A teaching post for women who are wondering if the hard years were wasted
“And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.”
— Romans 8:28 (NIV)
All things.
Not some things. Not the tidy things that already made sense. Not the seasons that looked spiritual from the outside. All things.
If you’ve been following Jesus for any length of time, you’ve probably wrestled with that promise. You’ve held it up against a specific season — maybe a loss, a betrayal, a door that stayed closed, a detour you didn’t choose — and you’ve asked, sometimes with tears and sometimes with barely-controlled frustration: Does this count? Is this one of the all things?
I’ve been there. I know what it’s like to look at a season of my life and see what appears to be wasted time, wasted effort, wasted years. To feel like God missed something. To wonder if I took a wrong turn and He just hasn’t corrected me yet.
What I’ve discovered — slowly, through my own story, and through walking alongside hundreds of women in theirs — is that the seasons we were most tempted to write off are often the ones God was most deliberately using.
The Problem With Human Sight
The honest truth is that we can rarely see what God is doing while He’s doing it.
That is not a design flaw. It is a feature of faith.
If we could see the full purpose of every season while we were in it, we wouldn’t need to trust Him. We could simply plan accordingly, wait out the hard parts with detached confidence, and emerge on the other side with our faith intact and our theology confirmed. But that’s not faith. That’s just a very long, complicated to-do list.
Faith says: I cannot see what You’re doing, and I’m choosing to trust You anyway. It says: This season doesn’t make sense to me, but I believe You are good, and I believe You do not waste the lives of people who love You.
Romans 8:28 is a promise about ultimate trajectory, not immediate comfort. It doesn’t say every individual moment will feel purposeful or good. It says that in the full sweep of your life — in all of it, working together — God is moving toward good for you. The thread is there. You may not be able to see it from where you’re standing. But it is there.
What God Does in the Seasons That Seem Pointless
I want to walk you through four things I’ve seen God do consistently in the seasons that seem, from the inside, to be going nowhere.
He builds the capacities you’ll need later.
There are skills and strengths that can only be developed in specific kinds of circumstances. Patience grows in waiting. Resilience grows in hardship. Discernment grows in confusion. Compassion grows in pain. You cannot manufacture these in a season of ease, no matter how much you want them. God uses the difficulty to build what the calling will need.
Think about what you can do now that you couldn’t do ten years ago. Think about the conversations you’re equipped for, the crises you can hold, the wisdom you carry — and trace it back to where it came from. My guess is that some of your most significant growth didn’t come from your best seasons. It came from your hardest ones.
He positions you for the people you’ll serve.
Your story is not just your story. It is the credential that gives you access to specific rooms, specific conversations, specific women who will one day sit across from you and wonder if anyone in the world could understand what they’re going through.
The answer is yes — because you’ve been there. Not in exactly the same way, but close enough. Close enough to speak into it. Close enough to hold it without flinching. Close enough to say, I know. And here’s what God did in the middle of mine.
That kind of authority cannot be borrowed or faked. It is earned in the seasons you survived.
He strips away what was never supposed to anchor you.
Some of what we hold on to most tightly is not from God. It’s from fear, or cultural expectation, or a version of success that looks spiritual but isn’t. Hard seasons have a way of revealing what’s actually holding us up — and stripping away what isn’t strong enough to sustain the weight of our calling.
This is painful. It can feel like loss. It can look, from the outside, like things falling apart. But sometimes what looks like deconstruction is actually God removing scaffolding that was never meant to be permanent — so that what He’s building can stand on its own.
He teaches you to know Him, not just know about Him.
Theology that has been tested in real life is different from theology that has only been studied. You can read about the faithfulness of God until your Bible is dog-eared and your margins are full — and then a season of genuine uncertainty arrives, and you find out what you actually believe.
The wilderness seasons — the ones that are long and dry and feel like spiritual silence — are often where the deepest and most durable knowledge of God is formed. Not because He is absent, but because in the absence of all the things that used to make faith feel easy, you discover who He actually is. That He is faithful when it doesn’t feel like it. That He is present when you can’t sense Him. That He is good when the evidence looks unclear.
You cannot buy that kind of faith. It is grown in the ground of hard seasons.
The Young Woman on the Sidewalk
Let me tell you a story.
There is a woman I know whose path was interrupted by a professor who stopped her on a sidewalk at Bible college. She hadn’t planned to teach. She hadn’t planned to work with refugees. She just said yes to a request that felt too big for her, and she showed up, week after week, into a room full of Cambodian families who were learning English in a new country.
She didn’t know — couldn’t have known — that the skills she was developing in that season would show up again decades later. That the ability to communicate across a barrier. To find the words that land simply and clearly. To sit with people who are still learning the language of their new world and help them find their footing — these are skills that transfer in ways she never anticipated.
The sidewalk stop felt random. The teaching assignment felt temporary. The season felt like a detour.
It was preparation.
What looks like a detour in your life right now might be the same thing. God doesn’t always announce what He’s building while He’s building it. He just asks you to say yes to what’s in front of you — trusting that He can see the full picture even when you can’t.
The Question That Changes Everything
When we’re inside a hard or confusing season, we almost always ask the wrong question. We ask: Why is this happening?
That’s a natural question. It’s an honest question. But it’s rarely the most useful one, because the answer — when it comes — almost always requires more time than you have in the middle of the season.
The question that changes everything is this: Lord, what do You want to build in me here?
That question positions you as a learner rather than a victim. It shifts the orientation from this is happening to me to God is at work in this. It assumes, before you have proof, that He hasn’t abandoned the project of your life — that even in this season, He is doing something worth cooperating with.
It is an act of faith to ask that question and mean it.
But it is also an invitation — one that God tends to respond to. Not always immediately, not always obviously, but over time: with insight, with strengthened character, with a growing clarity about what He’s been forming in you that will matter for what comes next.
You Are Not Behind
I want to say something directly to the woman who is looking at her life and calculating how much time she’s lost.
You are not behind.
I know it can feel that way. I know there are seasons that looked like they should have launched you somewhere and instead led you sideways. I know there are years you wanted to be further along than you are, accomplishments you expected to have by now, dreams that are taking longer than you thought they would.
But God does not work on your timeline. He works on the one that accounts for everything He knows about you, everything He’s preparing you for, and every person whose life will intersect with yours at exactly the right moment.
His timing is not careless. It is purposeful. And if this season of your life still doesn’t fully make sense, it may simply mean you’re still in it — still inside the chapter you’ll understand better from the next one.
He hasn’t wasted a moment. He is still weaving. And the thread He’s using is your life — all of it, including the parts that hurt, the parts you’d rather skip, and the parts you can’t yet explain.
In all things, He is working for good. Including this.
For Reflection
- Is there a season in your past — a hard chapter, an unexpected detour, a year that felt wasted — that you can look back on now and see what God was building?
- What capacities do you have now that came directly from your most difficult seasons?
- Is there a current season that still doesn’t make sense? What would it look like to ask, Lord, what are You building in me here? — and really mean it?
This teaching is part of the At His Feet, In His Service series — for women who want to understand their God-given design and the story He’s been telling all along. Learn more at https://awakewomensministry.com.