I have lived long enough to realize in every area of life, over time, we will need to experience a restart. Each new season requires a fresh encounter with God to get us moving once again from a place of standstill. 

Experience and success in any area of personal gifting will come to a place where we will begin to sense a lagging. This is unfamiliar friction will begin to impede our forward progress and productivity. As we begin to slow toward a stop, we realize our gift or talent is not working like it did in the past. In that realization, we sense a strange, and unwelcomed friction has overcome our forward motion. We begin to realize we are working from a past application and context that was used to express our gift or talent. That context is no more. 

The combination of a gift, talent, and context was given to us to relate to people and situations within a given time frame, not so we could live on through each season of life in an unthinking repetition of what worked in the past, hoping it would continue to work in the future. That way of thinking requires no faith or dependence upon God.

At some point, if we fail to evaluate and correct our assumptions properly, we will eventually come to a frustrating standstill. No amount of commitment or self-effort will get us moving again. In those static and frustrating seasons, the only way forward will be through the portal of a fresh encounter with God. We can miss these opportunities because we are overly focused on self-discipline or gaining a new skill set to get us moving again.  

If any of this is speaking to you, do something I just did as I was writing out this word. Stop, open your hands to Heaven and invite the Lord to do something new. Ask Him for a fresh encounter with His presence then begin to live in the expectancy of that coming experience. It will bring a beautiful and welcomed peace into your standstill, and that peace will abide with you until the Spirit gets things moving once again.