I used to hate the phrase “work in progress.” It felt like a polite way of saying “not quite good enough yet.”
Like I was a half-finished project God had abandoned in His garage, overlooked while He moved on to more promising renovations.
But here’s what I’ve learned since God met me in the wreckage of my life: the middle matters. Not just a little. It matters more than almost anything else. The struggles, the slow growth, the two-steps-forward-one-step-back dance of unlearning and becoming who you were meant to be. That’s not the annoying part before the real transformation happens. That is the transformation.
The Instant Makeover That Never Comes
We’re conditioned to expect instant results. Amazon delivers in two days. Streaming services drop entire seasons at once. Instagram filters transform your face before you even finish taking the photo. We’ve been trained to believe that if something’s taking too long, it’s not working.
So when we come to faith expecting a spiritual makeover montage (dramatic music, quick cuts, emerge as a completely different person in 60 seconds) the actual experience feels like failure. You pray a prayer. You mean it with everything you have, you often feel a rush of emotion as God’s spirit is present, and then…you wake up the next day still in the same life you built around your old self. With real relationships, real commitments, a real complexity that doesn’t magically disappear.
When I encountered Jesus at 42, I had built quite a life around my old false identity. I’d been in a same-sex relationship for 13 years. We had a life together. A real life, with shared memories and inside jokes and routines that made us us. And my first instinct? Run. My religious upbringing screamed at me: You’ve been so wicked! Abandon ship! Get out now! My head added its own panic: God will never be able to help you change, He can’t reach you if you stay where you are!
Then the Holy Spirit spoke to me with logic so simple it stopped me in my tracks: “You aren’t making a lot of sense. Obviously I can reach you here. You wouldn’t even be thinking about this if I couldn’t reach you there.”
He had a point.
When God Doesn’t Let You Run
Running was my default defense mechanism. It’s what I’d taught myself to do when things got complicated or painful. But God had other plans. Instead of letting me flee the mess I’d created, He spent the next year teaching me something I desperately needed to learn: how to take responsibility for my life without drowning in shame. How to face painful emotions instead of sprinting away from them. How to let Him actually walk me through something instead of just magically extracting me from it.
It was probably one of the hardest times of my life. It hurt. It still hurts. But here’s what I discovered in that excruciating middle space: God doesn’t need your life to be simple to work in it. He doesn’t need you to have everything figured out before He can start the transformation process. He just needs you to stop running long enough to let Him work.
During that year, I started attending the church I now belong to, which has been absolutely crucial to God’s direction for my life. Not because they had all the answers or made everything easy, but because they gave me a place to wrestle with hard questions and find healthy role models who could encourage me and who could hold me up in prayer while God was doing deep surgery on my heart.
The Seed and the Tree
Consider it this way: when you plant an apple seed, you’re not planting a mere idea or possibility of a tree. You’re planting a real apple tree. It just hasn’t taken shape yet. Everything required to grow that towering, fruit-bearing tree is encoded within that tiny seed. But the transformation from seed to tree isn’t immediate, nor is it optional. The seed must break open beneath the soil. Roots must push through the earth. The delicate shoot must endure storms, droughts, and challenges along the way.
The seed doesn’t doubt it’s a tree just because it doesn’t look like one yet.
When Paul writes in 2 Corinthians about being transformed “from one degree of glory to another,” he’s describing exactly this reality. You’re not waiting to become glorious. You already are, because Christ is in you.
But that glory is unfolding, manifesting, working its way from the inside out through every broken, confused, resistant, damaged part of your life. From one degree to another. Incrementally. Progressively. One hard day and small victory at a time.
The process doesn’t wait for ideal conditions. It starts right where you are, in whatever complicated situation you find yourself.
Why God Didn’t Make It Instant
If I could have snapped my fingers and instantly become a different person, one who was healed, free of toxic habbits, and extremely disciplined, I would have done it in a heartbeat. The process has been painful. There have been setbacks that gutted me,so many moments where I wondered if I was actually making any progress at all.
But here’s what I’ve come to understand: if transformation were instant, I would have missed the most important part. Not the destination, but the journey itself. Not the finished product, but the building of it.
The process is where you actually learn to know God. Not know about Him. Know Him. When you’re in the middle of facing painful emotions you’ve spent years running from, and God shows up in that space and says “I’m here, I’ve got you,” that’s knowing Him. When He gives you strength you didn’t think you had and teaches you to lean on Him instead of your old coping mechanisms, that’s a relationship, not a religion.
The process is where your character is truly forged. James teaches that trials produce perseverance, and perseverance shapes character. It’s through struggles that you build genuine spiritual strength, not just accumulate spiritual knowledge. Anyone can believe God is faithful when life is easy and straightforward. But it’s in the most challenging seasons, when you keep showing up and choose to trust despite the pain, that’s when faith becomes real. That’s when it moves from your mind into your very core.
The process teaches you that God has a plan, and usually the only person who can mess it up is you. Not other people. Not the devil. You. When you try to run instead of letting Him walk you through. When you insist on your own timeline instead of trusting His. When you white-knuckle your way to a solution instead of learning to lean on His strength.
Working Out What God Works In
There’s this verse in Philippians that perfectly captures the tension: “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.”
Notice it doesn’t say “work for your salvation”. Like you’re earning it, like it’s dependent on your performance. It says work it out. Like working out a muscle. Like living out the reality of what’s already true, even when your circumstances are messy and complicated and painful.
Here’s the stunning part: the same verse that calls you to serious effort (“fear and trembling” isn’t casual language) also reminds you that God is the one doing the actual work inside you. He’s the one giving you the desire to change. He’s the one providing the power to do it. You’re not white-knuckling your way to holiness. You’re cooperating with a divine power already at work in you.
It’s a partnership, but not a 50/50 one. It’s more like 100/100—God does what only God can do, and you do what only you can do. He provides the seed, the life force, the growth. You provide the conditions. The willingness to stay when you want to run, the courage to face what needs to be faced, the faith to believe He’s working even when you can’t see it yet.
God is so good. He has always been faithful, even when the process has been brutally hard.
The Glory in the Middle
I used to think I’d feel transformed when I finally had my life together, when I could look back at the mess I was and feel completely disconnected from it. But what I’m discovering is that the glory isn’t waiting at some future finish line. It’s the small things happening now, in the middle, in the messy process of becoming. It’s there when you realize you’re developing the ability to lean on Him instead of defaulting to your old defense mechanisms.
From one degree of glory to another. Not from no glory to some glory, but from glory to greater glory. You’re already glorious because Christ is in you. The process is simply revealing what’s already true, working it out into every area of your life, bit by bit, even the dark corners you thought were too complicated for God to handle.
Your Messy Middle Matters
If you’re reading this amid chaos, stuck in a situation that feels impossible, overwhelmed by painful emotions, and questioning how God could possibly bring resolution, know this: you are exactly where you need to be. This process isn’t a flaw. It’s part of the design. God isn’t frustrated by your complicated circumstances; He is deeply present, guiding you through every step.
The Israelites didn’t get teleported to the Promised Land. God walked them through the wilderness, showing up as a pillar of cloud and fire every single day. David didn’t become king overnight. God trained him in fields and caves and through years of running. Even Jesus didn’t appear as a fully-formed teacher; He “grew in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and man.”
God uses process. He honors process. He works through process. And He’s more interested in who you’re becoming along the way than He is in rushing you to some imaginary finish line or extracting you from every difficult situation.
Here’s your next step: Take five minutes today and ask yourself this question: “Where can I see even the smallest degree of change since I started this journey?” Not where you wish you were. Not where you think you should be. But where can you actually see growth, even if it’s tiny? Maybe it’s that you’re still here instead of running. Maybe it’s that you’re learning to lean on God instead of your old coping mechanisms. Maybe it’s that you’re facing one painful truth you used to avoid. Thank God for it. That’s not nothing. That’s one degree of glory to another. That’s the process working exactly as it should.
And if you can’t see any growth yet? That’s okay too. The seed breaks open in the dark before anything visible happens above ground. Keep watering. Keep showing up. Keep trusting that the God who can reach you right where you are is faithful to finish what He started.
You’re not behind. You’re not stuck. You’re not in the wrong place for God to work. You’re in the glorious, frustrating, beautiful middle of becoming who you were always meant to be.
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