There is a kind of pain that doesn’t make it onto anybody’s highlight reel.
It doesn’t trend. It doesn’t get shared. It doesn’t look like anything from the outside. It just sits with you — quietly, persistently — in rooms where nobody is watching.
I know that pain. I’ve lived it.
For seven years, I worked in the laundry room of a hotel.
Not on the stage. Not in the pulpit. Not in front of a crowd. In a laundry room — feeding linen into huge industrial washing machines, hour after hour, working the overnight shift as a washman while the rest of the world slept.
I want to be honest with you about what that felt like, because I think some of you are living in your own version of that laundry room right now.
I knew I was called. I wasn’t confused about that. One of the most recognized evangelists in the world at the time — had spoken over my life. He said he felt like God was saying that I would see miracles, even the dead raised and travel around the world ministering the gospel. Those words were real. They were weighty. I received them.
And then I went back to the laundry room.
Night after night. Year after year. Seven years.
The word hadn’t changed. The calling hadn’t disappeared. But the gap between what I knew in my spirit and what I could see with my eyes was enormous. And nobody really talks about what it costs you to live in that gap.
Samuel came and anointed him. Poured the oil over his head. Declared him the next king of Israel. And then — David went back to the sheep.
Think about that for a moment.
The anointing was real. The word was genuine. God had spoken through his prophet. And yet David returned to the fields, to the hills, to the silence. Just the sheep, the wind, and God.
There was no audience for what God was doing in David during those years. No crowd watching him grow. No one to validate the process. Just a young man with a harp and a call he couldn’t fully explain, learning to worship in a place where only Heaven could hear him.
“The LORD does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart.” — 1 Samuel 16:7
David wasn’t hidden from God. He was hidden with God.
That is not the same thing.
The pain of hiddenness is real. I’m not going to dress it up.
There’s a particular ache that comes from knowing what you carry — and watching the world move forward without seeming to notice. You wonder if the word was real. You wonder if the season will ever shift. You wonder, on the hard nights, if you somehow missed it.
But here’s what I’ve learned: hiddenness is not abandonment.
God is not unaware of where you are. He placed you there.
The laundry room wasn’t a detour from my calling — it was part of the formation of it. The silence wasn’t God’s absence. It was His classroom. In those seven years, He was working on something in me that a platform never could have produced. He was dealing with my heart. He was teaching me to trust Him without an audience. He was cultivating in me the kind of root system that could eventually hold the weight of what He’d spoken.
You can’t rush that. You can only receive it.
Even now, I won’t pretend the tension has fully resolved.
Even to this day as a entrepreneur and minister, building something that not everyone around me can see or fully understand, there are still moments when I feel the weight of it — the aloneness, the misunderstanding, the sense of being unseen. That doesn’t go away just because the season shifts.
But I know something now that I wish someone had told me in the laundry room:
Being hidden from people is not the same as being hidden from God.
He sees you. He knows your name. He hasn’t forgotten the word He spoke over you. The anointing doesn’t expire because the timing is slow.
And if you’re in your own version of the fields right now — if you’re carrying something real in a place that feels small — I want you to hear this:
David didn’t become a great king in spite of the wilderness years. He became one because of them.
The shepherd heart that learned to protect those sheep — that same heart would one day shepherd a nation. The worship that rose from those lonely hills — that same intimacy would make him a man after God’s own heart.
What God is doing in you right now is not wasted. It is not delayed. It is preparation.
You are not hidden from God.
You are hidden with Him.
And there is no safer, more sacred place to be.