Bloom Where It’s Hard

When the Spiritual Calling Isn’t to Fit In

image by Viktor Romaniuk @ 123rf.com

There are moments in the spiritual life when the guidance is not to fit in, not to move toward comfort, not to find the community that automatically understands you, but to stay exactly where you are, even when the environment feels less safe on the surface. It’s a strange kind of calling because it contradicts our human impulse to seek ease, validation, and resonance. And yet, if we were to talk openly about some of our lives’ most significant growth prompts, we would likely find common ground that profound awakenings happened not when the soil felt nourishing and comfortable, but when it asked something more of us - something deeper.

I was reminded of this recently by a story an ecclesiastical leader once shared with me, someone whose belief system had shifted dramatically over the years, from exclusion to inclusion, from rigid doctrine to something much more spacious. He had gone through a transformation not unlike my late friend Bishop Carlton Pearson’s from my Oral Roberts University days - the kind of awakening that arrives uninvited, unexpected, in a moment where the heart cannot lie to itself anymore.

He told me that years ago he and his sister drove to Asheville after a lengthy struggle within his community. Things were unraveling, just like his long-accepted dogma. Attendance was dwindling. The building they had poured themselves into was slipping away. The once-thriving spiritual dynasty of his family was now a memory, something unfamiliar and fragile. And in that in-between space, where the old wasn’t viable and the new wasn’t visible, he felt completely worn down.

The two of them parked in one of those little Asheville lots near the center of town. He sat behind the wheel, looking out at the square, unloading every bit of exhaustion he had kept bottled up. He told his sister how tired he was of trying to speak through the thick wall of resistance, how he longed to be somewhere, anywhere, where people were already open. “Wouldn’t it be easier,” he said, “if we just moved here and started fresh?”

His sister listened quietly, and instead of trying to soothe him, she asked him to look around the square and count the number of vegetarian restaurants he could see just in the main square. He turned his head, scanned the immediate circle, and said, “Four. I can see four just from this spot.” She nodded, then pointed to a long line of people stretching out the door of a completely different place - one serving barbecue.

“Do you see that?” she asked. “We could come here and become one more vegetarian restaurant in a town full of them. Or… we could stay in Atlanta and be the barbecue restaurant. We could stay where we are and learn how to bloom where we’re planted.”

The simplicity of the analogy fully captured his attention. It wasn’t about food or relocation. It was about the human tendency to assume that the easier environment must be the divinely ordained one, that alignment means lack of friction, that openness means everyone agrees with you, that spiritual work becomes valid only when it is applauded by the surrounding culture.

But a deeper truth may be that sometimes the environment that feels less safe is the very place where your roots are meant to deepen. And true expansion is learning to trust the ground beneath your feet, even when it trembles.

I’ve been guilty of imagining that the truest guidance would always point me toward harmony, toward the path of least resistance, toward communities that feel like instant resonance. And yet, if nothing is a mistake, if the curriculum of consciousness is exquisitely tailored, if “bloom where you’re planted” contains no disclaimers, then we must at least be willing to ask the harder questions.

Not “How do I escape this discomfort?” but “What is mine to do here?”

Not “How do I find a place where I fit?” but “What strength is this moment calling forth in me?”

This is the heart of duality work - the ability to hold two realities without collapsing into either one. There is the small-r reality: the environment feels difficult, people seem resistant, and the world around you looks unsafe or unwelcoming. And there is the capital-R Reality: the field of awareness in which your essence cannot be harmed, diminished, or outcast.

Our work is not to deny the human reality or to drown in it either.

Our work is to hold both.

This is why Ram Dass could ask, “How do I keep my heart open in hell?” Not as poetry, but as a practice because there will be seasons where the world around you does not soften, and the environment around you does not accommodate your growth. And still you are asked to show up with presence, courage, and compassion.

This is the deeper curriculum that awaits in the barbecue restaurant, so to speak. The place where the menu isn’t aligned with your preferences, where the smoke burns your eyes a little, where the room is full of people who aren’t looking for what you’re offering. But that doesn’t mean you’re in the wrong room. It may mean you’re in the exact room where the next iteration of your soul knows how to unfold.

Sometimes the spiritual calling is not to find where you fit. Sometimes the calling is to become someone who no longer needs to. Sometimes the calling is not to seek safety.

Sometimes the calling is to discover your unshakeable nature within environments that look unsafe. Sometimes the calling is not to run toward the place of alignment.

Sometimes the calling is to recognize that the environment you’re resisting is the one refining you.

There is no shame in wanting to move, to escape, to begin again somewhere less complicated. Everyone feels that pull. But there always exists a deeper invitation - to pause long enough to listen beneath the impulse. Sometimes the mind wants to relocate, but the soul wants to remain. Sometimes discomfort is not a detour but a doorway. Sometimes your greatest expansion is waiting in the very place you vowed you would never stay.

And maybe the guidance in times like these is not “Go where it’s easier,” but instead to stand where you are and breathe and trust that growth is always happening.

Not every calling is an exit.

Some callings are invitations to remain with eyes open, heart open and to bloom in unlikely soil.