21: What’s Growing Here?
How do we know if something is actually changing in us?
Maybe we thought we’d be farther along by now. Or maybe we’re only beginning to wonder what a life with God might look like and whether it really changes anything.
This week I’m thinking about spiritual growth, what we expect it to look like, and why it can be so hard to recognize while we’re living it.
In this episode, we explore:
When we find ourselves back here again
What we expect growth to look like
How we begin to recognize what’s changing
Links + Resources From This Episode:
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Order Kairos, When The Holy Meets The Daily
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I’m Denisa Nica, and welcome to Walking Anyway. You’re listening to episode 21.
This is a podcast about living faithfully in uncertain seasons when life feels unclear and nothing is quite settling yet. If you’re not quite sure how to move through this in a way that feels steady and true, you’re in the right place to keep walking anyway. Each week I offer a reflection and a gentle way to help you live faithfully, one ordinary step at a time.
I’m an author and spiritual director, and the founder of The Table— an online contemplative community shaped by a weekly rhythm, where women practice this kind of faithful living together, at their own pace, in the middle of their real lives and faith. I live in Spain, where life moves a little slower, and that has changed the way I pay attention, and the way I live inside my own life.
Today, we’re talking about how we know whether God is actually changing something in us, and I’ll share two of things that have been helping me with that question lately. Listen in.
Going to work looks a little different for me than it probably does for some people. Most days, my work involves some combination of thinking, writing, praying, talking and listening. Not necessarily in that order.
And because I’m a spiritual director, a good part of my week is spent sitting with people and listening to them talk about their lives with God.
The questions are different because the lives are different. But every once in a while, I’ll notice the same question showing up in different conversations.
And there’s one I’ve been hearing enough lately, that I thought we could talk about it here.
How do I know if God is actually changing something in me?
And when I say changing, I don’t just mean becoming more confident or more organized or getting better at managing my emotional life.
Those things can change in us too, of course. What I’m thinking, and what my directees mean when they ask this question, is something a little deeper.
As a Christian, I believe God is forming us into the likeness of our friend Jesus. So when I wonder whether we’re changing, what I’m really wondering is what kind of person we’re becoming with God.
Am I becoming more able to love? More willing to tell the truth? Am I learning to receive my limits, or trust God with something I can’t control?
That’s the kind of change we’re talking about today. And I know the question because I ask it too.
There are things I thought I’d be better at by now. Things I’ve prayed about before, things I know, and then find myself having to learn again. And again. And again.
Through the years, I’ve picked up some pretty definite ideas about what I think that change is supposed to look like.
I’ve been noticing some of them lately because I keep a few running lists in my journal.
One of them is really just an answer to a question: What do these days hold?
It’s a simple way of keeping track of my life while I’m living it. I’m not trying to figure out what everything means, I’m mostly just noticing what was here.
So every week, I write a few things down. It might be a conversation, something happening with work, a decision I needed to make, or just something ordinary that, for one reason or another, took up some space in my life that week.
I have a few other lists too - things I’m grateful for, questions I’m carrying, what’s been life-giving and what’s been draining, and things I’ve read or listened to.
And some of you will recognize this because you receive my monthly letters. Those letters are really born out of this rhythm. I don’t sit down at the end of the month and come up with something to write about. I’ve been living with it, noticing it, writing little things down as the days and weeks go by.
Something happens and I write it down. I notice something and add it to the list. I remember something while I’m making dinner or walking somewhere, and eventually it makes its way onto the page.
Then, usually somewhere around the third or fourth week of the month, I’ll turn back a few pages and read what I wrote during the first week. I’m almost always surprised.
Sometimes I look at something and think, Wait. That was this month? Other times, something from three weeks ago feels like it happened yesterday.
I’ll see a decision I made about something that felt quite important at the time, and somehow I’ve already stopped thinking about it.
Or I’ll realize that I had two migraines that month. Sometimes four.
And I’ll think, Oh right. That happened. Which is strange because when I have a migraine, I’m convinced there has never been anything else happening in the history of the world.
And then three weeks later I’ve nearly forgotten it.
Sometimes the same word keeps appearing, or the same concern, or the same thing I remain very committed to becoming more consistent about. By the way, want to guess what that is for me? Yes. Going to bed before midnight.
I don’t know how many times a person can write “sleep more” in a journal before they actually start sleeping more, but the answer seems to be: quite a few. Every version of me would like the next version of me to be done with the day and in bed by 10pm.
But I notice other things too. Something that felt enormous a few months ago barely appears anymore. A question I was carrying is still there, but when I read the way I wrote about it earlier, I realize I’m not asking quite the same question anymore. Or something that was taking so much of my energy isn’t what is taking my energy now.
None of this was particularly obvious while it was happening. When I wrote those first few words down, I wasn’t trying to figure out what it all means, I was just living my life.
It’s only when I turn back a few pages that I sometimes see something I couldn’t see while I was living it.
And I think that’s part of why reflection has become essential to me.
When I’m right in the middle of my life, I’m simply standing too close to some of it. Looking back gives me a little distance and helps me discern what is happening on both the outside and the inside.
But I’ve also been wondering how much of my difficulty recognizing what God may be doing and changing and in me has to do with what I expect that change to look like.
Because it turns out, I have expectations.
So I’ll tell you a few of mine. And as I do, you might notice some of your own.
Here’s the first one: I expect that if I’ve really changed, I won’t find myself back here again.
You know that feeling. I thought I was past this. I thought I had dealt with this. I thought this wouldn’t bother me anymore.
There’s something discouraging about that little word: again.
Because when the same fear comes back, or I find myself asking a question I thought I’d settled, it’s so easy to think, Seriously? We’re here again? And then, if I’m not careful, “I thought I’d be past this by now” becomes “What’s wrong with me that I’m not?”
But when I look a little closer, I’m not always sure I am in exactly the same place. Maybe I noticed sooner this time, asked for help, or I stayed with something, instead of immediately trying to get away from it.
It can feel very familiar and still not be exactly the same.
Number two: I expect change to be big.
I expect it to be obvious, to notice it, and maybe for other people to notice it too. I want to be able to point to something and say, There. See? That’s different.
But when I look back, what I notice may be as ordinary as pausing before I respond, letting somebody help me, or telling the truth sooner than I used to.
Things like that are so easy to miss.
Number three: I expect change to be fast. Fast enough that I can tell it’s happening, but some things take a very long time.
Sometimes it’s only when I look across months, or even years, that I realize something isn’t quite where it used to be.
When you’re living forward, slow can feel a lot like standing still.
And then there’s number four, which is almost funny when I say it out loud: I expect change to actually feel different.
I mean, shouldn’t it? If I’m changing, shouldn’t I feel changed? Shouldn’t I feel more trusting or more patient, less afraid, maybe a little more settled? And sometimes I do. But not always.
How I feel today is real, and I want to pay attention to it. But I’m not sure that feelings are always the best measure of what has or hasn’t been changing in a human person.
And lastly, number five: I expect that if I’ve really changed, I won’t need to keep learning the same things.
I’ve heard this before. I’ve prayed about this before. I know this. Surely, I should know this by now.
But knowing that I need to trust God, for example, and actually trusting Him when something I care about feels uncertain, are two different things.
I can know that I have limits and still have to learn how to receive those limits when I’m tired and can’t do everything I want to do.
I can know that I need other people and still find myself trying to carry something alone.
So returning to something I already know doesn’t mean I failed to learn it the first time. Sometimes I know something long before I know how to live it.
All that to say - when I look at those five expectations, I think there’s something underneath all of them. I expect to be able to tell.
If God is really changing something in me, I think I should know it. I should be able to recognize it somehow.
And I want to be careful here, because I don’t think the problem is that I want to change. I do want to become more like Christ. I hope there are things that are different in me because I’ve spent years walking with God. And there can be real disappointment when I find myself somewhere I thought I would have moved beyond by now.
You may be much newer to this than I am, simply beginning to wonder what a life with God could look like for you. But I think it’s good to hope that knowing God will make a difference in us—in how we love, how we respond to our lives, and the kind of people we’re becoming. I don’t want to talk us out of that desire.
What I’m questioning is how quickly I decide what that should look like—how fast it should happen, how different it should feel, or what I think I should have moved beyond by now.
And that doesn’t mean every time something familiar comes around again, it must mean we’re growing. It might not. Sometimes the fact that I keep coming back to the same thing is exactly what I need to pay attention to. Nor do I want to take every small difference and turn it into evidence that I’m doing better than I think I am.
I’m just becoming a little less certain that my expectations are always very good at telling me what God is actually doing in me.
Which… brings me back to reflection.
Looking back isn’t about going through my life trying to find evidence that I’ve changed. It’s not a way of deciding whether I’ve passed some kind of spiritual test.
Sometimes I just need a little distance from my own life before I can see it very clearly.
And even then, I may not know what any of it means.
I may notice that something keeps returning. Or that I’m responding differently than I used to. Or that a question has changed.
And there may be something in what I notice that God is inviting me to respond to.
That’s different from trying to prove that I’m growing.
But I can do all of that—look back, pray, ask good questions—and I’m still looking at my life through my own eyes.
There are things about my own becoming that I may not be able to see by myself.
Sometimes we need witnesses to our becoming.
I see this in spiritual direction quite often.
Someone will be sitting across from me—or, very often, on the other side of a screen—and all they can see is what is still difficult.
But I’ve been listening to them for six months, or a year, or sometimes longer, and I remember some of what they were saying before.
Every once in a while, I’ll hear something and think, That’s different. It doesn’t mean the difficulty has gone away. Maybe they’re asking a different question now, or they’re able to stay in a conversation they once would have avoided.
And I get to reflect that back to them.
I’ve had friends do the same thing for me.
I’ll be telling a friend something about my life, very much from inside whatever I’m experiencing, and she’ll remember something I don’t. She’ll remind me of something I said months earlier, or how I used to talk about this particular thing.
And suddenly I have another view of my own life because someone else has been remembering it with me.
A friend of mine, and former colleague, David, used to say something along the lines of: find people who love you and who will not be impressed by you.
I’ve remembered that sentence for years. We do really need both of these things in a friend. Someone who love us, who’s there for us, who can hold what is tender with care, and for whom we don’t have to perform. Someone who know us well enough, and love us well enough, to tell us the truth.
A friend might hear me saying that I’m really struggling with trusting God right now, for example, and remind me of something I can’t see from where I’m standing. But she might also hear me insisting that everything is fine, that my faith is great and say, Denisa, you keep coming back to this thing. I think there’s something here you need to pay attention to.
That’s part of what makes someone a trustworthy witness to our becoming. They’re not there simply to reassure us. They know enough of our story to help us see it more truthfully.
I’ve noticed this around The Table too, and honestly, it’s one of my favorite things that happens there.
Someone will be talking about something she’s living now, and another woman will say, Wait. This sounds like something you said a few months ago.
And sometimes the person doesn’t even remember it. But she does. Nobody has been keeping track of anybody’s progress, we’ve just been around long enough to know a little more of each other’s stories.
And I think the distinction we made at the beginning matters here.
Because not every change in us is necessarily formation.
We can become more efficient or more confident or better at managing life, and there’s nothing wrong with any of that.
But the Christian hope is something more than becoming an improved version of myself. It’s that God is forming me into the likeness of Jesus.
Which brings me back to the question we started with: How do we know if that’s actually happening?
Of course, most of us, if not all of us, we want to know where God is working. We want to know that something essential is happening in us as we live this one precious life.
And, if I’m being honest, I would also like to be able to measure it, just a little.
I wonder if part of that, is simply wanting to know that I’m doing this right. That all of this is working. That I’m somehow where I’m supposed to be by now.
And this is where I have to remember that God is the one who forms me.
I can pay attention to what’s happening in me. I can respond to what I notice. I can keep choosing practices that turn me toward God. I can let other people help me. But I can’t turn myself into the person I’m trying to become. That’s simply not something I can manufacture.
And I suppose this is where my imaginary spiritual progress report starts to fall apart. Because all of this is happening in the middle of an actual human life. My actual human life, with limits and shadows and sinful patterns and old fears and things that are taking considerably longer than I had ever imagined or planned.
There are things I can see being transformed in me, and there are things I honestly can’t. I don’t have to decide any of it, I just have to pay attention to what’s actually here.
Because here’s the thing: we don’t have to be able to measure everything God is doing in order to remain open to Him.
So before you move on with your day, take a minute and look back. Not to figure out whether you’ve made enough progress. Please don’t do that to yourself. Just look.
Is there anything you can see now that you couldn’t see when you were right in the middle of it?
And is there anything there you want to bring before God?
You may know right away. Or you may think, I have absolutely no idea. That’s fine. You don’t have to come up with something profound.
And you don’t have to be able to account for everything God is doing in you. There may be things you can see now, things someone else can see before you do, and things you simply can’t see yet.
For now, you can bring God what you do see, and leave the rest with Him.
Blessed are you who thought you’d be farther along by now, who find yourself here again wondering if anything has changed at all.
May you be gentle with what is taking longer than you hoped.
May God give you people who can remember with you what you cannot always see for yourself.
And may you trust Him with the parts of your becoming you cannot yet understand. Amen.
Thanks for listening to episode 21 of Walking Anyway.
I hope the simple practice of reflection, and the gift of having a witness to your life, help you pay attention to what God may be doing in you—even when you can’t quite see it for yourself.
Because the way you’re walking through this, is already forming something steady in you.
And if this kind of looking back would be helpful to you, this is the rhythm I was telling you about earlier with my letters.
I’ve been writing Letters from the Middle for almost four years now. At the end of every month, I send three questions that give us a chance to stop before another month begins and ask, What just happened here?
Because otherwise I will absolutely keep moving and forget half of it. As we’ve already established, I can forget four migraines, so I’m not sure I should be trusted to remember an entire month.
And then every few months, I send a What I’m Learning letter, which comes from those same journal pages.
So if you’d like to join me in that rhythm of reflection, I’d love to have you. Think of it as a little reminder at the end of each month to stop, look back, and notice your own life before another month begins. I’ll put the link in the show notes.
And if today’s conversation has left you thinking about how those kinds of witnesses actually become part of our lives, I think this is part of why I’ve come to value smaller communities so much.
The Table isn’t meant to replace your local church. It’s a smaller community alongside it, where there’s room to bring more of your actual life with God and, over time, to be known.
It’s the kind of place where we can become witnesses to one another’s lives simply by showing up and sharing some of what we’re actually living.
So if you’ve been listening today and thinking, I think I need some of that. I need some people who will know my story, or at least begin to know it, then come join us for a while.
We have a Guest Seat at The Table, which means you can be with us for three weeks for free.
You don’t have to prepare anything. You don’t have to know what’s going on. You certainly don’t have to have anything figured out.
Just pull up a chair and see what you think. I would really love to have you there. I’ll put that link in the show notes as well.
If something in today’s conversation stayed with you, I’d love to have you back here next week. You can follow the show so the next episode finds its way to you. And if Walking Anyway has been good company to you, leaving a quick rating or review is one small way to help someone else find it too.
And perhaps someone came to mind while you were listening today. If they did, send this episode their way. You don’t need to explain why or have anything helpful to say. Sometimes it’s enough to simply say, “I thought of you when I heard this.”
As always, you can find me at denisaonica.com., on Substack at denisaonica.substack.com or on Instagram at denisa.o.nica. I’d love to see you there.
As you step back into your day, notice what stayed with you, and let that be enough for today. Just like light moving through a room— you don’t need to see everything at once to keep living faithfully here.
Before you go, I want to leave you with a few words from C. S. Lewis. In Mere Christianity, he writes: “We have not yet had the slightest notion of the tremendous thing He means to make of us.”
Thanks for listening, I'll be here with you next time.