If I could remove one expectation from every new believer’s mind, it would be this: that following Jesus should produce fast, visible, linear progress. It doesn’t. It never has. And the sooner you make peace with that, the sooner you’ll stop quitting every time growth feels slow.
A Tree, Not a Microwave
The Psalms don’t compare a flourishing life to a light switch. They compare it to a tree.
He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers.
— Psalm 1:3
Trees don’t fruit the week you plant them. Most of what a tree is doing in its first years happens underground, in root systems nobody can see and nobody would applaud if they could. That’s not a design flaw. That’s how anything durable gets built — slowly, invisibly, from the roots up.
Why We Hate This
We live in a culture engineered for instant everything — overnight shipping, streaming, one-click answers to any question. So when spiritual growth doesn’t move at that speed, we assume something’s broken. Either God isn’t working, or we’re doing it wrong, or the whole thing was never real to begin with. Usually none of those are true. You’re just watching a tree instead of a microwave, and you’re checking on it far too often to notice it’s actually growing.
What This Frees You to Do
Once you actually believe formation is slow, a few things change. You stop measuring your walk with God by how you feel this particular Tuesday. You stop abandoning a practice just because it didn’t transform you in a month. And you start playing a longer game — showing up to the ordinary, unglamorous means of grace not because they work like magic, but because roots take time, and you intend to still be here in twenty years.
Andrew Washkow 
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