If you are reading this, you are probably in one of two places. Either you sense that something is shifting and you cannot quite name it yet, or you have been waiting for so long that you have started to wonder whether anything is actually coming. Both of those feelings are familiar to almost every person in Scripture who was on the edge of something significant.
The consistent testimony of the Bible is that God does not change a person’s life abruptly or without preparation. What looks sudden from the outside, Moses at the burning bush, Joseph standing before Pharaoh, Mary receiving the angel, was the end of a long process that God had been running quietly in the background. The preparation is not a detour from the new season. It is the new season arriving early, working from the inside out.
These twelve things are in sequential order because they tend to follow a pattern. Not rigidly, and not necessarily in a single continuous arc. But if you are honest as you read, you will likely recognize where you are in the sequence. That recognition itself is useful information.
The Bible’s Timeline Before the New Season
Four numbers that put God’s preparation process in perspective“See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.”— Isaiah 43:19 (NIV) — God speaks this to a people in captivity, not yet delivered. The new thing is declared before it is visible. That is always how it works.
Before you read: These twelve things are not all comfortable. Some of them are things you have been interpreting as signs that God has forgotten you, or that the new season is not coming after all. Read them with that honesty in mind. The disruption you are experiencing may be more purposeful than it looks.
Ur of the Chaldees was not a bad place. Archaeologists have established that it was one of the most advanced cities in the ancient world, with sophisticated housing, a literate population, and a functioning economy. Abraham was established there. He had family and roots. And then the restlessness came, and with it a call that did not come with a destination.
The first thing God does before a new season is not open a new door. It is close a chapter on the comfort of the current one. Not necessarily through loss or difficulty, though that happens too, but through a specific dissatisfaction with where you are that cannot be resolved by improving anything about the current situation. If you have been trying to fix the restlessness with productivity, new experiences, or better arrangements and it keeps returning, it is worth asking whether the restlessness is a complaint or a compass.
Abraham did not know where he was going. He knew who had called him to go. That distinction is the beginning of every new season God initiates: the clarity is about the direction and the caller, not yet about the destination.
He is loosening your grip on the familiar before he shows you what comes next. The restlessness is not a malfunction. It is the beginning of a severance from a place that cannot go where you are going.
Israel had been in Egypt for generations by the time of Exodus 1. They were there because God had placed Joseph in a position of authority that created favor for his family. That favor outlasted Joseph for a while. Then a new Pharaoh came, and everything that had made Egypt workable suddenly became hostile. The verse says with stark simplicity: “a new king, to whom Joseph meant nothing.”
When God is preparing a new season, one of his most common tools is the withdrawal of the favor, the relationship, the position, or the arrangement that made the current place sustainable. The boss who was always in your corner quietly becomes adversarial. The opportunity that always renewed itself stops renewing. The door that was always open closes without drama or explanation. This feels like loss, and it is, but it is the specific kind of loss that works like a release: it removes the reason to stay.
Israel could not have left Egypt while Egypt was still good to them. The withdrawal of favor was not punishment. It was preparation. It made the new direction available by making the old one untenable.
God is removing the anchor. What made the current place comfortable enough to stay in is being dismantled, not because the current place was wrong, but because the next place requires you to actually leave.
Between the last word of the Old Testament and the first word of the New, there are four hundred years of prophetic silence. No new revelation. No burning bushes. No angelic visitations. Just the accumulated weight of what had already been spoken, and a people trying to remain faithful while wondering if God had forgotten the promises. Then John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness, and everything broke open at once.
Joseph, between the dream at seventeen and the interpretation at thirty, had thirteen years in which heaven offered no update. The dream had been given. The silence was not a retraction. It was a gap that God was filling with something Joseph could not yet see. The silence between your last clear word from God and the next movement is rarely an indication that the new season is not coming. It is more often an indication that the preparation happening underneath the surface is not yet complete.
The danger of the silence is that it trains you to stop expecting. People who stop expecting stop being positioned to receive. The silence is not the end of the story. It is the interval between two sentences in the same paragraph.
He is working in the space where you cannot see him working. The silence is not absence. It is a different kind of speech, addressed not to your ears but to the character that the next season will require of you.
Moses spent forty years in Pharaoh’s palace developing the skills of leadership and governance. Then, in a single act of violent, unilateral justice, he killed an Egyptian and buried him in the sand. Pharaoh’s palace could teach him administration. Only the desert could teach him patience, dependence, and the ability to lead without the power of an empire behind him. He spent forty years in Midian tending his father-in-law’s sheep before the burning bush appeared.
Paul, after his dramatic encounter with Jesus on the Damascus road, did not go immediately to Jerusalem to be commissioned by the other apostles. He went to Arabia for three years. Three years in which the same theological intelligence that had persecuted the church was being reoriented by the Spirit toward the construction of the theology that would anchor the New Testament. The brilliance was already there. It needed to be completely rebuilt from the foundation.
Before the new season arrives, there is almost always a period in which the specific character issue, the wound, the tendency, the blind spot, the habit, that the new season will test, gets addressed in a lower-stakes environment. What looks like a detour is actually surgery in a context where the consequences of not getting it right are smaller than they will be later.
God is not delaying the new season. He is building the person the new season requires. The character work that feels like the wilderness is the very thing that will make the next assignment survivable.
David had already been anointed king in private by Samuel in 1 Samuel 16. He knew the future that had been assigned to him. Then he went back to the sheep. He did not lobby for the throne. He did not try to accelerate the timeline. He went back to the field and was faithful to the assignment in front of him, at a level of commitment that no one required and no one watched.
When the lion came, nobody was grading his performance. When the bear came, nobody was keeping records. He chased them, fought them, and recovered what was taken, because the sheep were his responsibility and that was sufficient reason. That faithfulness in the field is not a footnote to his kingship. It is the foundation of it. The man who would fight a giant had first spent uncounted hours fighting predators in the dark for an audience of none.
God does not typically release people into significant new assignments until the current assignment has been fully honored. Not perfectly, but fully, with the genuine effort the current responsibility deserves rather than the minimum required to keep moving toward what you actually want.
God is watching how you handle the assignment nobody celebrates. The small faithfulness is not separate from the preparation for what comes next. It is the preparation.
Acts 16:6–10 is one of the most revealing sequences in the New Testament about how God redirects a person into a new season. Paul and his team tried to go to Asia. Blocked. They tried to enter Bithynia. The Spirit of Jesus would not allow it. They came to Troas, a port city, and stopped, likely uncertain and possibly frustrated. That night Paul received the vision of the man from Macedonia saying “Come over and help us.” The next morning they left for Macedonia.
The closed doors were not the absence of God’s direction. They were the direction. By closing Asia and Bithynia, God had created a funnel that made Troas, and eventually Macedonia, the only path. If either of the first two doors had opened, the gospel might never have reached Europe on that particular mission. The closed doors were not obstacles to the new season. They were the navigation system for it.
When a door that should be opening according to your expectations stays shut, the natural response is to push harder on it, assume something is wrong, or conclude the new season has been delayed. The Macedonian pattern suggests a different interpretation: check whether there is a vision you have not yet received because you are still standing in front of the door that was supposed to open.
He is not blocking you. He is directing you. The closed door is part of the navigation, not an obstacle to the journey. The new direction often only becomes visible after the familiar ones have been definitively shut.
📌 The first six steps are primarily about removal, restriction, and repositioning. The next six are about what God sends, shows, and confirms as the new season actually arrives. If you are in steps one through six, stay in it. The second half is coming.
Saul of Tarsus had spent three days blind, fasting, and processing what had happened to him on the Damascus road. Then God sent him a messenger named Ananias. Ananias was not a prominent apostle. He was a disciple, described simply as a man in Damascus who was available and obedient. He was terrified to go, for good reason: Saul was known for persecuting believers. But he went, laid hands on Saul, and delivered a word that launched one of the most significant ministries in the history of the church.
God’s messenger before a new season is rarely who you expect. It is not always the senior person with the obvious credentials. It is often the ordinary person who was simply available and willing, who showed up at the right moment with a word or an act that turns out to be pivotal. Looking for the messenger from the expected direction can cause you to miss the one God actually sent.
The other side of this is equally important: if God asks you to be the Ananias for someone else, go. Even if you are afraid. Even if the person’s history gives you reason to hesitate. The new season often arrives through someone willing to cross an uncomfortable street with an uncomfortable word.
He is connecting you with the specific word, the specific person, or the specific moment that the new season requires, from a direction you were probably not monitoring. Pay attention to unexpected sources.
The widow of Zarephath had reached her last meal. Not her last good meal. Her actual last meal. One handful of flour, a little oil, and then nothing. That is where Elijah found her, gathering sticks for a fire. She had no options left, no reserves, no plan B. She had reached the precise place where God’s provision would be unmistakably his own and not the product of her management.
Before new seasons, God frequently allows a person to exhaust their own resources, not because he wants them to suffer but because the new season requires a different source than the one they have been drawing from. As long as you can sustain the current situation on your own, you will. The depletion of self-sufficiency is not a failure. It is often the moment that makes the next provision both possible and recognizable.
The disciples were in a similar position in John 6, standing in front of a crowd of five thousand with five loaves and two fish. “What are these among so many?” (John 6:9). The answer is: they are the exact amount needed for a miracle. The miracle required the prior acknowledgment that the human resources were insufficient.
He is creating the conditions for a provision that could not be mistaken for your own cleverness. The depletion is not the end of the story. It is the setup for the page that follows.
Elijah had just experienced the most dramatic public victory of his prophetic ministry on Mount Carmel. Fire fell from heaven. The prophets of Baal were defeated. Rain came after three years of drought. And then he ran. A threat from Jezebel drove him into the wilderness, to a cave on Mount Horeb, the mountain of God, where he sat alone with his exhaustion and his grievance.
What happened next is important. God did not send him back to a community. He did not immediately give him a new assignment. He fed him twice and let him sleep, and then he took him through a wind that tore mountains apart, an earthquake, and a fire. Then came the still small voice. And it came only after all the noise had passed, and only in the silence of isolation.
Before a significant new season, God often removes a person from their usual community of voices, not as punishment but as a precondition for hearing something that the surrounding noise has been covering. The isolation feels like abandonment. It functions as a necessary quiet in which a specific word can finally land without competition.
He is reducing the frequency of competing voices so that the frequency on which he speaks can finally be heard. The people who feel furthest from God in a season of isolation are often the people he is speaking to most specifically, in the only environment where that word can be received.
Jacob’s name in Hebrew means supplanter, one who grasps from behind, a deceiver. It was the name given to describe what he did at birth, grabbing his twin brother’s heel. He had lived into that name for decades: deceiving his father for a blessing, deceiving his uncle Laban, maneuvering and scheming his way through his life. The night before his reunion with Esau, he was alone and he wrestled with a divine stranger until dawn.
The stranger’s question is arresting: “What is your name?” He had to say it. He had to own what he was. “Jacob.” Deceiver. And then the name was changed: “Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel,” one who wrestles with God. The same event that injured him permanently also renamed him permanently. The new season required a new identity, and the new identity required a confrontation with the old one, by name, in the dark, alone.
Before significant transitions, God often allows a period in which a person’s sense of self, their identity built on a role, a reputation, a relationship, or a past self-understanding, is brought into question. That questioning is not a crisis to be solved by reassembling the old identity. It is an invitation to receive the new one.
God is ending who you have been so that who you are becoming has room to emerge. The identity that was enough for the last season may be the very thing preventing the next one. The wrestling match is not the problem. It is the transition.
Mary’s question is the right question. She is not doubting God. She is asking a genuinely reasonable question about mechanism: the thing you are describing does not match my current situation in any way I can account for. The angel’s answer is not a mechanism. It is a principle: “Nothing is impossible with God” (Luke 1:37). The word comes before the capacity to fulfill it. Always.
Gideon’s situation is the more extreme version. When the angel of the Lord greeted him as “mighty warrior,” Gideon was hiding in a winepress threshing wheat because he was afraid of the Midianites (Judges 6:11–12). He was not a mighty warrior. He was the least member of the weakest clan in the smallest tribe. The greeting described who he was going to become, not who he currently was. God’s word about the new season is almost never calibrated to your current capacity. It is calibrated to what he intends to do in and through you.
The gap between the word and the capacity is not a reason for doubt. It is the space in which faith operates. If the word matched your current resources, you would not need God to fulfill it.
He is announcing what is coming before the conditions that make it possible exist. The gap between the word and the reality is not a sign that the word is wrong. It is the signature of a promise that requires God to fulfill it.
Paul had already received his call from God directly on the Damascus road. But before his first missionary journey, which would take the gospel into Europe and Asia Minor, the confirmation came through the community. The church in Antioch, fasting and worshipping together, received the same word. They responded with prayer, fasting, and the laying on of hands. The call that had been given privately was confirmed publicly before the departure.
Gideon, about to lead an army against an enemy that outnumbered him massively, received confirmation twice through the fleece. Not because God was irritated by his need for confirmation, but because the assignment was significant enough to warrant it and Gideon’s courage needed it. God does not universally discourage the request for confirmation. He uses it as part of the preparation.
The pattern of the Bible is that significant new seasons are rarely confirmed by a single sign or a single voice. Two or three witnesses, a convergence of circumstances, the agreement of trusted community, the persistence of the word over time, these are the ways God builds the certainty that a major step forward requires. If you are moving into something significant and you feel the need to tell no one and receive no confirmation, that is worth pausing on.
He is completing the preparation by surrounding the new direction with confirmation that is proportionate to the size of the step. He does not want you to walk into the new season on one uncertain impression. He builds the confidence to step through multiple witnesses.
“Which of these twelve do you recognize as the thing God is doing in your life right now?” That is not a rhetorical question. Take a moment to answer it honestly before you move on. The step you are in is not an obstacle to the new season. It is part of it.
All 12 Steps at a Glance
You are not between seasons. You are inside the preparation for the next one.
Every step in this article describes something that felt, from the inside, like delay, disruption, or abandonment. Moses did not experience the wilderness as seminary. Joseph did not experience the prison as preparation. Mary did not experience the angel’s word as something she fully understood before she said yes.
The step you are in right now is not an interruption to your story. It is part of it. The question is not whether the new season is coming. The question is whether you will cooperate with the preparation while you wait for it.
Lord, I can see myself in some of these twelve steps. What felt like silence, I now understand may have been speech I was not positioned to hear yet. What felt like loss, I now understand may have been the removal of what could not come with me. Give me the courage to cooperate with what you are doing instead of resisting it. I trust the process because I trust the one running it. Amen.
Three Questions Worth Sitting With
- Step 3 describes a season of unusual silence — the gap between the last clear word from God and the next movement. Where are you in relation to that kind of silence right now, and what has that silence been producing in you during the waiting?
- Step 10 describes Jacob’s identity being brought into crisis before he received the new name the next season required. Is there an identity, a role, a self-understanding, or a reputation that you sense God is asking you to release before you can fully step into what is coming?
- Looking at all twelve steps as a sequence, where do you honestly believe you are in the process right now? And what does that location tell you about how to respond to what God is doing in this specific season?
