What No One Tells You About a Faith Journey Beginning

   It's less like walking into a cathedral and more like learning to breathe in a room you've         never been in before. Here's the part that doesn't make it onto the welcome card.

You will feel like an imposter for longer than anyone admits. You will read a verse and not feel anything. You will pray and wonder if you are doing it right. You will hear a worship song that splits you open in a coffee shop and then go a month feeling nothing again. All of this is normal. None of it means you've lost the thread.

You will outgrow your old comforts before the new ones arrive

This is the part no one prepares you for. The first thing that happens, often, is not that you feel close to God. It is that the things you used to numb with stop working. Old conversations bore you. Old patterns ache. You are between countries, and the new one has not built you a house yet.

                            Stay. Build a small one, one journaled morning at a time.

Your prayer life will be embarrassing

It will sound like a child's. It will repeat itself. It will not be eloquent. Good. Eloquence was never the point. The point is the turning. Turn, turn, turn — even when the turning looks like ten unfinished sentences and one honest sigh.

You will meet women who seem to have figured it out

They have not. They are also remaining, also doubting, also returning. Some of them have been at it longer. Borrow their courage without borrowing their pace.

            Faith is not a personality you adopt. It is a relationship you tend.

What to do this week

Get a journal. Open your Bible without a plan. Read one chapter. Write one paragraph about what struck you, what bored you, what confused you, what comforted you. Do this five times. You will have begun. You may not feel like you have. You will have.

Download the free "What No One Tells You About A Faith Journey" Practice Worksheet