I graduated college in 2019. I didn’t get into medical school until 2024.
Five years. Multiple entrance exam attempts. Multiple application cycles. A post-bac program. Volunteering. Working as a research coordinator. Every year, another version of my application trying to look different — and every year, it felt like I was throwing everything at a wall and nothing was sticking. Family members told me to change careers. And honestly, the door didn’t just seem closed; it seemed locked, and my test score felt like a mark on me that couldn’t be washed off.
Then I finally got in — and failed my first year, and had to start it again.
If you had asked me during any of those years whether God was doing something, I would have said the right words and not believed them. It looked like wasted time. It felt like proof that I had to keep proving I deserved a calling I clearly wasn’t good enough for.
Looking back now, I can tell you what it actually was.
The Word
“For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.” — Ephesians 2:10 (ESV)
The Truth
Workmanship is a craftsman’s word — some translations say masterpiece, the Greek is poiema, where we get “poem.” It means you are something God is deliberately making. And craftsmen are never in a hurry. The long, slow, hidden stages — the sanding, the waiting, the reworking — aren’t delays in the process. They are the process.
Notice also the order of the verse. You are created for good works, which God prepared beforehand. The works come after the workmanship. God wasn’t withholding my calling during those five years; He was building the person who could survive it. The truth is, the delay was God rooting my identity in Him deeply enough to face what was coming — because training in healthcare will test everything, and I needed an identity that wasn’t made of acceptance letters. I just couldn’t see the workshop from inside it.
So here’s the lie, named: I have to prove I deserve this calling. And here’s the truth: you can’t deserve prepared works. God laid out patient encounters, classmates, and assignments for you before you ever applied to anything. You don’t audition for workmanship. You are the workmanship.
The Shift
Whatever stage feels like wasted time right now — the retake, the gap year, the season of rejection — hold it differently today. Not as evidence against your calling, but as the craftsman’s slow work. And if I can say one thing to the version of you in the waiting: you’re allowed to live while He builds. I spent those years stressing when I could have also been living — enjoying my family, my freedom, my God. The workshop years count as life too.
Root It
Name one season you’ve filed under “wasted.” Write next to it: “workmanship, not waste.” Then thank God for one specific thing that season built in you — even if you can only see it faintly.
Prayer
Father of glory, give me the Spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Christ. Show me Jesus, the One in whom I was created on purpose — and help me trust the slow hands of the Craftsman when the door looks closed. Amen.
Comment the year(s) you’ve been calling wasted — let’s rename them together: workmanship. Send this to someone in a waiting season who thinks the door is locked.