Listening for the Next Step

Revelation doesn’t arrive through planning or control, but sometimes over a wooden bridge in the distance.

The maples are red, and the air carries that faint chill that says fall has arrived for good.
I’m standing here on a few acres I just closed on in Afton, Virginia. The next chapter of my life has started to unfold.

Down the road, there’s a small wooden bridge that crosses Stillhouse Creek. Every so often, a car drives over it, and the boards rumble—a soft, distant sound I can only hear if I’m quiet enough to notice.

That sound reminds me to listen.

For the last few days, I’ve been wrestling with a question: Should I build a tiny cabin first?

It wouldn’t be much, just a small structure I could complete in a few weeks, tucked into the trees. Ten by twelve, maybe. A place to live simply through winter. A wood stove in the corner. An oversized window framing the southern mountains. A big skylight over the bed where the night pours in like a river of stars. Rustic, for sure—but if you know me, it would also be beautiful, calm, and intentional.

Part of me wants to plan it all out, to weigh costs, to make sensible choices. But another part of me knows better. Where I’m at in life isn’t a place for logic—it’s a place for listening.

So I keep asking the same quiet question:
What do you want me to know?

Sometimes the answers come through people. Sometimes through circumstance.
Other times, they rise like that soft rumble from the bridge down the road—distant, steady, only audible if I stop trying to fill the silence with my own words or solutions.

Maybe I’ll build the cabin this fall. Maybe I’ll wait and begin the house instead.

What I know for sure is this: the next step will reveal itself when I stop trying to force it. Land—and life—has its own pace, its own language. My work right now is to listen.

And maybe yours is too. Where in your life are you trying to solve things with logic instead of stillness? Where might you need to stop, ask, and wait for that quiet rumble—the one that tells you the next step is already on its way?

Maybe that’s where you and I will meet—at the edge of what we can’t yet see, learning to trust the stillness together.