My grandmother kept a prayer journal for forty-three years. When she died, my mom found stacks of them in a cedar chest — cheap spiral notebooks, coffee stains on the covers, her handwriting getting shakier as the decades went on.
I flipped through one from 1987 expecting to find profound wisdom. Instead I found this entry, written in the middle of a brutal year when my grandfather's business was collapsing:
"God feels far away today. I don't know if I'm doing this right. But I'm still here."
That's it. No breakthrough. No lightning bolt. Just a woman showing up.
I've thought about that line more than almost anything else I've read about faith, because it captures something we rarely admit: the seasons when your faith feels weakest are often the seasons when it's actually growing the most.
Let's be honest — nobody posts that on Instagram. We post the mountaintop moments. But the mountaintop isn't where roots grow. Roots grow in the dark, underground, where nobody's watching.
So if you're in a dry season right now and wondering whether anything spiritual is happening in your life at all, here are seven signs your faith is growing stronger — even when it absolutely doesn't feel like it.
1. You're Still Showing Up (Even Half-Hearted)
The single biggest indicator of spiritual growth isn't passion. It's presence.
I've found that people whose faith falls apart usually don't crash dramatically. They just quietly stop showing up. They skip one Sunday, then three, then a year goes by. Meanwhile, the person dragging themselves to church exhausted, distracted, and slightly annoyed — that person is growing. They just can't feel it yet.
Think about it like the gym. The workouts that change your body aren't the ones where you feel amazing. They're the ones you do on the days you'd rather be anywhere else.
Faithfulness in the absence of feeling is faith at its purest. When you show up and don't get a dopamine hit from it, you're proving you're there for God and not for the emotional payoff.
2. Your Questions Are Getting Deeper, Not Weaker
There's a myth in a lot of faith circles that mature believers stop asking hard questions. The opposite is true.
A child asks, "Why did God let my dog die?" A mature believer asks, "How do I hold onto a good God in a world that contains this much suffering?" Both are honest. One is just deeper.
If your questions have shifted from "Does God love me?" to "How do I love God well when I can't see what He's doing?" — congratulations. That's not doubt. That's depth.
Doubt that drives you toward God is not the enemy of faith. It's a growth spurt. The people I know with the sturdiest faith have all gone through years where they nearly walked away. The questions didn't break them. They rebuilt them.
3. You Notice Small Convictions You Used to Ignore
Here's what most people miss: spiritual growth often shows up as increased sensitivity, not increased certainty.
You catch yourself mid-sentence in gossip and feel a little pull to stop. You notice you've been short with your spouse and actually want to apologize — not because you got caught, but because something in you is uncomfortable with it. You feel a nudge to give money you were going to spend on yourself.
A decade ago, those moments wouldn't have registered. Now they do.
That's the Holy Spirit doing renovation work. It's not dramatic. It's a slow recalibration of your conscience. The fact that you're bothered by things you used to shrug off is evidence something inside you is alive and awake.
4. Your Prayers Have Gotten Messier
Early on, most of us pray like we're writing a formal letter. "Dear God, I come before you today to humbly request..." Very polished. Very safe.
But as faith matures, prayers tend to get messy. More honest. Less performative.
Now it's "God, I'm exhausted and I don't know what to do and honestly I'm kind of mad at you right now." That's not backsliding. That's intimacy.
You don't get real with strangers. You get real with people you trust. If your prayers have gotten rawer, that's a sign you trust God more, not less.
5. You're Weirdly Okay With Not Having Answers
There's a stage of faith where you need everything to make sense. You need the theology to line up, the suffering to have a reason, the timeline to be clear. If it doesn't, you panic.
And then one day, you don't.
You lose someone you love and you don't get an explanation. You go through a hard season and never find out why. And instead of it wrecking you, you find yourself saying something like, "I don't understand, but I still trust Him."
That's not resignation. That's faith graduating from an intellectual exercise into an actual relationship.
Let me ask you something: do you trust your closest friend only because you can explain everything they do? Of course not. Trust that requires full explanation isn't trust. It's math.
6. You Serve More and Post Less
Spiritual maturity has a strange way of making you quieter.
When you're young in faith, you want everyone to know what you're doing. You want to be seen praying. You want your generosity to be noticed. You want the small group leader to know how committed you are.
But somewhere along the way, you start doing things nobody sees. You pray for someone and never tell them. You help with the church setup at 6am and slip out before the service ends. You give money anonymously.
Growth looks like the slow death of your need for applause. If you've started doing good things for an audience of One — that's not a small thing. That's everything.
7. You Want God More Than You Want His Gifts
This one is subtle, and it might be the biggest sign of all.
Most of us start our faith journey wanting God's stuff — His blessings, His protection, His provision, His answers to our prayers. God is a means to an end.
But at some point, if growth is happening, the math flips. You start wanting God Himself. Not just the healing. Not just the job. Not just the breakthrough. Just Him. His presence. His nearness.
When the gifts stop feeling like the point and the Giver starts feeling like the point — you've crossed a threshold most people never reach.
The Part Nobody Tells You
Here's the truth I wish someone had told me a decade ago: spiritual growth is mostly invisible from the inside.
You will almost never feel it happening. You'll feel stagnant, distracted, doubtful, tired, and convinced you're doing it all wrong. Meanwhile, people around you will start noticing something different about you. Your spouse will mention you seem calmer. A friend will say you've been kinder lately. Someone will ask what changed.
And you'll be genuinely confused, because from where you're standing, nothing changed at all.
That's how it works. Roots grow in the dark. Muscles grow on rest days. Faith grows in the seasons where it feels like nothing is happening.
So if you're in one of those seasons right now — keep showing up. Keep asking the questions. Keep praying the messy prayers. Keep doing the small, unseen things.
Your grandmother's prayer journal might be someone's lifeline someday. And it'll be full of entries that say, "God feels far away today. But I'm still here."
That's not weakness. That's the whole thing.
What's one small sign of growth you've noticed in yourself lately — even if it feels insignificant? I'd love to hear it. Drop it in the comments. You might be the encouragement somebody else needed today.
