You pray constantly for three months, feel closer to God than you have in years, and then on an ordinary Tuesday, everything calmly passes.
The devotional sits unopened. The peace you worked so hard for feels like something you borrowed and had to return.
Nothing wrong happened with you. Spiritual growth was never designed to move in a straight line. It moves the way living things move: in seasons, in circles, in growth spurts followed by long periods when nothing seems to happen.
Here’s what the journey actually looks like on the inside and how to keep walking when what you’re feeling doesn’t match what’s being built inside of you.
📈 Why do we expect a straight line?
Most of us have learned to measure growth the way school does.
Finish the level, pass the test, and advance the class. Faith is quietly placed under the same order, so we begin to believe that this year should be more holy than last and that a good week of prayer guarantees a better week to come.
Social media doubles the pressure. You see other people’s achievements and degrees, almost never their dry years. So when your dry year comes, you read it as a failure rather than a normal season.
The ladder model appeals to us because it promises control. Do the practices and get the result. True spiritual life is much less predictable and much more forgiving.
🌀 True shape: a spiral, not a ladder
A spiral is the closest image. You keep coming back to the same lessons – forgiveness, surrender, trust, patience – and each time you meet them from a slightly different height.
That’s why an old wound can resurface years after you think you’ve released it. You’re not starting over. You meet the same thing with greater ability than the first time.
The situation seems familiar. You are the part that has changed.
Once you accept the spiral, revisiting stops feeling like a failure and starts serving as information.
Being angry about your mother showing up again at 50 does not erase the work you did at 30. This means you are finally firm enough to handle the next layer of it.
🌑Awakening season
This is the season everyone wants to stay in. Something opens up, often because of a loss, an illness, an important birthday, or a book you accidentally picked up, and suddenly you’re hungry again.
It’s a real gift, but it acts like strong winds that move the boat instead of where it’s supposed to live.
🌬️ It arrives like a strong wind
Something opens up and suddenly you’re hungry again. The prayer feels alive, the Bible reads as if it were written this morning, and you want to tell everyone about it.
⛵ The wind is not meant to blow forever
This season gets the boat moving, but it’s never the destination. When the intensity rises, nothing is taken from you and nothing goes wrong.
🕯️ Notice what you come up with naturally
Pay attention to the practices you effortlessly gravitate to now. Those quiet favorites become your anchors later, when enthusiasm stops doing the work for you.
🌤️ Enjoy it without building on it
Receive the full gift, but don’t make sense of who you are. What you build during this season matters much more than how long the glow lasts.
🔥Expansion season
Then comes the part that no one puts on the highlight reel.
Life asks you to actually live what you have learned. Relationship tension. Diagnosis arrives. Someone treats you unfairly and you discover that your peace is weaker than you had hoped.
Seasons of expansion feel like retreat as your reactions unravel. You explode at your husband. You’re lying awake worrying about money. You wonder where all this growth has gone.
It didn’t disappear. Growth becomes visible only under load, and that is load. The impatience you see has always been there. You simply had no reason to look at her while things were quiet.
Be kind to yourself here and be completely honest at the same time. This combination is what turns a difficult season into a formative one.
🍂 Plateau: Where most of the growth hides
The plateaus are the longest and most misunderstood season. Nothing dramatic happens. You show up, you pray, you serve, and you feel very little. Temptation is when you decide that you have procrastinated or that God has remained silent about you.
Spiritual writers have described this state for centuries, and they consistently treat it as progress rather than regression. When the emotional reward disappears, your motivation purifies. You discover whether you want God or you want feeling.
Plateaus are also where habits turn into character. Anyone can be loyal when they feel great. Devotion on a plain, silent Wednesday is the thing that truly reshapes a person.
Keep the practices small, and do it anyway.
🕯️ The plateau purifies your motivation
When the emotional reward disappears, you discover what you were really preparing for. Practicing without any warm feelings strips away the parts of your faith that were in the air, and what remains is the part that truly belongs to you.
🌾 Transforms habits into personality
Anyone can be loyal when they feel great. Repeated practice without applause and without a rush of emotion ceases to be something you do and quietly becomes part of your identity. This is the season when the roots go down instead of the branches go up.
🌙 Builds calm endurance
Standing still on an ordinary, silent Wednesday grows something no dramatic season can do for you. Keep the practices small enough that you can maintain them honestly, and keep them anyway. The endurance built here is what carries you through whatever comes next.
🌾Integration season
Finally something clicks. You don’t glow or struggle. You simply live differently, and you barely notice it happening.
Integration looks normal from the outside. You become less upset by news that would have devastated you five years ago. You forgive faster, not because you decided to be noble, but because holding on to it no longer appeals to you. You need less applause to do the right thing.
This is the season when others notice you before you do. Someone tells you that you seem stuck and confused, because on the inside it feels like a normal Tuesday.
Then the vortex turns again, a new awakening arrives, and the whole cycle is repeated on a deeper level.
🔍 Quiet signs that indicate that you are in the process of growth
⏱️ Your recovery time is shortened
You still feel angry or anxious, but you come back to yourself within an hour instead of a week.
🤍You’ll be less right
Winning an argument quietly loses its flavor, and peace becomes more important than proof.
👁️ You can catch yourself sooner
You notice your reactions as they happen rather than realizing them three days later.
🕊️ You can sit with the unresolved ones
An open situation no longer requires an immediate solution, and waiting feels less like failure.
💛You are kinder to your younger self
You forgive who you were before, and are not greatly affected by the certainties of others.
🧭 What to do when you feel stuck spiritually
First, intentionally lower the bar. Five honest minutes beats an hour-long sloppy routine every time.
Consistency trumps strength, and a workout you can sustain on your worst weeks is worth more than a workout you can only manage on your best weeks.
Second, change form instead of commitment. If reading dries up, walk and pray instead. If words feel empty, sit in silence. If the silence is unbearable, try music or writing.
Third, tell someone you trust the truth. Drought thrives on secrecy and will lose a lot of weight the minute you say it out loud.
Fourth, take care of your body. Fatigue, lack of sleep, and unprocessed grief all resemble spiritual death. Sometimes, what you need is rest instead of repentance.
💛 How to stop comparing your journey
Comparison is the quickest way to make a healthy season look like a failure.
The woman whose faith seems easy may be in her year of awakening and you in your year of expansion. You look at two different classes and call them a class.
Keep a log instead of a scorecard. Once a month, write down one thing you handled better than you did a year ago. Reread it again when you’re procrastinating, because your history is more compelling than anyone else’s highlights.
Choose your inputs carefully, too. If certain accounts constantly leave you feeling behind, here’s helpful information on what you should stop consuming.
Frequently asked questions
Is it normal that I feel further away from God than I have in years?
Yes, and it usually reflects a change in season rather than a loss of land. Emotional closeness fluctuates in almost everyone.
Confidence and character often deepen specifically during quieter periods, even though there is nothing particularly impressive at that time.
How long do dry seasons last?
There is no specific timetable. Some pass within a few weeks, others stay longer. What always helps is keeping your practice small and really sustainable rather than waiting for motivation to return before starting over.
Does going backwards mean I never grew up?
No, confronting an old conflict again always means that you are confronting a deeper layer of it with greater capacity than you had before. Repetition is part of the design, not evidence that previous work has been lost.
Should I change traditions or practices if everything seems outdated?
Try changing the model before changing the foundation. The anxiety is usually about style rather than belief, and constant switching prevents anything from taking root long enough to bear fruit.
How do I know if this is spiritual dryness or depression?
Drought tends to remain tied up in your spiritual life while the rest continues to work.
Persistent despondency, changes in sleep or appetite, and loss of interest in every area of life merit a conversation with your doctor or counselor.
✨ Conclusion
The most liberating thing you can accept about spiritual growth is that flat parts are not discontinuities. They make up the majority of the path, and are where the real shaping happens.
You’re allowed to have a year that looks like nothing from the outside.
You are allowed to revisit lessons you thought you were finished with. You are allowed to keep a very small practice on days when a large practice is impossible.
Stop checking if you are higher than you were. Instead see if you are still going, still honest, and still willing to change.
That’s the whole metric, and by that metric you’re definitely doing better than you think.
