# How to Define Success When Your Season Looks Different Three friends in ministry talk about losing the awe of man, asking for fresh oil, and defining a win that is yours. Joseph's prison and Moses at the rock sit behind it all. Source: Pray.com — https://www.pray.com/articles/how-to-define-success-when-your-season-looks-different Author: Adam Mesa Category: Faith & Wisdom Published: 2026-10-22 Last revised: 2026-10-22 --- ## Key takeaways - **Stop making people your source.** Jeff Osborne says doors opened once he quit performing for influential people and looked to God as his provider. - **Bring fresh oil to a new season.** The mindset that opened one door may not be enough for the next one. - **Righteousness can lead to a prison.** Sammy points to Joseph, who was in prison because of his obedience, and asks whether we will stay faithful there. - **Define your own win.** Comparing your season to someone else's harvest can push you to force results God has not asked for. - **Obedience takes different shapes.** The same God can call one friend to a pulpit and another to business rooms. - **Keep friends close.** Friends who want to see you win will also confront you. ## When the doors finally open This conversation is among friends who started in leadership, ministry, consulting and business in their twenties and are now reaching their late thirties and forty. They celebrate one another's wins in a group chat, and they asked Jeff Osborne what is different in his life right now. Jeff said that in almost nineteen years of doing this work, he has never had God open the floodgates the way he has this season. He called it a weird season. The doors are open, and he is working out how to carry them well. ## Losing the awe of man Jeff traced the change to a painful moment. When he was speaking on stages as an evangelist, he said, every person became an opportunity. He felt he had to sound smart and say something deep to be recognized. After that moment, he said, "I lost the awe of man." From then on, he reasoned, if God did not want him around a person or an opportunity, it was not for him. He described how people assume that an influential person's influence will transfer to them, so they lower themselves and wait for the baton. One day they wake up no closer, more broken and caught in people pleasing. His wife, Nadia, started asking what they were doing, and he pushed back at first. What broke it open was money. Jeff said he was part of something that went down to zero dollars in less than twenty-four hours because of choices others made, and everyone else seemed fine. That was when it hit him that nobody was responsible for his family except him, and God. Then God sent confirming experiences. Someone asked if he did coaching, and that first client paid about a thousand dollars a month. He was careful to add that God does use people to open doors. What he left behind was an unhealthy reliance on man as his source. ## Asking for fresh oil Doors opening brought a new challenge. Jeff said he had been home only seven days the previous month. He told of landing from one trip and having to pack again for a conference, searching for a charger and feeling the weight of the road. He thought of ministers who have lasted a long time, such as T.D. Jakes, Billy Graham and John Bevere, and he prayed for fresh oil. He explained what he meant by oil: the mindset and the way of doing things that opened the door in the first place. In his words, "sometimes we step into the new seasons with old oil." He is turning forty in three months and asked God for fresh oil to love his kids in this season. His son had moved out for college, his daughter is a high school senior, and Nadia was home without him. He admitted to the fear that his family might forget him while he travels. ## Righteous and still in the prison Sammy, who is preparing to plant a church in Huntington Beach, shared what he is preaching from Genesis 40. The cupbearer and the baker were in prison because they had sinned. Then he said, "Joseph was righteous, and he was in prison." He asked a question most of us would like to dodge: "Are we still going to be faithful when that happens?" Sammy said part of his own frustration was feeling he had been faithful and still was not where he expected to be. Then he drew attention to what Joseph noticed in the prison. > He asked Pharaoh’s officers who were with him in custody in his master’s house, saying, “Why do you look so sad today?” > > ([Genesis 40:7](/bible/web/genesis-40/#v7), WEB) Sammy asked whether we lose compassion in the middle of our own hard seasons. He observed that Joseph stood before Pharaoh in part because he noticed someone else who needed help while he was suffering. Joseph also asked the cupbearer to remember him, and the cupbearer forgot him for two whole years ([Genesis 41:1](/bible/web/genesis-41/#v1)). Faithfulness, Sammy said, can still leave you waiting. ## Who defines success? One of the friends recalled hearing Furtick say to "discern your season," because someone plowing who thinks it is harvest will always be discouraged. The group added that many people are harvesting what they sowed years ago, so being fruitful now does not prove they are still doing what got them there. They brought up Moses at the rock ([Numbers 20:1-13](/bible/web/numbers-20/#v1)). To the people, he looked successful because water came out. One friend said that before God, he had failed. Another suggested Moses had gotten used to how God spoke to him earlier and went back to that method. They also noted that fruit often takes decades to see, like the cathedrals one of them visited on a pilgrimage in Spain, which were started by people who never saw them finished. Someone also told of Paul Washer being asked who the greatest preacher alive is. His answer, as they told it, was that the man is probably in the mountains somewhere preaching to unreached people groups no one knows about. Greatness in God's eyes may look different from the Western scorecard of more and growth. As one friend put it, activity does not equal intimacy. Jeff offered a practical version of this. During a hard transition, everyone around him seemed to be winning with crypto, NFTs and real estate, and he started to panic. Then he heard God ask what his win was. His answer was paying rent and putting groceries in the refrigerator while doing what God had called him to do. "You got to define your win," he said. When he did, nobody could make him feel behind, and he did not feel the pull to strike the rock to see whether something would work. ## One obedience, different shapes Jeff once asked Bishop Jakes on a video call how to do business, speaking and ministry without being squeezed into one box. As Jeff remembers it, Bishop Jakes told him that people will define you by where they find you, and that nowhere in the Bible does it say you have to be one-dimensional. God then asked Jeff if it was all right if he never gave him one thing to build, and called him to be scaffolding, which goes up beside a building and comes down when the work is done. Jeff said he felt great relief. He described speaking at a business event in Chicago with about 800 salespeople. God asked him to teach on renewing the mind from [Romans 12:2](/bible/web/romans-12/#v2). > Don’t be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what is the good, well-pleasing, and perfect will of God. > > ([Romans 12:2](/bible/web/romans-12/#v2), WEB) Jeff said he cut his message short and offered prayer for a renewed mind, and almost 800 people filled the stage and the walkways. Then he felt prompted to give an altar call, and over a hundred hands went up. He told it as an act of obedience he was afraid to take. Another pastor in the group said that God told him almost the opposite about six months ago: he is a pastor, called to father people in the faith and plant churches, and should drop everything else. The principle is the same, they agreed, and the application can look very different. Sammy said he feels compelled to see people saved, formed and sent, and that he cannot shake the call to plant. ## Friends who want to see you win They ended on friendship. One said the church talks a lot about sonship but has little theology of friendship, and pointed to Jesus calling his followers friends ([John 15:15](/bible/web/john-15/#v15)). Friends who want you to win, they said, will confront you, and some of them will keep calling until you answer. ## What this means for you If you are comparing your season to someone else's, these friends suggest slowing down and asking a few questions. - Are you in a season of plowing or harvesting, and are you judging yourself by someone else's? - What would a win honestly look like for you this season, and who has been defining it for you? - Where are you still waiting on a person to open a door that only God can open? - Who is close enough to tell you the truth? Success on this view is faithfulness to what God has asked of you, even when the season looks small, and fresh oil is something you can ask him for.