Women at the Well: Leaning into Seasons of Slow, Contented Growth
Editor’s Note: Women at the Well is an ongoing blog series. Each month, a different woman shares how God is meeting her in her current season of life. Today, we’re excited to have Shelby Hirschman joining us to talk about her walk with God as a working mom of young girls. Join Shelby as she shares how she discerns God’s voice while finding peace in the present moment.
Tell us a bit about yourself, your vocation, and normal daily routine.
Hello, I’m Shelby. I am home in the Catholic Church, where I navigate life as a wife, mom, and Registered Dietitian in Saint Louis, MO. I have two daughters (5 and 2) on earth, and a baby born into heaven in 2018. My weeks are split between being at home with our girls and running my nutrition counseling practice where I specialize in eating disorder recovery. And that combination is both a coveted delight and a whirlwind of wild all at the same time.
I am a recovering striver, and I am learning to shift my mindset away from do, pursue, produce, and prove my worth. In its place, I am asking God to help me cultivate a heart of peace, stillness, and joy in the here and now. A fun phrase I often return to in this transition is, “I am a human being, not a human doing.”
I have many hopes and dreams for my family and myself and my business, but as I am learning to rest in God’s peace and plan, it has been helpful for me to confront my inherent inability to “do it all”.
Some tangible things that have helped me in this season:
- Daily prayer, and being flexible with what it looks like.
- Getting familiar with the discomfort of moving slow in carrying out my ideas (business, personal, and otherwise).
- Creating boundaries around quiet time–when my girls rest midday, I do too.
- Deciding what matters most (keeping this list small), and keeping my energy focused here.
- Each evening, reflecting with each of my family members on something from the day we are grateful for.
I am learning a new tempo of slow, contented growth. It is less directed by my ambitions and more by the still small voice of God.
If we look closely, we can see the hand of God weaving threads throughout the fabric of our lives. Where are you seeing God working in your current season of life?
In this season, a thick and heavy fog of grief is beginning to clear around me. I can see a bit more clearly now, but I still feel the residue of it in the air. The past two years have been hard, with parts of my life that once felt like the safest and most secure, suddenly filled with confusion, fear, and doubt.
But now, the weight on my chest is lessening, and the sun is peaking through. Still, I hesitate to rashly present a pretty picture of the glory and redemption that God painted with the ashes of my grief. God’s word is true, and He does bring all things together for good (Rm 8:28). But I know that in this season of grief I often felt the pressure to feel better quickly, and make my grief pretty for the “glory of God”. But what I really needed was to lament, rawly and honestly.
I now see that as I allowed myself to name and embrace those lamentations, Jesus intimately met me there. K.J. Ramsey’s words in her book, This Too Shall Last, stick with me. In it she said, “[Jesus] so fully honored our pain, that He took it into His very body, and carried it to the cross.” Jesus is not afraid of our big emotions and heavy experiences. He embraces us in them. Even before they look or feel, “better”. This closeness to the King of Mercy, this raw acceptance of a not so pretty season, has brought depth and peace to my life that I had not known before.
As we come to know ourselves, we come to know God. What truths has the Lord been revealing to you in prayer? How does acknowledging these truths in your heart affect your daily life?
I talked about this in Live Today Well’s writer introduction blog, and I think it still feels really prevalent: God has been opening my eyes to see the subtle (and not-so-subtle) ways I lean on myself to “prove” my value and/or keep myself “safe”. Following a recent season of grief, I feel God inviting me to bring down my walls of protection in particular ways. Walls like relying on productivity, passion projects, and other distractions, that seem to offer me purpose and control, but which actually perpetuate self-reliance and fear. God has been calling me to slow down, open my palms, reflect on their emptiness, and rest in the knowledge of His unconditional love.
In my daily life, this often looks like trying to slow down enough to listen for God’s desire for my morning, my day, week, season, or life. It has looked like aligning my spirit with God’s peace, and not being fueled and pulled by my rash plans and pursuit. It has meant reflecting on the reality that God loves me right now, exactly as I am, and that His love and mercy is all I need to truly be “okay”.
Mary Beth Keenan, @mb_keenan.15.
The Woman at the Well dropped everything in order to invite the people she had previously avoided to meet Jesus. How has encountering Jesus in prayer radically changed your life (or even in a small way)? What fruits do you see manifested in your day-to-day that flow from encounters with Him?
In prayer and in scripture I repeatedly encounter the gentleness and compassion of Jesus. His pursuit of me, and my heart, and my good; his desire to meet me where I am and remind me that I am not alone. And in the presence of His unconditional love, I learn, little by little, to offer myself–hollowed for His Spirit, yet outlined by the uniqueness of me–as an instrument of His peace.
In this season of your life, do you have any habits, hobbies, or self-care practices which fill your heart with peace and keep you from falling into discontentment?
In this season, asking for and creating spaces where I can be alone and be still has been instrumental to my peace. I am learning that God is in both the quiet and the commotion of my daily life. But I’ve also seen that my heart fills and stabilizes so much when I am able to consistently have pockets of time to myself. And even more so when I am intentional about using those times to rest or play, and not produce.
What words of encouragement can you pass on to a woman who might be facing the same choices and challenges as you?
Be still, daughter. You are loved, right now, exactly as you are. Remember that your pursuit of holy growth is not in the name of earning love, but out of the peace of knowing you are already perfectly loved.
Meet Shelby Hirschman
Shelby Hirschman is a wife, mom, and registered dietitian, as well as a lifelong Catholic. She is passionate about sharing God’s truth on the inherent goodness of our bodies, and she is the owner of a nutrition counseling company that helps women restore relationships with their food, body, and soul. Her favorite words are, “compassionate” and “curious”--usually paired together. You can follow along with Shelby’s work on Instagram at @goodbody_nutrition.