I don’t know when it happened exactly. But at some point in the last couple of years, I decided to let God come to me.

There was no grand gesture. No proverbial fist-shaking at the sky.

Somewhere along the line, I got tired.

For the last fifteen years, give or take, I’ve started my day with a “quiet time.” It looked different depending on life. Sometimes it was fifteen minutes, sometimes forty-five. There was the odd day or week here and there that I missed. But I was faithful. Stubbornly faithful.

Until I wasn’t.

My relationship with God has been going through some growing pains since I moved to New York. Certainly for the better, but still. The transition has been apocalyptic in many ways. Moving from a Christian-saturated environment to the most diverse place I’ve ever lived exposed a lot of questions I took for granted when I lived in the South.

That, plus working with the best therapist a gal could ask for, has been transformational for my faith.

When I started freelancing, I realized how much in my life I felt was up to me. In short, it was everything. Including my faith.

The situation was untenable. Even if I could control everything, no human has the capacity to keep all the balls in the air.

Among other shifts in my practices, I wondered what would happen if I let go of this idea that my relationship with God was 100% up to me. What would it look like to let God meet me? To remember and trust that God has always been faithful, and so wouldn’t he continue to be? What would happen if I let him surprise me?

That’s when I stopped doing my quiet time. Instead, I found myself more open to doing shout-outs to God throughout my day. I found my eyes more open to the ways God met me through my friends, through the city, through my work. I’m more attuned to my God-given curiosity and how that draws me to God.

A gentler, kinder faith has found me. There are still many ways in which I live as if everything is up to me. But I’m on my way.

I don’t know if this practice is for everyone. It might be that I return to my quiet time method one day. But I hope this message encourages you to consider if there are areas where you’re living like everything is up to you, and how you might invite God and/or others into those areas of your life.