I Love Words | Liminal – The Devotional Guy™

I love words. I learned a new one the other day. Well, new to me.

Liminal spaces are strange places. They are the in-between. Not what was, not yet what will be.

I’ve come to recognize that PTSD often lives in that space. Not always as a sharp memory, but as a kind of unsettled boundary where my nervous system is still scanning the room even though was once happening isn’t happening anymore.

I’m not fully in the past, but I’m not fully at rest in the present either. Just in-between.

Liminal.

There’s something disorienting about it. We like clarity. We like “before and after.” But much of healing doesn’t work that way. It moves more like fog, not lightning. Gradual. Uneven. Hard to measure. And yet, Scripture doesn’t seem afraid of in-between spaces.

Israel in the wilderness.
David in caves.
The disciples between the crucifixion on Friday and the resurrection Sunday morning.

God does some of His most formative work in the not-yet places.

I don’t always know what to do with the liminal. I want it resolved. I want to feel “on the other side” of things I am still in the middle of navigating.

Maybe the invitation is awareness, not escape. Perhaps the invite is to trust that even thresholds are held by God.

Liminal spaces are not empty spaces. They are spaces of waiting. Somehow, even there, God is not absent. He is forming something I don’t yet have language for.

Not finished.

Not forgotten.

Just in-between.