When You Feel Like Giving Up

Finding joy on the other side with Leanna Crawford

Leanna Crawford had given everything to a calling she believed God gave her. Then she experienced a season so dark she couldn’t see His hand in any of it.

She was close to walking away from music entirely. “I just didn’t see,” she says. “I wanted to move to an island and never talk to anybody again.”

What kept her wasn’t a plan. It was a person God had already placed in her life.

“God put people in my life,” she says. “And one of those specific people was my sister.”
They’d moved to Nashville around the same time—different opportunities, same city. Best friends, sixteen months apart. And when Leanna had nothing left, Lindsay was the one who showed up.

“She was the one that just continued to speak life over me,” Leanna says. “And some of that was hard truth.” Including the hardest kind: You need to go to counseling. The kind of truth that takes love and courage to say—and even more to hear.

“She was there when I was just crying and crying out to God,” Leanna says. “I cry thinking about it. Just because He was so kind to put her in my life.”

Honest With God
Community held Leanna up. But she was also fighting through it directly with God.
“There’s a lot of yelling between me and the Lord,” she says. “I’m just like, why do I feel this way? I don’t want to feel this way.”

• She journaled.
• She prayed.
• She cried.
• And she kept going back to what she knew was true even when she couldn’t feel it—the same honesty she’d later write into her song “Honest.”

“He can take it,” Leanna says. “He can take the honesty, he can take the real, he can take the raw.”

Through all of it, she held onto one anchor. “I know that he’s been faithful every single time,” she says. “And so trusting that.”

He Is With You
A promise in God’s Word finally steadied her. “Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid; do not be dismayed, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go” (Joshua 1:9 NIV).

“I love that verse not because I always feel strong and courageous—I definitely did not during that season,” Leanna says. “But because of the promise. He is with you. He was with me. He goes before us, He goes behind us, and He walks beside us.”

She came through that season carrying something she didn’t expect. “There is such joy with Him,” she says. “It’s different than happiness. Happiness is temporary. But joy can be found in the Lord—even in the hard seasons.”

Maybe you’re in that season right now—the one where disappearing feels easier than pressing on, where you’ve been more honest with your doubts than you’ve let yourself be with God.

Let Leanna’s story be your invitation: let someone in, and tell God exactly how you feel. He already knows. And He goes before you into whatever comes next.

Want to go deeper?
No Ordinary Moments—a 5-Day Devotional on YouVersion—will walk you through what it means to find God present in every season, including the ones where you can barely hold on.