FEELING BEHIND
In our small group this semester we’ve been going through our church’s foundations of faith study called Established — eight sessions on the basics of what the Christian faith is and what it looks like to take steps in following Jesus. It’s really good, and it’s been really cool to watch it help our people draw closer to God.
This week we were looking at spiritual practices — prayer, Bible reading, and how to actually integrate these things into daily life. Somewhere in the middle of the conversation, a couple of the newer believers in our group said something I’ve heard and felt myself many times.
They felt behind.
Behind on prayer. Behind on reading. Behind in their relationship with Jesus. Like there was a standard somewhere they kept missing, and every week that passed without hitting it was another week of falling short. One of them said, “I don’t even know if I’m doing this right.”
I knew exactly what they meant. There have been many times over the years where I’ve found myself calculating whether I’d prayed long enough, reading Scripture to relieve the guilt of not reading Scripture — picturing God as a figure skating judge holding up the 3.0 sign, grading my faith and faithfulness.
In doing so, I wasn’t connecting with God, or anyone for that matter. I was managing a performance review I kept giving myself.
It led to a great conversation about what spiritual practices are actually for, and how we find the space between healthy discipline and anxious duty.
Most of us have been operating with an answer to that question we may have never consciously chose. It goes something like this: spiritual disciplines are the way you maintain your standing with God. Read enough, pray enough, show up enough — and the relationship stays functional. Miss a few days and the gap starts to open up.
That’s actually a performance contract dressed up as devotion. And it produces exactly what my friends were describing: the constant, low-grade anxiety of someone who can never quite be sure they’ve done enough.
Somewhere along the way, many of us quietly turned spiritual practices into a way of proving we were serious. Proving to others, God, even ourselves. The relationship became secondary. We started living for our spiritual lives when we were meant to live from them.
ABIDE IN ME
Jesus describes something different in John 15. “I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.”
What Jesus is describing here isn’t primarily a productivity system. It’s a relationship.
Connection before productivity. Presence upstream of output.
The fruit matters — he says so explicitly. But fruit is what living things naturally produce over time. It’s not a target you manage toward. It’s what happens when something stays genuinely connected to its source. Healthy things grow because they are alive, not because they are pressured into it.
That word abide is really the key. It means to remain, to stay, to keep company with. Jesus isn’t saying achieve in me or prove yourself in me. He’s saying stay. Keep the connection alive.
The discipline isn’t the point. The connection is. The discipline is how you tend it.
APPLE NAILING
Paul Tripp has an illustration that has helped me with this. He describes a man with a backyard apple tree that’s been producing bad fruit for years — dry, wrinkled, pulpy apples, year after year. Finally the man decides to fix it. He comes out one Saturday with a staple gun, a step ladder, and two bushels of Red Delicious apples. He cuts off the bad ones and staples beautiful apples onto the branches.
Problem solved.
Except the stapled apples rot too. They’re not attached to anything living. The problem was never the fruit — it was the root system.
A lot of spiritual life looks like fruit-stapling. Forcing the quiet time. Going through the motions of prayer while your mind is somewhere else entirely. The effort is real — but it’s disconnected from the source, and eventually it shows.
WORK IT
Learning to live from doesn’t skip the effort. It redirects it.
You still work the soil — that’s your part. Vineyards don’t tend themselves. But the work changes character when you understand what it’s for. You show up to prayer because you want to hear from someone you love. You read Scripture because the vine is speaking and you want to be paying attention. You serve because love produces that — not because the significance ledger needs updating.
The practices stay. The anxiety changes.
The gardener doesn’t make anything grow. They create conditions. They clear the rocks, till the soil, prune what isn’t bearing, tend what is. And then they wait — not passively, not anxiously, but with the patience of someone who knows the ground is good and the source is real. Your job is to stay close enough that when the growth comes, you recognize it and celebrate it.
STICK THE LANDING
This is something I’m still working out. I’ve spent a fair amount of my Christian life fruit-stapling — attaching good-looking habits to a root system I hadn’t actually tended. Showing up to all the right things while quietly running out of whatever I was supposed to be drawing from.
What that small group conversation reminded me is that the people who feel perpetually behind aren’t necessarily lacking discipline. They’re lacking connection. Or more precisely — they may have the disciplines, but the disciplines have become the point instead of the path. And when that happens, the practices are still there — but somewhere in the middle of all of it, the relationship quietly went missing. I think this is the condition of a lot of modern discipleship.
In John 15, Jesus isn’t describing a system for managing your spiritual output. He’s describing what it’s like to be with him. And when you’re actually with him — staying, remaining, keeping company — the fruit doesn’t need to be managed.
The vine offers you life. The branch just has to stay attached long enough to receive it.
So what do we actually do with this?
Start where you are. It’s the only honest starting point. Tell God exactly where you are. Not where you think you should be, not where you were six months ago when things felt more consistent. Right here, right now, whatever that looks like. He already knows anyway. Saying it out loud is for you.
Tell him how you want to grow. Tell him you want to be closer to him than you are. Ask him to move in the gaps between your intentions and your follow-through. That prayer — honest, unpolished, not trying to impress anyone — is already abiding.
Then take the first next step. Move some dirt. Add in some nutrients. Make sure you’re getting enough water. You don’t have to overhaul your entire routine. You just have to do the next thing that keeps the roots alive — a few minutes in Scripture, a conversation with God on your commute, a moment of stillness before the day takes over. Small, consistent, connected.
Invite others in. The root system strengthens in community. Find people who will tend alongside you, who will notice when you’re running dry and say something, who aren’t impressed by streaks but care about the soil underneath. The vine and the branches — plural. This was never meant to be a solo project.
And don’t compare your growth to anyone else’s. Comparison is just fruit-stapling with someone else’s apples. Stay connected where you are, on your best days and your worst, whether you’re busy or bored or somewhere in between. Invite God into the ordinary rhythm of your day and keep leaning toward the one who offers life, flourishing, and fruit you didn’t have to manufacture.
That’s the whole thing, really. Stay close. Let the vine do what only the vine can do.
This is part of a larger project I’m working through — a book about identity, significance, and what it means to live from who you already are in Christ rather than for who you’re still trying to become. More on that soon.
If this resonated with you, I’d love to hear about it. And if you know someone who’s been feeling behind in their faith — maybe pass it along.