God Is In The Gaps
Destination cognitive bias — it makes every gap in your life look like failure.
There is something your brain does that nobody told you about. It is called pattern recognition, and it is one of the most elegant features of the human mind. Your brain is constantly scanning, sorting, and connecting — turning raw experience into meaning. It is why you can read a sentence with mssing lttrs and still understand it. It is why a melody with one note dropped still sounds like a song.
But here is the part that gets us into trouble: your brain is not just pattern-completing. It is destination-obsessed. Hand it a starting point and an end goal and it will spend most of its energy measuring the distance between where you are and where you are supposed to be. I’ve started calling this destination cognitive bias — the deeply human tendency to evaluate everything in light of the finish line.
By that measure, the gap between here and there always looks like failure. We always come up short, lacking.
I know this not because I read it in a book but because I have lived it. For years after I left corporate America to follow a call into full-time ministry, I looked back at everything that came before — the software engineering, the systems design, the business — and filed it under wasted. Time spent in the wrong lane. Ground that didn’t count.
I was wrong about that. Completely wrong. And the moment I found out is the moment this reflection started to take shape.
What I discovered — slowly, and only in hindsight — was that none of it was wasted. Every system I had designed, every team I had led, every problem I had untangled in a boardroom turned out to be preparation. When I stepped into ministry I didn’t leave that experience behind. I brought it with me. God had been building something in me during all those years I thought I was just building a career. I couldn’t see it from inside it. I needed distance and a different vantage point before the pattern became visible. And God used it all.
I am in a similar place now. The decade since seminary have not gone the way I mapped them. Ventures I believed in didn’t survive. Doors I walked through closed behind me. And my destination cognitive bias has had plenty of material to work with — plenty of gaps to measure, plenty of distance between where I am and where I thought I would be by now. There are mornings when the honest answer to how’s it going is: I’m not sure yet.
But here is what I keep coming back to. The first time I misjudged a season of my life, I had hindsight to correct me. I could look back and see God’s hand clearly. This time I am trying to trust the same thing going forward — in the middle without the hindsight yet. Not because I have figured something out, but because He has proven Himself trustworthy with my story before.
And that, it turns out, is exactly what faith looks like from the inside.
There is a moment in John 15 where Jesus says something that challenges our destination cognitive bias.
“I am the vine; you are the branches. If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.” — John 15:5 (NIV)
He doesn’t say: bear fruit and then come to me. He doesn’t say: get to the finish line and I’ll meet you there. He says stay connected. Abide. The fruit is the result of the connection, not the prerequisite for it.
We spend so much energy measuring ourselves against the harvest — how much fruit, how ripe, how visible — that we miss the invitation underneath it. Jesus isn’t primarily interested in your productivity. He is interested in your proximity. Stay close. Stay connected. Let my life move through yours. The rest follows from that.
God is not waiting for you to cross the finish line. He is with you on the road. He is present in the training seasons that don’t look like ministry yet. He is present in the ventures that don’t survive. He is present in the gap between who you are right now and who He is calling you to become. His Spirit is the one who names that gap in the first place — not to condemn you with it but to invite you into it. The gap is not evidence of His absence. It is often the very place He is most at work.
The technical theological term for what the Holy Spirit is doing in that gap is sanctification. But you don’t need the term to recognize the experience. It is the slow, sometimes painful, often surprising process of being molded into something. Of being conformed (Paul’s word) to the image of Christ. That is God’s endgame for every one of us. Not an achievement. Not a destination. A person. His Son.
And here is what I find genuinely exciting about that: he has tipped His hand. He has shown us His cards. We know the goal. Which means the gap ahead is not a mystery to be feared — it is a direction to move toward. When you know what He is building, you can start to recognize His tools. You can hear His voice more clearly because you know what He is saying yes to in your life and what He is slowly, patiently saying not yet.
Someone once told me the Christian life is a race. They were quoting Paul, who knew something about running life’s race. But I have come to think the race is more complicated than a single straight line from start to finish.
There are lots of starting lines.
Every milestone is a new beginning. Every season that ends — whether you made progress or not — is followed by another starting line. You take your bearing. You check the map. You move forward. The destination hasn’t changed. But the race you are running today started from where you are today.
It also changes how you measure the gaps. If the only measurement that counts is the distance between where you are and the finish line, you will always feel behind. But there is another measurement available to you — the distance between where you started and where you are now. That gap tells a different story. It is the record of ground covered, of faith stretched, of God’s faithfulness showing up in seasons you barely survived and seasons you didn’t expect to flourish in. Trace that gap honestly and you are not reading a ledger of not measuring up. You are reading a testimony.
Those gaps behind you are not evidence of how far you still have to go. They are evidence of God’s faithfulness to get you this far. Every one of them. The seasons that felt like preparation and the seasons that felt like waste. The ventures that thrived and the ones that didn’t survive. The callings that unfolded the way you expected and the ones that are still unfolding in ways you can’t see yet.
He was in all of it. He is in all of it now.
So take your bearing. Check the map. And move forward — not because you have figured out how to close the gap, but because you know the One who is closing it. His plans for you are good. His endgame is written. And He has never once needed you to get to the finish line on your own.
I know the middle of the gap is hard. Confusing. Some days just heavy. He is there with you. In the gap. - This is The Way
“You hem me in — behind and before; you have laid your hand upon me.” — Psalm 139:5 (NIV)
Before you close this page, sit with one of these:
Think about a season of your life you once filed under wasted. Looking back now, where do you see God’s hand in it? What was He building in you that you couldn’t see from inside it?
Where are you measuring the wrong gap right now — fixating on the distance to the finish line instead of tracing how far God has already brought you? What would it look like to read that gap as testimony instead?
If this landed somewhere real for you, I’d love to hear about it in the comments. And if you know someone in the middle of a hard gap right now, feel free to pass it along.