How God Develops You (Part 1)

When Learning God Didn't Look the Way I Expected

We all want to do God’s will.
But many of us struggle because we don’t understand God’s ways.

This mini-series is an attempt to bring clarity and confidence as you discern what the Lord may be doing in your own life, especially if your development hasn’t followed the script you were given.

For a long time, I wrestled.

Not with God.
With the environments surrounding Him.

I had expectations about how spiritual development was supposed to work,
and my expectations weren’t matching my reality.

I would attend church services, conferences, and faith-based events and leave feeling disoriented.
Like I was missing something everyone else seemed fluent in.

I didn’t understand the language.
The structure.
Or the absence of one.

I was being asked, sometimes subtly and sometimes directly, to conform to religious protocols that didn’t actually draw me closer to God.
And that confusion produced frustration, not rebellion.

What made it harder was this:
I was learning more about God through books, study, and online ministries than I was through the in-person spaces that were supposed to be forming me.

So I questioned myself.

Am I doing this wrong?
Why isn’t this landing for me?
Why do I feel more alive learning outside the four walls than inside them?

I was deeply aware of the warning in Scripture about always learning but never arriving at truth (2 Timothy 3:7).
I didn’t want information without formation
or knowledge without intimacy.

Let me be clear:

I am not anti-church.
My husband and I are deeply involved in our local church community.
We believe in the body.
We believe in gathering.

But development is not always linear.
And it is not always predictable.

For many of us, we’ve unintentionally restricted how God is “allowed” to move.
We assume formation happens only through certain steps,
certain spaces,
or certain people.

God’s patterns often repeat,
but His methods rarely do.
And when we expect uniformity,
we often miss the uniqueness of how He’s moving in us.

What if God’s developmental process for you is beyond what’s typical
or widely accepted?

What if your wrestling isn’t resistance
but redirection?

I wasn’t rejecting God.
I was resisting a version of spirituality that required me to abandon how I was actually wired.

What I didn’t understand then
was that God wasn’t trying to rewire me.
He was trying to meet me where I was being me.

And once I stopped confusing conformity with formation,
things began to make sense.

God wasn’t asking me to become someone else
in order to hear Him.

What I can see clearly now is this:

God’s developmental process is rarely loud
or uniform.
But it is intentional.

• He meets you in you being you, not the version you think you should become.

• He often begins with small acts of obedience, not big moments or public assignments.

• He gives smaller assignments first, and how we steward them determines what comes next.

• And He moves uniquely through people, even when that uniqueness isn’t obvious or attached to worldly success or accomplishments.

God wasn’t absent.
He wasn’t silent.
He was speaking,
just not in the way I’d been taught to expect.

And learning how God spoke to me
was the beginning of learning how He would lead me.

Reflection

Has God ever met you in a way you didn’t expect, and how did you respond?