Texas Heart Journal | Page 006

Don't Confuse Unfinished With Failing

There are boxes everywhere.

And I mean everywhere.

Things that need unpacked. Things that need packed. Products that need photographed. Orders that need prepared. Lists that need finished. Ideas scribbled down that I haven't had time to do anything with yet.

Some days I look around and think...

What in the hell am I doing? 😂

Because this isn't what the dream looked like in my head.

In my head, everything had a place.

The plan was organized.

The timing made sense.

One thing was finished before the next thing started.

Apparently, real life did not receive a copy of that plan.

And lately I've been thinking about how easy it is to look at something in the middle of being built and mistake it for a mess.

We do that with our businesses.

We do it with our homes.

We do it with our plans.

And God knows we do it with ourselves.

We look at everything that isn't finished yet and somehow turn it into evidence that we're failing.

But what if it isn't?

What if this is simply what progress looks like up close?

From far away, we see somebody else's finished picture.

We see the business after it worked.

The home after the boxes were unpacked.

The woman after she found her footing again.

The dream after somebody figured out how to make it happen.

We don't usually see the middle.

The wrong turns.

The changed plans.

The things that showed up before there was somewhere to put them.

The nights somebody sat surrounded by boxes wondering why the hell they ever thought this was a good idea.

The moments when faith looked a whole lot less like confidence and a whole lot more like:

Okay, God. I guess we're doing this.

That's the part nobody frames.

But maybe we should.

Because there is something beautiful about evidence that a life is being lived.

There is something beautiful about the boxes.

They mean something arrived.

There is something beautiful about the unfinished list.

It means there's still something worth doing.

There is something beautiful about changing the plan.

It means you're paying attention instead of stubbornly following directions that no longer make sense.

And there is something beautiful about a dream beginning to take up actual space in your life.

That's what I've been noticing lately.

Things that once existed only in my head are sitting in front of me now.

I can touch them.

Pack them.

Hold them.

Ship them to another woman.

That's not nothing.

And maybe that's why I need the reminder as much as anybody:

Don't confuse unfinished with failing.

You can be unfinished and still making incredible progress.

Your business can be unfinished.

Your healing can be unfinished.

Your plans can be unfinished.

Your confidence can still be under construction.

Your next chapter can have boxes stacked everywhere and absolutely no idea where the damn scissors went.

None of that means you're doing it wrong.

It means you're in it.

You're building.

And building is rarely neat.

So, if you're standing somewhere in the middle right now and wondering why your life doesn't look like the picture you had in your head, don't judge the story before you've finished the chapter.

Move one box.

Make one decision.

Handle the next thing.

Then the next.

And every once in a while, stop looking at everything that's left to do long enough to notice everything that didn't exist before you started.

That's progress, too.

Maybe it isn't a mess.

Maybe it's what progress looks like up close.

And maybe all this unfinished stuff surrounding you isn't evidence that you're failing at all.

Maybe it's evidence that...

something is being built here. 🤎

Texas Heart Journal | Page 006