In reflection, how it all began

When I trace it all the way back, everything started with prayer… not the structured kind… WHICH AT THE TIME was the only kind I knew… but the kind where you tell God what’s actually on your mind, and then you listen.

I heard Father say once to pray proportionally.
You have one mouth and two ears… so basically listen to what God is trying to tell you just as much as you talk.
And that shifted the way I saw prayer.

I started listening to Jeff Cavins around Junish 2024 on Hallow because I wanted to understand the Gospel better… but life felt busy and in hindsight I see I wasn’t ready to put Him first fully.
My faith had always been familiar, but I wanted depth.
I wanted to know what Scripture was actually saying… and that small habit ended up becoming the doorway.

From there my prayer life changed fast…
because in Sept 2024 our new pastor suggested twenty minutes of praying a day… which turned into twenty minutes of talking and listening to Jesus.
Just me and Him… with no agenda outside of that Pray Like a Pirate acronym (ARRR Acknowledge, Relate, Receive, Respond).
Just honest conversation… which was really weird and uncomfortable at first.

Then something shifted in my heart…
and that twenty minutes grew into an hour.
Some days it turned into an hour and a half.
It was like once I tasted what real prayer felt like… I could not go back to the watered down version I had lived on for years.

Prayer softened me… convicted me… opened my eyes to the places in my life that needed realignment.
Including putting God first… before everything else.
Eventually it became impossible to ignore what God was placing on my heart.

Confession became important…
(kind of where the whole marriage conviction piece started)…
Scripture became something I wanted to put into action, not just read…
and obedience stopped feeling like a burden and started feeling like a response to better my life.
In other words… obedience wasn’t something out to get me… it was something meant to make me better.

I began understanding what it meant to be an obedient child of the Father.

And honestly… that is where my whole journey started.
Not with big decisions or the belief that marriage would magically fix everything…
but with prayer becoming a consistent priority in my life.

With giving God my time… He gave me His voice to listen to.

Everything that came after flowed from that place.
I don’t know how to make more sense of it than how I explained.
When you start feeling held by God… you develop this faith that things will turn out okay…
and you find comfort in knowing not everything needs “proof”… because you feel the proof.

I imagine that’s how the apostles felt when they went out to spread the news that He had risen.