God's Work Often Happens in the Unseen

Exposed tree roots along a creek bank with leaves collected between them

A hardwood puts a serious amount of its life underground. Root systems that spread wider than the canopy, working down through clay and rock, most of it happening in the cold months when the top of the tree looks finished.

And here’s the part I find hard to get over. The tree does not verify any of it. There’s no moment where it checks. It drops its leaves in October with no confirmation that anything is happening down there, and it does this every single year, and the whole arrangement holds.

I’m not a patient woman. I want the receipt. So this metaphor convicts me a little every fall.

The problem with unmeasurable work

We are trained from about age five to trust what can be counted. Grades, weight, hours, followers, dollars, sessions attended. If it can’t be measured, we assume it isn’t occurring.

Then you hit a season where the only work available is the kind nobody can see, and you have no instruments for it.

You’ve been in therapy for four months and you can’t point to a single thing that’s different. You’ve been praying about the same situation since March. You’ve been showing up for a kid who gives you nothing back. You’ve been sober for sixty-one days and you feel worse, not better, which nobody warned you about.

That’s when the voice starts. Nothing’s happening. You’re wasting your time. This isn’t working.

I want to be careful here, because there’s a version of this conversation that turns into spiritual bypassing, where “God’s working in the unseen” becomes a way to avoid ever asking whether a thing is actually broken. Sometimes nothing’s happening because you’re in the wrong situation and your body knows it. Discernment matters. I’d rather you ask the hard question than paste a verse over it.

But I’d also say this. Most people declare something dead well before the evidence is in, and they do it because waiting without proof is genuinely miserable.

What the unseen work looks like from the inside

It mostly feels like nothing, which is the whole problem. When I go back through my own hardest stretches, the growth was almost never available to me in the moment. I only found it later, looking backward.

It shows up in strange, unremarkable places. You notice you didn’t check his location this week. Somebody said the thing that always leveled you and you were annoyed instead of destroyed. You slept through the night twice. A memory came up on a drive and you thought about it instead of swerving away from it. You caught yourself about to apologize for taking up space and you didn’t.

None of that goes on a chart. Put it all together over a year and it’s an entirely different person.

Sitting with a God who doesn’t narrate

The part of faith I find hardest is not believing God is there. It’s that He so rarely explains Himself on my schedule.

Scripture is full of long gaps. Joseph in a cell for years with no update. Forty years in a wilderness. Three days in a tomb, and even that, which is the shortest version we’ve got, was three days too long for everybody standing there Friday night. The people living through those stretches did not have the benefit of the chapter heading. They had Tuesday, and then another Tuesday.

If you’re in a stretch where heaven has gone quiet, you’re standing in the most crowded room in the Bible. That’s not a platitude. That’s the pattern.

How to hold steady without proof

Shorten your measuring window. Stop asking whether you’re healed and ask whether today had one thing in it that last April wouldn’t have. The long question is unanswerable right now, and asking an unanswerable question daily will wear a groove in you.

Keep records you can’t argue with later. Date them. Your memory will revise this season to match however you feel in January, and a dated note doesn’t negotiate.

Let somebody else see you. The whole point of having people is that they can observe from outside the snow globe. You’re in it, shaken up, and you cannot see clearly from in there. I can stand outside and watch things settle that you can’t see yet, and so can a good friend, and that’s not flattery. That’s a different vantage point.

Do the next small right thing without checking whether it’s working. Feed yourself. Go to the appointment. Make the call. The tree doesn’t audit its roots, it just keeps doing root behavior.

Let it be hard. You’re allowed to hate a season you’re also growing in. Nobody has to be gracious about November.

What I’d tell you across the desk

There’s a reason it’s roots and not results.

Results can be taken from you. A bad year, a layoff, a diagnosis, another person’s choices, and the visible things come right off. What goes down into the ground stays yours. It’s the part that keeps the whole thing standing when the wind gets up, and it gets built in exactly the season you feel the least productive.

You’re not wasting this. I know it feels like you are. Knowledge is power, and when you know better you do better, and you’re going to look up in a year and find you got taller in a direction nobody could see.

Keep going. Baby steps.

This is education, not therapy. If you’re in crisis, call or text 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. If you’re in Kentucky and want faith and clinical work in the same room, that’s what I do at Circle of Hope Counseling Services.

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