For years, my faith had a predictable shape: Sunday service, a verse on the fridge, prayer that sounded like a grocery list. Milk, eggs, thanks for the roof, amen — faster than saying it. I kept it up mostly out of habit, because I’m the kind of person who doesn’t like quitting things she already signed up for. What I didn’t have, and won’t pretend I did, was anything that felt alive.
That changed on an ordinary Wednesday in March. I was sitting on the edge of my bed at 5:47 a.m., staring at a dark window, and I said out loud, more or less: okay, if you’re actually in here, I don’t want to rush you. No words after that. I just sat. Nothing dramatic followed — no voices, no light, no plot twist. Just stillness. And somewhere inside it, I noticed something I’d been missing for a long time: the silence felt like it was answering.
Six minutes of not doing anything
My pastor once underlined a verse in my Bible — Be still, and know that I am God (Psalm 46:10). I’d read it a hundred times before, but that morning it stopped being a slogan. I made a small plan: six minutes of silence before I opened the Bible, before the phone, before I started answering anyone. No agenda, no performance. Just sitting with God and letting my thoughts settle the way silt settles in a jar of water — not by shaking harder, but by stopping.
The first week my mind was a mess: bills, a fight with my sister-in-law, one email I’d left unanswered. By the second week something shifted. I started hearing the silence as a place instead of an absence. Wait for the Lord; be strong and take heart (Psalm 27:14). The waiting itself became the point. That’s the part nobody warns you about: prayer changing your life doesn’t mean God suddenly answers everything on your list. It means the list stops running the show.
The question that knocked me over
Around week three, my younger kid asked me something I almost didn’t write down. Mom, is God listening right now? We’d just been driving, and he said it with the completely ordinary tone kids get when something genuinely puzzles them. I pulled over and said I thought so — yes, he’s listening right now.
Pray without ceasing (1 Thessalonians 5:17) is one of those verses people quote like a dare. I used to picture it as someone narrating their day to heaven nonstop, and I couldn’t do it. But that car moment reframed it for me. It wasn’t about nonstop words. It was about an underlying assumption — that he was there in the middle of everything. Faith wasn’t limited to what happened at the kitchen table. Once I stopped asking am I praying enough? and started assuming he was already near, it stopped feeling like a task I owed him.
What actually changed
I’ll keep this short, because the real answer is less listy than that.
- My patience got better — or at least it stopped costing me as much. Waiting on things, on people, on answers. Wait for the Lord; be strong and take heart (Psalm 27:14) stopped being a line and became a rhythm.
- I noticed more. The way my daughter lights up when she thinks nobody’s looking. The particular quality of morning light in our kitchen. Small stuff. None of it needs explaining.
- I stopped keeping score. I used to track prayer like a habit app — streaks, minutes, badges. Now I just show up. God isn’t in the business of my streaks.
None of this makes me special, and I’d push back hard on anyone who read it that way. I still have days where I don’t pray before noon and the whole thing feels gray. That’s not failure. That’s just Tuesday. What helps is not grading myself against the best version of me, just the last one. The gap between Tuesday-me and the me who sits at 5:47 is smaller than the gap between that me and the grocery-list version from years ago, and that’s what actually counts.
One more thing, because people ask. Does it work when you’re angry? I got angry at God last year and I’ll keep that in the story, because I think it matters. The anger wasn’t a disqualification. It was just another true thing to put in front of him. I stopped hiding the sharp edges of the day, and I’ve found the silence gets more honest when I stop sanitizing it. The Bible is full of this. The psalms are full of people who were furious, exhausted, and asking how long, Lord? without apologizing for it. Nobody asked David to soften his words. He just brought them.
Praying as a family
Last month we started praying before bed as a family, and I’ll be honest: the first few nights were awkward. Kids have their own agendas. Last night my youngest’s entire prayer was one sentence: Thanks for today, God. Same thing tomorrow, please. My older one added, very seriously, and please fix the wobbly table.
It wasn’t polished. It wasn’t what I’d planned. But it was ours — and that’s the whole thing, isn’t it? Prayer isn’t a performance. It’s a family sitting in the dark saying the same words you say at the table. Jesus said that when you pray, go into your inner room, close the door, and pray to your Father who is hidden away (Matthew 6:6). The inner room doesn’t have to be a literal room. For me it’s six minutes in a dark kitchen at 5:47 a.m. Somewhere in your day, carve out a space that belongs to God and nobody else — even if it’s as small as one cup of coffee.
If you want a structure to hold that kind of daily rhythm, the 30 Days of Prayer Journal in our shop was built for exactly this — prompts and a place to write things down. It’s not a substitute for sitting in silence with God, but for me it’s what made the habit stick. And if you’re doing this with the kids, the Family Devotional Bundle has short, real-life devotionals written for the moments when faith gets tested in a car seat or at a wobbly table. No theology textbook. Just the stuff you say when you’re tired and honest.