She Built Her Own Arena — But First, She Had to Survive the Held Season

On grief, liminal space, motherhood, and the God who holds you in the in-between.

"She built her own arena" to me means turning my lived experience into something meaningful that creates space for both myself and others.

Motherhood. Resilience. Setbacks. Growth. All of it becomes the material.

Today we talks about what comes before the arena.

Not the rock bottom. We have language for that. Not the comeback. We celebrate that. The part we never have a name for. The threshold. The season where you are standing in the doorway between who you were and who you are becoming, and nothing on either side feels solid enough to stand on.

Scholars and theologians call it liminal space, from the Latin limen, meaning threshold. It is the space between. The hallway between two rooms. The moment after one thing has ended and before the next thing has begun. It is disorienting by design. It is supposed to feel like nothing fits, because you are between worlds.

I call it the Held Season.

When you are in it, it feels like the opposite. Like you have been forgotten. Like the doors keep closing. Like everyone else is moving forward while you are standing completely still. But looking back, I can see clearly now what I could not see then.

That was the season God held me the closest.

The Grief That's Hard To Name

We need to talk about grief first, because this story does not make sense without it, and most of us are carrying a grief we were never given permission to name.

I used to think grief had one face. A funeral. A phone call. The kind of loss that everyone around you could see and acknowledge and bring casseroles for. It took growing older, and honestly it took motherhood, to show me how many other shapes grief wears.

There is grief for the version of yourself you had to leave behind just to survive. Grief for the friendship that slowly went quiet until one day you realized it had been months and neither of you reached out.

Grief for the career path you mapped out at 22 that life rerouted without asking your permission. Grief for the goal, the plan, the idea you poured yourself into that never became what you imagined. Grief for the woman you were before you became someone's mother, someone's backbone, someone's everything.

These losses don't get funerals. Nobody brings you flowers. Most of the time nobody even notices, because from the outside you are still functioning, still showing up, still holding it together. But inside you are quietly mourning a version of yourself that is gone, standing in a liminal space between who you were and who you are supposed to become next, with no map and no timeline and no guarantee that anything is coming.

That mourning is real. It deserves to be named.

And here is what I want you to know before we go any further. God was not absent from any of it. Psalm 34:18 says "The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit." He was not distant in your grief. He was not on the other side of the door waiting for you to get yourself together. He was in the threshold with you, closer than He had ever been, sitting with you in the loss that had no name, the mourning that had no ceremony, the pain that nobody else could see.

You were not abandoned in the in-between.

You were being held in it.

Your Boaz Is a Season, Not a Person

This is where Ruth and Naomi enter the story, because their story is the Held Season made visible.

Two women in the middle of the most devastating kind of loss. Naomi had lost her husband and both her sons. She was so hollowed out by grief that she told people to stop calling her Naomi, which means pleasant, and call her Mara, meaning bitter. She stood in that liminal space with nothing. No identity that still fit. No future she could see. No script for what came next. She did not perform okayness. She named what she was carrying and kept walking anyway.

And Ruth was in her own Held Season. Widowed, far from her homeland, released by Naomi to go back to the life she knew, she refused. The path forward was anything but clear. She had no plan, no promise, no preview of what was coming. But something in her knew that the story was not over, even when everything around her said otherwise.

"Where you go, I will go. Where you stay, I will stay."

That is not the declaration of a woman who has it figured out. That is the declaration of a woman who has decided to keep moving through the threshold, through grief, through loss, through the in-between, trusting the God she could not see to be doing something she could not yet understand.

And He was.

What I want you to understand about what came next is this. Boaz was not just a person. Boaz was a season. He represented everything waiting on the other side of Ruth's faithfulness in the middle. The provision, the peace, the belonging, the fullness she could not have manufactured or rushed or performed her way into. He was what God had been quietly preparing the entire time Ruth was just trying to survive the threshold.

She did not know a field like that existed when she left Moab. She could not see it from where she was standing. All she knew was that she would keep walking, keep showing up, keep being faithful in the small and unglamorous and unwitnessed, and trust that the God who held her in the in-between also had something waiting for her on the other side of it.

Your Boaz is not a person coming to complete you.

Your Boaz is the next season of your life. The one you cannot engineer, cannot rush, and cannot reach by performing your way through the middle. It is the peace that outlasts the hustle. The purpose that finally fits who you actually are. The platform, the ministry, the motherhood you actually enjoy instead of just survive. The leadership that comes from the inside out. The life you have been quietly longing for, the one that kept feeling too far away to trust, too good to believe, too big to hold onto in the middle of a liminal season that had no end date.

God was building it the whole time you were in the waiting.

He was near to you in every grief that had no language. Every plan that did not survive. Every door that closed and confused you. Every version of yourself you had to release. Every season you showed up anyway, even when nothing seemed to be moving, even when you wondered if you had somehow missed your window.

You did not miss it.

You were being formed for it.

If You Are in the Held Season Right Now

So this is what I want to leave you with, wherever you are in your story right now.

If you are in the threshold, in the liminal space between who you were and who you are becoming, you are not behind. You are not broken. You are not forgotten. You are in the Held Season. And the God who is close to the brokenhearted, who saves those who are crushed in spirit, is not watching from a distance while you figure it out. He is in the doorway with you, doing in the hidden place what only He can do, preparing you for a season your current eyes cannot yet see.

Let yourself grieve what did not make it to this chapter with you. The old plans. The old version of yourself. The friendships and paths and dreams that ran out of road. They mattered. Honoring the loss does not mean you are stuck. It means you are honest. And honest women are exactly the kind God walks into full seasons.

Keep going. Keep showing up. Keep being faithful in the field you are standing in right now.

Your next season is already being written.

And when you get there, when you are standing on the other side of the threshold in the fullness of everything God was building while you waited, you will look back at the Held Season not with bitterness but with gratitude. Because it was there, in the in-between, in the liminal space, in the place that felt most like nothing, that God was doing everything.

That is where the arena begins.

Not in the arrival.

In the held.

This post was written in connection with Unspeakable Leadership podcast episode "She Built Her Own Arena-Defining Leadership Beyond Titles, Expectations and Imposed Roles" with host Rohene Bouajram and guest speaker June Abahuje — a conversation on motherhood, leadership, and the seasons that shape us. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.