I spent most of my life believing that closeness with God was something I had to earn. No one handed me a checklist that said “earn it,” but the version of Christianity I grew up in communicated that idea clearly enough through tone, through fear, and through the unspoken weight of never quite measuring up.
The doctrine was soaked in guilt. Obedience was driven by the threat of consequences rather than the draw of love. And somewhere very early, my spirit learned to perform rather than rest.
That pattern didn’t stay inside the walls of a church. It shadowed me everywhere. It followed me into relationships, into caregiving, into the way I moved through every hard season of my life.
I served until I was empty. I tried until I couldn’t. I studied, showed up, pushed through, and measured every effort against an invisible standard I could never quite meet.
Are ye so foolish? having begun in the Spirit, are ye now made perfect by the flesh? (Galatians 3:3)
I had read that verse many times. I couldn’t yet hear it for myself.
The Unexpected Teacher
Somewhere in the long middle of all that striving, I encountered something I hadn’t expected: broader spiritual thought, the exact kind of thing I had been warned against my whole life – concepts from other traditions, other frameworks, other ways of understanding the inner life and the nature of what is real and what endures.
What I found there was not the misguided idea that those things were equivalent to Christ, but much of what I found there did help me see clearly where the lines actually were and that organized religion puts limits on Him of its own. It showed me which parts of what I had been handed were genuinely rooted in Scripture, and which parts were human construction dressed up in religious language. It made crystal clear the fear, the control, the performance, and that those things were never God’s design.
What I also discovered is that true spirituality – the kind that flows from surrender, from honest self-examination, from acknowledging something greater than ourselves working in us – shows up as a deep current beneath many traditions, because God wrote it into human longing. And every place I found a shadow of that truth somewhere else, it only pointed me back more surely to the source. To Christ. To the real thing, not the version I had been given.
I was not led away from my faith. I was led through the fog of it, until I could see it clearly for the first time.
The Breaking
Then grief arrived. Not once, but in waves, over years. The people I loved most got sick, and I took care of them. That was a type of grief on its own.
Then they died, and as those episodes began to compound, they began to bury me under the weight of a pain I can’t begin to put in to words even today. The structures I had built around myself fell quiet, and running through all of it was a friendship that was not what it appeared to be – one that drained rather than filled, that confused rather than clarified.
I kept trying. I kept striving. I gave it my all… until one day, I just couldn’t anymore.
And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. (2 Corinthians 12:9)
That verse stopped being a concept and became something I lived in by necessity. I had nothing left to offer. No performance. No effort. Just the raw and quiet reality of a woman too tired to try anymore.
The Solitude
What happened next was not something I chose or planned or engineered.
God pulled me into solitude.
This was not a retreat I signed up for. It was not a spiritual discipline I added to my routine. It was total and complete withdrawal that was God led, just as Elijah, Paul, Moses and so many others in Scripture had experienced.
In that true (extreme, to some) righteous solitude, the people and the noise and the toxic patterns fell away, and what remained was stillness. I thought I knew and loved stillness before that moment, but in that stillness, something began to change that neither all my years of striving nor even meditation had ever touched.
Be still, and know that I am God. (Psalm 46:10)
I had always read that as instruction. It turned out to be an invitation. In the quiet, I began to be honest with God in ways I never had been. I was no longer performing prayer or praise, and was no longer presenting my best self and hoping it would be enough. I was bringing the real thing to Him – the grief, the confusion, the anger, the fear. What I found was that He was not surprised, not disappointed, and He had never been withdrawing or hiding from me.
He was waiting.
Transformation, I was learning, is not something we accomplish. Just as sanctification is, it is something that happens in us when we finally stop blocking it with our own effort. The Holy Spirit had been at work all along. Some part of me knew that; that’s how I understood to withdraw from my external life to begin with, after all. I just hadn’t been still enough, or honest enough, or desperate enough to cooperate.
What Striving Could Never Do
I am not perfectly resolved. I don’t say that to balance my image or the story I’m sharing here. I say it because it’s true, and because false testimony does more harm than good. There are still places where the old patterns surface, where fear tries to speak louder than trust.
But I am closer to peace than I ever imagined possible. Not because I finally did enough. Because I finally stopped.
And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus. (Philippians 4:7)
That promise used to feel like a destination I was trying to navigate toward. Now it feels like where I actually live, most days, not because I earned my way there, but because I let go of the striving and the performing and the giving to the outside world what I didn’t have to give long enough for grace to do what grace was always meant to do.
Closing Thoughts
The faith I have now is not the one I was handed. It is the one I found when I stopped performing and started abiding. It was always there, underneath all the noise.
Christ was always there.
I just had to be brought low enough to let Him meet me.
Twin Tree Project 