Nobody talks about the middle part.
The testimony always seems to jump from the wreckage to the restoration. One minute you're hearing about the worst night, the lowest point, the moment of total surrender. And then the next minute, everything's different. New life. New joy. Cue the worship song.
But there's a whole stretch in between that gets glossed over. The part where you did surrender, and you did start showing up, and you are reading Scripture and praying and doing the things you're supposed to do — and it still feels slow. Painfully, confusingly slow. You expected transformation to have more momentum than this.
If you're somewhere in that middle stretch right now, this one's for you. Because I've been there.
My own road to getting clean wasn't a single moment
I wish I could tell you I hit rock bottom, cried out to God, and woke up free. That's the version that preaches well. But that's not how it happened for me.
Getting clean meant I had to start exposing the lies I'd been living in. And I don't just mean the substances or the behavior — I mean the entire architecture of dishonesty I'd built around my life to keep it all going. The lies I told other people to cover my tracks. The lies I told myself about why it wasn't that bad. The sin I'd buried so deep I'd almost convinced myself it wasn't there.
Bringing all of that into the light wasn't a one-time event. It was a process. Some days it felt like pulling thread from a sweater — you tug on one lie and realize it's connected to three more you didn't even know were there. I'd confess one thing and think I was done, and then God would gently (or not so gently) show me the next layer underneath it.
It was exhausting. It was humbling in a way that went way past uncomfortable. And it didn't happen overnight. Not even close.
But it was the only path to actual freedom. Not the kind of freedom where you white-knuckle your way through each day, but the kind where the weight starts to genuinely lift because there's nothing hidden left to carry.
The patience nobody prepared you for
Recovery communities talk a lot about the first step — admitting you can't do it alone. Churches talk a lot about the moment of salvation. Both of those are real and they matter. But very few people sit you down and say, "Okay, now here comes the long, unglamorous part where you learn to wait."
David doesn't hedge. He doesn't add a nice disclaimer about still trusting God. He just asks the raw question.
And Scripture keeps it in. That matters. It means the waiting, the frustration, the wondering-if-God-has-forgotten-about-you part isn't a sign you're doing faith wrong. It's built into the experience. David knew it. The prophets knew it. I knew it during the months when I was doing everything right and still felt like I was barely holding on.
What's actually going on when nothing seems to be happening
You've probably heard the tree-and-roots analogy before, and I'll be honest, it can sound a little too neat when you're the one stuck in the dirt. But there's something to it that's worth sitting with for a minute.
A lot of the real work of healing happens in places you can't observe directly. You sat with an uncomfortable memory this week instead of numbing it. You caught yourself mid-lie and chose to tell the truth instead. You picked up the phone and called someone when the old version of you would've isolated. None of that shows up on a scoreboard. Nobody claps for it. It's just Tuesday, and you made a harder, better choice than you would've six months ago.
That kind of change accumulates quietly. It doesn't feel like progress most days. It feels like survival. But there's a difference between treading water and learning to swim, even when both look the same from shore.
Looking back on my own process, I can see now that the exposure — all that painful, layer-by-layer honesty — was the root work. At the time, it just felt like I was falling apart. I couldn't see what God was building because He was still clearing the wreckage. But every lie I brought into the light was one less thing the enemy could use to keep me stuck.
The temptation to perform your way through it
When the pace of healing gets frustrating, a lot of people start to perform. You learn the right answers. You project the version of yourself that makes everyone else comfortable. You say "God is good" and mean it about 40 percent, and fake the other 60.
I know that temptation personally. After I started getting clean, there was this pressure — some from others, mostly from myself — to look like I had it together faster than I actually did. To skip ahead to the "restored" part of the testimony. But that kind of performance is just another form of hiding, and hiding was the whole problem in the first place.
Real life isn't that tidy. And pretending it is can actually slow you down, because performing takes energy that could've gone toward the actual, unglamorous work of getting well.
The Hebrew word for "wait" there is qavah, and it carries this image of twisting fibers together, like braiding a rope. It's not passive. It's this slow, deliberate binding of your life to God's — strand over strand — until the thing can hold real weight.
That image is more helpful than most sermons on patience, honestly. It reframes waiting as something you're actively doing, not something being done to you.
Some days are just about staying
There's no five-step framework for this. If you've been in recovery for any length of time, you've probably had enough frameworks to wallpaper a room with. What you might actually need on a hard day is simpler than that.
Read something. Even a few verses. Even the same psalm you read yesterday. Consistency matters more than novelty here, and God doesn't get tired of meeting you in the same passage twice.
Talk to someone who won't try to fix you. Not a lecture. Not advice. Just someone who can hear "today was hard" without panicking or pivoting to a Bible verse before you've finished your sentence. (Bible verses are great. Timing also matters.)
And give yourself permission to count the small stuff. You stayed clean today. You told the truth today. You prayed, even when it felt like talking into a wall. That's a day's worth of faithfulness, and it counts.
The part you can't rush
Not the soul who has arrived. Not the soul who has a clean testimony with a satisfying ending. The soul who's still seeking. Still in process. Still somewhere in the middle part nobody talks about.
I spent a long time in that middle part. Longer than I wanted. Longer than I thought God would ask of me. But every lie I exposed, every sin I brought out of the dark and laid at the cross, made the ground underneath me a little more solid. Freedom didn't arrive all at once. It accumulated, one act of honesty at a time, until one day I realized the weight I'd been carrying for years wasn't there anymore.
You might be in the thick of it right now. You might be pulling at threads and wondering if the unraveling will ever stop. I can't tell you when it ends. But I can tell you the exposure is worth it. The honesty is worth it. The slow, unglamorous process of letting God into the parts you've been hiding — that's where the freedom actually lives.
It doesn't come overnight. But it comes.