Every new season of ministry begins with hope. Hope that the church will grow. Hope that the difficult relationships on your team will find their footing. Hope that the weight you carried into last year won't follow you into this one. Those hopes shape your goals, renew your energy, and give you something to lean into as you lead.
But ministry has a way of testing hope. Unexpected challenges arrive. Needs go unmet. Prayers seem to bounce off the ceiling. And when that happens, slowly and quietly, the hope you started with can become almost unrecognizable, buried beneath the accumulation of disappointment.
For leaders, this tension carries an added weight. You are expected to shepherd others through doubt while quietly wrestling with your own. More often than not, that wrestling gets pushed down rather than worked through.
“When you’re struggling to see His hand at work in your ministry or your life, the most important move you can make is toward Him, not away.”
David understood this tension intimately. His psalms are among the most honest pieces of writing in all of Scripture, a sustained juxtaposition of praise and lament, confidence and despair, faith and raw, unfiltered doubt. Psalm 13 is one of the most striking examples, and it offers four lessons for any leader navigating a season where hope feels distant.
Psalm 13: How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and day after day have sorrow in my heart? How long will my enemy triumph over me? Look on me and answer, Lord my God. Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death, and my enemy will say, “I have overcome him,” and my foes will rejoice when I fall. But I trust in your unfailing love; my heart rejoices in your salvation. I will sing the Lord's praise, for he has been good to me.
When a relationship is strained, the temptation is to create distance. But the path toward restoration almost always runs in the opposite direction, toward the other person, not away from them. The same is true in our relationship with God. When you're struggling to see His hand at work in your ministry or your life, the most important move you can make is toward Him, not away.
David doesn't ease into this psalm. He opens with four consecutive “how long” questions, each one pressing harder than the last. There is no performance here, no pastoral veneer. He tells God exactly what he feels: that he's been forgotten, that sorrow has become his daily companion, that his enemies are gaining ground.
This kind of honesty is foundational to deep relationship, and it is just as important with God as it is with anyone else. Putting into words what God already knows is a gift to yourself as much as it is an act of faith. For leaders who rarely slow down enough to feel anything, naming what's actually happening in your interior life is no small thing.
Verse 5 turns on three quiet but decisive words: “But I trust.” David doesn't resolve his circumstances. He reorients his gaze. He shifts from what he feels to what he knows. The Lord's love has not failed. That remains true regardless of how the present season feels.
In seasons of doubt, our feelings have a way of obscuring what we know to be true. If you feel under-resourced and overlooked, call to mind the specific ways God has provided for you. If fear over the unknown is pressing in, rehearse the ways He has proven himself faithful. Doubt isn't the opposite of faith, but it does ask us to choose whether we will stand on what we feel or what we know.
David closes the psalm with a resolve that defies his circumstances: “I will sing the Lord's praise, for he has been good to me.” The ESV renders it, “he has dealt bountifully with me.” His problems are still present. No resolution is recorded. And yet something has shifted.
Worship in a season of doubt won't fix what's broken. But it will recalibrate your perspective. It has a way of revealing that the hope we've been clinging to was placed in a desired outcome, in a solution, rather than in the God who has been at work the entire time, in ways we may not yet be able to see.
For pastors and ministry leaders who carry the weight of leading others through their own seasons of doubt, this is a particularly important reminder. The practice of choosing worship before the answer arrives is not a denial of the struggle. It is, in fact, one of the most honest things a leader can do, an acknowledgment that God's goodness is not contingent on our circumstances, and that He has been, and remains, good to us.
