I’m sitting in a coffee shop, sipping on a mocha, silently panicking about today’s post. It’s Thursday, and I have two days to write and post something for this Saturday. My mind is a hurricane of thoughts: “What should I write about? What does God want me to write about?”
My mind wanders back to last Sunday’s sermon about rest, and more questions flurry around my head. “Am I supposed to rest? Am I supposed to WRITE about rest?”
Guilt wraps around my shoulders when I think about resting. I’ve already broken my “streak” of posting every Saturday this year. I hate to keep breaking it, but…
I also haven’t sat and listened to what God has to say in a long time. I used to sit upstairs in my office, hands outstretched, waiting for God to tell me what to write about.
I haven’t done that in months.
I know I need to recenter. Remember what ARMR is all about. Remember that I’m not a factory churning out content. Remember that God is letting me do this for Him.
All the late Friday nights, scrambling to finish my posts and social media in time for Saturday, run through my mind’s eye. At some point in the journey, I started to turn my calling into a chore.
Isn’t that reason enough to rest?
But what if this is the enemy trying to stop me from writing?
All of this could be answered with some quiet time with the Lord, so why haven’t I done it?
So, I did. I sat and listened.
When I finally stopped trying to make a decision and just sat in the quiet, my brain kept swiveling through “Is this what I want to do?”, “Is this what God wants me to do?”, and “Is this the enemy trying to attack me?“.
No wonder my poor mocha sat unnoticed for thirty minutes while my brain tried to sort itself out.
It wasn’t until I let all of that go and simply listened that I landed on an answer and heard Him say:
“You got this, daughter.”
Immediately, I felt lighter and more energized than I’d felt all day. My fingers were ready to type, ideas flying around my head.
This. THIS is what I needed to write about—not rest, exactly, but this: how we drift from God when the world gets loud, and how we find our way back.
How Do We Even Notice We’ve Drifted?
In the early days of ARMR Collective, I was always terrified I’d start writing what I wanted instead of what God wanted. I’d remind myself: I’m not doing this. This is God using me. That’s why I would always sit in His presence first, to make sure what I wanted to write was what He wanted me to write.
Somewhere along the way, I stopped sitting first. The writing was still God-breathed—I believe that—but I’d quietly let the rhythm take over. The streak. The schedule. The Friday-night scrambles. The calling hardened into a chore, and I didn’t even notice it happening.
That’s the tricky thing about drifting. It’s rarely a dramatic exit. Maybe one day you just look up and think, “What am I doing?” You can’t remember the last time you really thought about God or Jesus.
Finding the Way Back: How to Reconnect With God
And maybe the shame feels too great to make your way back. It seems like too big of a change, too much of a shock to the system.
But we don’t have to use absolutes to return to Jesus. Even the smallest habits can glorify God. He doesn’t want us to do a 180 with our lives by tomorrow. He knows we’re only human. Baby steps are perfectly fine. We don’t have to change our entire lives overnight. God is so patient, and He will always wait for us, no matter how long it takes.
So, start small. Set aside five minutes for quiet time. I did it right here in a coffee shop, and while it was hard to focus at first, I finally heard what God wanted to tell me.
Throw on a worship song in the car (Beast Mode Christian on Spotify has the best Christian rap—I promise it’s not cheesy.) Playing worship music infuses your surroundings with the Holy Spirit.
Rest with the Lord. Not take-a-four-hour-nap rest, or scroll-on-your-phone rest, but rest IN the Lord. Sit in the quiet and pray. It doesn’t have to be a fancy prayer. Just speak to Him. Bring Him all your worries, concerns, problems, joys, sadness—everything.
He is big enough for all of it.
Seeing Him Again
I’ve written before about apathy in Christianity. It’s so easy to become complacent with the miracle of Jesus’s sacrifice, or the goodness of God.
Earlier this week, I needed two more dollars in cash to send my daughter to VBS. I didn’t want to run to the ATM, and I was asking my husband if he had two dollars, when I literally turned around and saw two dollars sitting on the trashcan. No idea where it came from. Such a tiny, random thing, but we both said, “Wow, thanks God!”
When we shift our focus back onto the Lord, we start to reframe our thinking and see Him in everything. Maybe God didn’t plant those two dollars or pull them out of thin air. But they were there exactly when we needed them. It wouldn’t have been catastrophic to go to the ATM, but what a blessing to avoid being late(r than usual).
When money’s tight and you barely have enough to cover the bills, maybe instead of “barely enough” it’s “just enough”. Maybe instead of “almost missed it”, it’s “got there just in time”.
God is in the tiniest details. It’s just so easy to miss them in such a loud and confusing world.
So, let’s get back on the path. Not with a dramatic overhaul, but with five quiet minutes and a willing heart.
He’s right there, waiting.
