Blog #19: The Work Happening Beneath the Surface

Category: Theme — Volume 3 (Discernment) · 5 min read

You cannot always see what God is doing. That has never meant He isn't doing it. This is about learning to trust the invisible work.

A tree does not look like it is working.

For most of the year, if you watched an oak, you would see nothing happening. No visible growth. No measurable change. It stands there, as it did last week, as it did last year. If your evaluation of the tree's aliveness depended on what you could see from above the ground, you would eventually conclude that the tree had stopped living.

But the tree is working. Constantly. Underneath the ground, in a vast system of roots you will never see, the tree is searching for water, storing minerals, forming relationships with the fungi that feed it. It is drawing nutrients from soil you cannot examine and building structures that will only become visible years from now when a new branch pushes out in a direction no one predicted.

Ninety percent of the tree's life is happening where no one can see it.

And I want to suggest, carefully, that the same is true of you.

Most of what God is doing in your life is happening beneath the surface.

You have been trained to measure your spiritual life by what you can see — the prayers answered, the feelings of closeness, the moments when you knew something shifted. Those are real. They matter. But they are the branches, not the roots. They are a small fraction of the actual work.

The actual work is quieter.

It is the patience forming in you that you will not notice until the day someone cuts you off in traffic and you simply do not have the energy to be angry — and then you realize, a week later, that you used to have that energy, and somewhere along the way it got replaced with something else.

It is the grief being processed while you are doing the dishes. Not the dramatic grief of the first months. The slower grief. The grief that shows up in waves you did not schedule, that moves through your body while you are folding laundry, that is quietly rearranging what your life means in ways you will only understand years from now.

It is the decision maturing inside you about something you have not yet named. You do not know you are making it. You think you are simply living your days. But something in you is sorting, considering, coming to a knowing that has not yet surfaced in language. When it does — when you finally say the thing out loud — it will feel sudden to everyone around you. It will not have been sudden. It will have been the harvest of work you did not know was happening.

It is the slow softening of something that used to be hard in you. A grudge that is losing its grip. A fear that is losing its hold. A certainty that is becoming a question. You did not work to make any of this happen. It is happening anyway. Because something is at work in you that is not you.

I want to say something carefully here, because I think it is the honest heart of this.

You cannot rush this work. You cannot speed it up. You cannot prove it is happening on any timeline you would like it to happen on.

And you cannot tell, most days, whether it is happening at all.

This is the hardest part. Because most of us have been shaped by a culture that measures progress by what is visible. We want to see evidence. We want to know we are moving forward. We want milestones, markers, some confirmation that our lives are not simply drifting through time.

But the deepest spiritual work refuses those terms. It works on a timeline that is not ours. It works in a medium we cannot examine. It is completely real, and completely invisible, and completely outside our ability to verify.

The roots do not ask the tree for a status report. They are just doing their work.

Here is what I want to offer, and I will be honest: it is harder than it sounds.

Stop demanding visible evidence of God's work in your life.

Not because evidence is bad, and not because the times when you could see Him working were somehow lesser. But because the habit of demanding evidence is quietly stealing from you the capacity to trust when evidence is not available. And the real seasons of formation — the ones that shape you most deeply — are usually the ones without evidence.

You cannot live a mature spiritual life if every season has to be one where you can see God working. You will burn yourself out chasing a feeling. You will start measuring your faith by the intensity of your experiences rather than the faithfulness of your staying. You will mistake the absence of fireworks for the absence of fire.

There is fire. It is burning low and slow and deep. It is doing what fire does when it is not being watched — converting one thing into another thing, permanently, over a long period of time, without any need for an audience.

The work God is doing in you right now is real. You cannot see most of it. You will not see most of it for years. Some of it you will never see in this lifetime.

Trust it anyway.

Not because it is easy to trust. Because the alternative — demanding proof you cannot have — will exhaust you and teach you nothing.

The roots are growing. The tree will grow a branch you cannot yet imagine, in a direction no one predicted, at a time you did not schedule.

Your only job is to keep standing there.

If something here resonated with you, The Direction Series was written for exactly where you are. I would love to invite you in — you can find it at directionseries.com.

 The Porchlight is on. 🔆
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