Latent

When you're heating a liquid, there's a point where its temperature plateaus. You continue to put more and more energy into the thing with no appreciable change. Then BAM, it boils and turns to gas. Game development is like that. Weight loss is like that (though if I have a plateau on weight gain I have yet to find it). Faith is like that. It's the latent stage in which it's the hardest to justify continued effort, and it's the latent stage where something remarkable is about to happen.