I heard a story about a man who spent 36 days lost in the Amazon rainforest after his plane crashed. His name was Antônio Sena. For the first week, he stayed near the wreckage, hoping someone would find him. Eventually, he realised he couldn’t keep waiting and started walking. It rained. He was hungry, exhausted, and alone. In the version of the story I heard, he kept asking God for one thing: please, make the rain stop. But it wouldn’t stop. Day after day, the rain kept falling. He was constantly wet, cold, and exhausted. And the longer it went on, the harder it became to understand why God wasn’t answering him. Why isn’t God listening to me? I’m asking for just one thing. Please, make the rain stop. Imagine asking for the same thing every single day, for weeks, and feeling as though your prayers are going nowhere. Then, after more than 30 days alone in the forest, he finally encountered a group of people collecting Brazil nuts, who helped him get rescued. The story was told to me with one particular detail: that the rain had forced those people to take a different route, bringing them to the very place where he found them. I haven’t been able to verify that detail. But the idea has stayed with me. What if the very thing we’re asking God to take away is somehow part of what will lead us somewhere else? A few days before I lost my job in June, I was on a flight back from Bucharest. I remember looking out of the window, feeling this strange tightness in my chest. Something about my professional life wasn’t right. I couldn’t explain it, but I could feel it. And so I prayed. Divine Universe, show me, guide me, use me. I’m listening. I am at your service. I was asking for guidance. A few days later, I lost my job. Excuse me? I asked for guidance. Not unemployment. Not months of interviews, applications, uncertainty, and waking up without knowing exactly what comes next. And yet, here I am. Four months later, still looking for work. Still having conversations that may or may not lead somewhere. But also writing, recording a podcast, creating things, reading books, attending masterclasses, exploring meditation and Kundalini, and discovering interests I never imagined I’d have. Sometimes I wonder whether I would have found any of these things if my life had continued exactly as it was. Other times, I would quite happily exchange another lesson in personal growth for a little financial certainty. Both feelings are real. And when I heard the story of the pilot, I couldn’t help thinking about my own rain. I’ve spent these months wanting something to happen. Wanting an answer. Wanting to know whether all this effort, curiosity, and learning are actually taking me somewhere. But what if something is happening that I simply cannot see yet? Maybe your rain looks nothing like mine. Maybe it’s a relationship that ended, a country you moved to but still don’t quite feel at home in, or a version of your life you worked so hard to build that no longer feels like yours. Maybe you’ve been asking for something to change for months. And nothing has. I wonder how many of us are walking around convinced that our prayers are going unanswered, when the truth is that we simply don’t know what happens next. I don’t know whether God or the universe had anything to do with my losing my job. I don’t know whether everything happens for a reason, or whether we find reasons afterward because they help us make sense of what happened. I want to believe there is something waiting on the other side of this period. But wanting to believe something and knowing it are two very different things. I keep remembering that prayer on the airplane. Show me. Guide me. I’m listening. Perhaps I imagined guidance would arrive as an opportunity, an introduction, a door opening. I hadn’t considered what it would feel like if something closed first. And perhaps, when I look back one day, I’ll understand why these months unfolded the way they did. Or perhaps I’ll simply be grateful for what I decided to do with them. For now, I don’t have the answer. I’m still walking. And it’s still raining. I’m still praying for it to stop. But lately, I’ve also been wondering where the rain might be taking me. Just Julia This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit juliakallas.substack.com
