The Real Work Happens Beneath the Surface
You cannot trust what you see on the internet. We all know this by now, but it becomes more painfully obvious every single day. Those perfectly curated Instagram photos—the headstand in the field, the tennis court pose, the pristine workspace—they're all cropped versions of reality. Zoom out, and you'll find the messy truth: flip-flops and trash on the beach, clothes scattered across the bedroom, a cat trying to steal food from that beautifully arranged cookbook photo.
We live in a world of carefully curated images, and somewhere along the way, we've applied this same logic to our spiritual lives. We present the polished 10% while keeping the other 90% hidden beneath the surface, convinced that God—and everyone else—can only handle our highlight reel.
But what if the real work of transformation happens precisely in that hidden 90%? What if the seasons that feel most like spiritual failure are actually where the deepest growth occurs?
The Iceberg Effect of Faith
I've been thinking a lot about icebergs lately. You see that tiny tip poking above the waterline—maybe 10% of the whole structure—while the massive bulk remains invisible beneath the surface. That visible portion represents our behavior, our practices, our Sunday morning language. It's what we present to the world when we walk into church or sit down for coffee with a friend.
But underneath? That's where you'll find our beliefs, thoughts, feelings, assumptions, values, fears, needs, and all the cultural baggage we drag into every space. The majority of who we are lives in that submerged 90%, yet we spend most of our spiritual energy trying to perfect the tip of the iceberg.
I see this pattern everywhere in faith communities. We focus on spit-shining the 10%—do I look Christian enough, sound Christian enough, feel Christian enough to belong here?—while actively keeping the Holy Spirit away from the 90% that remains hidden. We crop our spiritual lives for maximum impact, filtering out anything that might suggest we're not having a constant, overwhelming experience of God's joy.
This is precisely where Moses found himself in the middle section of his life, the part that doesn't make it into most Sunday school lessons or animated movies.
When the Curated Image Crumbles
Moses' Instagram feed would have been incredible. Prince of Egypt, raised in Pharaoh's palace, access to power and privilege that most people could only dream about. The ultimate success story of a displaced child making it big. But zoom out from that carefully cropped image, and you'll find a different reality.
Moses was a traumatized refugee watching his own people suffer daily while he enjoyed the privileges their oppression provided. He lived with the complex developmental trauma of knowing his identity was built on others' pain—something many of us Americans, particularly white Americans, can understand all too well.
In Exodus 2:11-15, we see what happens when buried trauma finally surfaces. Moses witnesses an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, and his buried rage explodes into violence. He kills the Egyptian and buries the body in the sand, thinking he can just cover it up and move on. But buried bodies have a way of surfacing.
When word gets out, Moses becomes a fugitive. Everything he thought he had gets stripped away. The prince becomes a refugee, an exile fleeing to the wilderness of Midian.
"Moses fled from Pharaoh and settled in the land of Midian and sat down by a well." (Exodus 2:15)
Maybe this sounds familiar. Maybe you've found yourself in exile after coming out and losing family and friends. Maybe you left your religious community and lost all the connections you thought would last forever. Maybe you owned your full self—your race, your sexuality, your questions—and discovered that the cost was higher than you expected.
The Wilderness Isn't Punishment
Here's what I need you to understand about wilderness seasons: they're not divine punishment. The wilderness is a recurring theme throughout Scripture, and it's often a place of preparation, not penalty.
Jesus was driven into the wilderness by the Spirit—not as punishment, but as preparation for the ministry ahead. Moses fled to Midian out of fear, wanting to keep his buried bodies hidden, but God was going to do something incredible in that ordinary, overlooked place.
I've been taught a tradition that said wilderness seasons were God's discipline or punishment. But what if they're actually hospitals, places where healing really begins? What if exile is an invitation to healing rather than evidence of divine abandonment?
The Christian mystics called this time "purgation"—a stripping away of the false self, a purging of whatever toxic systems and harmful beliefs have embedded themselves in our lives. Purgation feels awful, like getting your stomach pumped after drinking poison. It feels like death. But it's actually the first stage of spiritual formation, the beginning of real growth.
Moses spent forty years in Midian. Forty years. That's longer than some of you have been alive. He wasn't doing ministry, changing the world, or being particularly religious. He was just tending sheep, processing trauma, learning presence, distancing himself from the Egyptian oppressors who raised him.
The mystics called this stage "illumination"—slowly learning to see God, self, and the world more clearly. It took forty years of unlearning, forty years of moving from Egyptian prince to Moses the deliverer, before he was ready to see the burning bush.
My Own Buried Bodies
I have my own bodies buried in the sand. In 2018, my brother David died due to alcoholism and a car accident. We were homeschooled together, did everything together—4-H club, youth group, music, surfing. He was always the cool one while I was the dorky kid with the bowl cut and the part down the middle.
David had a wandering period, came back to God, then lost his job, drank too much, and died. He had a wife—I performed their wedding. He had a kid. And suddenly my neat, tidy theology began falling apart.
Up to that point, I'd had it all figured out. Bad things happened because of free will. We couldn't blame God. I'd never really doubted belief in God. But when David died, all my Q&A responses to "why do bad things happen to good people" crumbled. I had to confront my own buried bodies—not people I'd killed, but all the loss and heartache and grief I'd tried to cover up and move on from.
My spiritual life went to shit. It did not go well.
St. John of the Cross, a 16th-century mystic monk, wrote about this experience: "The things that used to move you, that made you feel close to God, now make you feel sick." That's what trauma and heartache do. The very practices that brought life now feel dangerous or empty. It's like getting food poisoning from your favorite meal—something that used to nourish you now makes you nauseated.
When the Sweetness Fades
Around the same time, I had a small group that imploded. People we'd cooked for, whose kids we'd watched, who'd been in our home regularly—one left the faith entirely, one revealed an affair, one basically broke up with us in a formal sit-down conversation. These were people I'd invested hours and days in, and suddenly I had to confront my buried expectations about ministry.
I realized I'd been approaching relationships with a toxic ROI mentality—if I invest enough in you, you owe me something. If I give enough of myself, I deserve a return on investment. All the things that made me a decent leader and teacher also had a shadow side. I needed those attaboys and pats on the back to feel valuable.
As someone with abandonment issues from childhood, someone who's always afraid of people leaving and thinking badly of me, having these experiences regularly in ministry meant I had to renegotiate my entire understanding of why I was a pastor.
People deserve love without an ROI. Ministry isn't about getting my affirmation. It's about following the way of Jesus—self-sacrificial, others-oriented love.
"When worship stops giving you goosebumps, and when Bible study feels more triggering than nourishing, when prayer feels empty—this isn't spiritual failure. It's graduation to a more mature love."
When the vaccines came out in 2021, when our church officially became LGBTQ affirming, when we survived the pandemic and changed our governance structure and hired new staff—I did great. I thrive in crisis situations. But when things settled down, when the adrenaline faded, I hit a wall. I was left with the humdrum wilderness of ordinary time.
St. John of the Cross talks about the sweetness of early faith fading, and how this isn't failure but graduation to deeper love. When you first become a Christian or find a church community you love, everything feels sweet. You're on fire for God. Every Bible study and worship song feels like you're moving closer to the divine.
But when that sweetness fades, we tend to feel guilt and shame. Was it not real? Am I not faithful enough? I want you to understand that when the sweetness fades, it's not proof you never loved God or that God is angry with you. It means love is growing into maturity.
You're moving from loving God because it feels good to loving God because you actually want to love God. Like any relationship after the honeymoon phase, when the excitement fades and love remains, it's not as easy but it's deeper and more authentic.
The Burning Bush in Ordinary Places
The mystics called this final stage "union"—not spiritual highs or mountaintop experiences, but steady, faithful presence. What Eugene Peterson called "the long obedience in the same direction."
For me, this meant my old rule of life had to die. I'd maintained spiritual disciplines for over a decade because I knew how important they were, especially for pastors. But those practices had become spiritual scorekeeping—could I keep the check marks going, maintain the streak?
I had to die to performance metrics and move into simple presence with God. "God, I'm angry. God, I'm upset. God, I don't understand." I hate admitting I don't know things, but I had to go through a season of spiritual simplicity. No counting verses or chapters or minutes prayed. Just being with God.
When my spiritual disciplines became lifelines instead of performance metrics, when they became ways to move toward God out of desire rather than obligation, that's when real transformation began happening.
Forty years after Moses fled to Midian, God showed up. Not to the prince in the palace, but to the traumatized shepherd in exile. The burning bush appeared in the wilderness, not the castle. God meets us in our own Midians and wildernesses—not on the mountaintop, but in ordinary, overlooked places.
God doesn't wait for us to get our act together. The burning bush finds Moses, not the other way around. God meets us as traumatized shepherds, in our exile and ordinariness, in the midst of our healing process.
You're Not Broken
For those of you in spiritual darkness right now, I need you to hear this: you're not broken. There's nothing wrong with you. When you move into that season of dryness where God feels distant, where Bible study and worship feel like running a marathon through gelatin, you're not broken. That is the path.
This is what every mystic from the centuries has said—eventually what was easy becomes difficult, and that means things are moving along as expected. It's those folks whose Christian lives are nothing but joy and celebration all the time that make me suspicious.
You're not abandoned. Not feeling constant, overwhelming joy of the Lord is not the same as God leaving you. Mother Teresa went through a fifty-year-long period of the dark night of the soul, and I dare any of us to say God abandoned her. She was doing faithful work, and in that dark night, God was doing their work too.
If you're in a season where God feels distant, where spiritual practices feel empty or even dangerous, where you've thrown the baby out with the bathwater—you're not broken. You're in the company of Moses and Jesus in the wilderness, of countless saints who have walked this path. You're standing, God says, on holy ground.
The dark night of the soul isn't divine punishment. It's liberation from spiritual performance, freedom from toxic faith systems. It's breaking agreement with lies of self-hatred that sometimes versions of Christianity tell us, or that toxic family systems present to us, or that white supremacy and patriarchy whisper—or scream—in our ears.
An Invitation to Try Softer
Your deconstruction and exile and wilderness wandering—it matters not just for you, but for others who need to see that there's life after leaving Egypt. Moses wasn't in Midian just for his own therapy. God was preparing him to lead others out of bondage.
So here's my invitation: if spiritual practices are somewhere in the rearview mirror, maybe it's time for a gentle return. Not with metrics and checklists, but asking what would a lifeline look like right now? Without shame, without pressure, but because we love God and God gives us some sense of hope.
The invitation isn't to perform better or try harder. It's gentleness. It's to try softer. Not because we have to, but because we want to. Start small—one practice, one breath, one moment of presence with God.
Psalm 42:7 says, "Deep calls to deep at the thunder of your cataracts. All your waves and all your billows have gone over me." Sometimes spiritual life feels like drowning. The psalmist knows this. But deep calls to deep because there's something in the depths that recognizes the depths of God.
What lies beneath—that zoomed-out image, the 90% under the surface—it's not something to fear. It's where the real work begins, where God meets us. And it doesn't happen quickly, and it's not a place where we perform. It's where God does their work precisely in the places that feel most dark.
Questions for reflection:
- What "buried bodies" in your own life might need to surface and be acknowledged rather than hidden?
- How might you distinguish between loving God because it feels good versus loving God because you actually want to love God?
