Spiritual Formation Dropout

Finding grace in the backsliding.

I was supposed to start grad school tomorrow. But here’s the thing: I dropped out before I could even begin.

The backstory: Last summer, I applied and was accepted to a 2-year graduate program for a degree in Christian Spiritual Formation and Leadership. But as the start date approached, I realized I wasn’t ready to start, so I deferred. Flash forward to March 2024, when again it came time to enroll. As the deadline loomed, I realized I needed to turn my deferral into a withdrawal. I knew it was the right decision, but honestly, I felt heartbroken. It felt like God was taking away something good from me. I felt like other people’s lives were so full of momentum and significant life events like engagement, marriage, babies, and business ventures. Meanwhile, I felt deeply insecure in where I was at and how little momentum I actually felt.

But when I made that decision, I suppose it was an (reluctant) affirmation of my belief that the path to faithfully follow God isn’t linear at all. These last few months, I believe God has been working to help me see that I do not need a degree in spiritual formation to continue to be formed in his spirit and truth. How? By showing me that my “spiritual backsliding” is actually what God is using to bring goodness into my life.

This “Aha!” moment came to me after having a conversation with my spiritual director (who I’ve been formally meeting with for 9 months now) about how spiritually unproductive I’d been feeling lately. My regular prayer journaling was no longer regular, my Bible reading felt decidedly unremarkable and lacking revelation, and I hadn’t written a long-form piece of spiritually-inclined writing in months. Lately, it felt like my Serious Christian To-Do List™️ had not been ticked off; not only had I dropped out of my grad school program for Spiritual Formation, but now it felt like I was becoming a dropout of spiritual formation as a whole.

The longer the conversation went on, I began to see the connection of how often I see my participation in any number of spiritual tasks as my way to earn God’s love and grow in my faith. I’ve been slowly learning to let go of expectations only I’ve placed on myself for what a healthy and growing relationship with Christ looks like.

For me, I’ve almost always equated spiritual productivity and participation with spiritual fulfillment and favor. But as the last year of life has unfolded, the way I lived life was forced to change. Not only did I experience a life-altering running injury (which I’m doing much better with, thankfully!), but I also decided to leave the church community I’d been a part of for 6 years. The silence and solitude of those changes did a slow work on me. In my lack of words, my lack of participation, and my lack of productivity, I (re)discovered that God’s love for and commitment to me was never, ever withheld. In fact, it was at that slow pace that I began to experience God in new ways—ways I never would have unless the rhythms and rituals I clung to were set aside for stillness with the Spirit of the Living God.

While I make jokes about it, I believe it really is true: the best practice we can do for our spiritual formation is to suffer. I have given up and let go of a lot this year—hopes and plans, idealism and innocence, money and time. And as I’ve let go of these things, I’ve also let go of a version of myself that I thought I was or would be by now. At times, this process made me feel like I was backsliding into a version of myself that the younger me would have been worried about. But the thing I realized is that God was not worried about who I was becoming. In fact, he was the one forming me into the person he always intended for me to become.

Yet you, LORD, are our Father.
We are the clay, you are the potter;
we are all the work of your hand. (Isaiah 64:8)

At times over this last year, I’ve felt like I was walking on scorched earth. But there’s a verse in Hebrews 12 I was drawn to this summer: “For our God is a consuming fire.” This could feel like a frightening verse, but I’ve found it to be so heartening. I’ve come to know that to be consumed by God’s holy fire can be the best thing to ever happen to us. As one of my favorite authors Marilynne Robinson writes, “The idea of grace had been so much on my mind, grace as a sort of ecstatic fire that takes things down to essentials.”

This quote has accompanied me through many highs and lows of my young adulthood. I suppose time and time again, God has shown me that the life I think I want or need is not the life he intends for me. In fact, there is something richer and deeper forming in and around me. To walk with Jesus is to leave some things behind, but I can see now that the life he’s called me in to is one of beauty and grace, provision and purpose, relief and restoration—a life with all of the essentials.

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I’ll close with a story I read a couple of weeks ago from the Spanish architect Antoni Gaudí. Gaudí famously never lived to see the completion of his greatest work: La Sagrada Família. People would frequently chastise him about how long it was taking to build the third and final facade, which focused on depicting the glory of Christ’s return. At these critical remarks, Gaudí replied, “My client is not in a hurry!”

If I’ve come to learn anything this year, it is this: God is not in a hurry with us. His pace is different than ours, his love defies expectations, his means are mysterious. These truths help me surrender my worries about “spiritual unproductivity” at the foot of the cross, because I believe Jesus’s invitation that Eugene Peterson so excellently paraphrased: “Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.”

It’s not what we do that makes God love us—whether that be going to seminary or nailing all our spiritual disciplines; he just does. So this semester, I may not be listening to lectures about spiritual formation or starting something new and exciting and big and bold. But I am excited to keep being a student of Jesus. I am eager to walk alongside him in the unforced rhythms of his grace—to keep company with my savior and teacher and friend—to learn from him how to live freely and lightly.