reaching out, stop being the one who keeps showing up, stop doing the vulnerable thing when the safe thing is right there.
If you’ve lived through the kind of hurt that teaches you people leave, you know exactly what I mean. Your body learns before your brain does. Someone gets close and every alarm in you starts ringing, even when there’s no actual fire.
Trying doesn’t look like a montage. There’s no swelling music when you send the text anyway, or say the honest thing out loud, or let someone see you mid-process instead of waiting until you’re polished. It looks like an ordinary Tuesday. It looks like doing the small brave thing, making dinner like nothing happened, and choosing to keep trying again tomorrow. Nobody claps. But God notices.
But here’s what I’m learning: the trying is the point.
Not getting it right. Not feeling confident. Not waking up one day magically healed and secure and good at the hard things. Just… still here. Still reaching. Still willing to be bad at something that matters.
We don’t like being bad at things. We’ll quit a hobby, a habit, a relationship before we’ll sit in the awkward middle where we’re trying and it’s not working yet. But that middle is where all the becoming happens. I’d rather be bad at trust and keep trying than be excellent at keeping my walls up. One of those is a skill. The other is a cage.
I still get nervous. I still overthink the text before I send it, replay the conversation after I have it, brace for the disappointment that hasn’t even happened. And I still try.
There’s a widow in Luke 18 who reminds me of this. She kept going back to a judge who didn’t care about her, asking for justice again and again until he finally listened. Jesus told her story so we’d do the same: keep praying, keep trying, don’t give up. She wasn’t confident. She wasn’t polished. She was just persistent.
Galatians 6:9 says, “Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.” I’ve read that verse a hundred times, and I always heard it as a productivity verse — keep working, keep grinding. But lately I hear it differently. What if “doing good” includes the quiet, invisible work of staying soft in a world that gave you every reason to harden? What if the harvest isn’t the outcome — it’s who you become while you wait for it?
Trying doesn’t mean performing. It doesn’t mean pretending you’re fine when you’re not, or earning someone’s love by getting it right. The trying that counts is the honest kind — shaky hands, racing heart, doing it scared. God never asked me to be impressive. He just asked me to stay.
Maybe faithfulness was never about feeling sure. Maybe it’s just about staying.
So if you’re still trying — at trust, at love, at the thing that scares you — I want you to hear this: it counts. Even shaky. Even scared. Even bad at it.
Keep trying. It counts.