When You Want to Grow and It Hurts

I didn’t expect the year I asked God to grow me to be one of the hardest years I can remember. Looking back, I’m not sure what I thought would happen. Maybe a quiet deepening. A gentle stretching. Some new insight arriving on a Tuesday morning with my coffee, leaving me wiser and largely undisturbed.

What actually happened was harder than that. Relationships that needed honest conversations I’d been avoiding for years. Patterns in my own thinking that got exposed in ways I couldn’t un-see. Circumstances that didn’t resolve the way I wanted them to, no matter how faithfully I prayed. A prolonged season of not knowing, which is one of the most uncomfortable places a person can live.

I remember thinking at one point: I didn’t sign up for this. And then, quieter: Actually, maybe I did.

What Pruning Actually Means

Psalm 1 gives us the image of a tree planted and flourishing, but anyone who has spent time around trees, gardens, or anything that actually grows knows that flourishing rarely arrives without some cutting back first.

John 15:2 puts it plainly: “Every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so it will be even more fruitful.”

The branches that get pruned aren’t the dead ones. Those get removed entirely. The pruning — that intentional, careful cutting — happens to the branches already bearing fruit. The ones with potential. The ones worth the attention.

Reframing the challenges and seeing then from this different perspective changed something for me. The hard seasons weren’t evidence something had gone wrong. They were evidence of something being tended. But knowing that doesn’t make pruning comfortable. A branch doesn’t enjoy being cut, I’d imagine. But the gardener isn’t being careless. He knows exactly what he’s doing, and he’s doing it because he sees the potential in what the branch can become.

When Pressure Helps You Grow into Something Better

There’s a reason diamonds require pressure and roots grow deeper in a drought. Resistance isn’t the enemy of growth. Sometimes, it’s at the very heart of it.

I think about that hard year now with a kind of complicated gratitude. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not pretending it wasn’t hard because I know it produced good things. No. I’m actually holding both truths at once. I’m acknowledging that season was difficult, but I also wouldn’t trade the change it made in me.

The conversations I’d avoided for years? Having the changed relationships I’d quietly been keeping at arm’s length. The patterns that got exposed? Seeing them clearly was the first step toward actually shifting them. The prolonged not-knowing? It built a tolerance for uncertainty that I didn’t have before and that I’ve needed every year since.

None of it felt like growth while it was happening. It felt like loss, disruption, and the ground shifting under something I thought was stable. But the roots were going deeper. I just couldn’t see it from where I was standing.

When You’re in the Middle of It

If you’re in a hard season right now, one that feels more like breaking down than building up, I won’t offer you a tidy bow. Just know this:

Hard seasons aren’t proof that God has lost track of you. They may actually be proof of the exact opposite. That you’re being tended. That something in you is worth the careful attention of a gardener who knows what he’s doing.

The tree in Psalm 1 doesn’t get to skip the seasons it can’t control. Instead, it just stays planted near the water through all of them. That’s the whole assignment. Don’t make the hard seasons stop. Just keep drinking from the right source while they run their course.

You’re not behind. You’re not forgotten. You might just be in the part of the process that happens before the fruit. So, hang in there and stay rooted.

Grow to Anchor

This month, our theme is GROW — Get Rooted On the Word. And sometimes getting rooted means letting the roots go deeper through ground that resists them. The Word doesn’t just comfort us in hard seasons. It anchors us in them, so when the storms come, we’re not completely uprooted and ripped from our foundation. That concept matters more than we usually realize until we’re standing in the middle of one of those challenging seasons.

Here’s this week’s question: What’s something that felt like a setback at the time but turned out to be exactly what you needed?

It could be as simple as a job that didn’t work out, a detour on a road trip, or a recipe that flopped and led you to something better. Share it in the comments. We love hearing where the unexpected turns have taken people.

To get a bit more personal with that question—pondering the hard season you might be in right now, what it’s costing you, what you’re hoping it’s forming—you’ll need more than a comment box. Your journal is a safe place to be honest about where you actually are, without having to wrap it up neatly.