I've been a Christian for almost my entire life, and if you had asked me at any point over the last several years whether God was the center of my life, I would have told you yes without hesitation.
I believed in Him, prayed, went to church with my family, and genuinely wanted to live a life that honored Him. My faith has always been an incredibly important part of who I am, so it's been pretty humbling to realize that somewhere along the way, I had slowly allowed something else to become a much bigger priority than I ever intended.
And the craziest part is that I didn't even recognize it while it was happening.
Over the last several years, I became incredibly invested in my career. I loved my work, believed in what I was building, and wanted so badly to do a good job. There's nothing inherently wrong with any of those things, but looking back, I can see that somewhere along the way my desire to do good work became tangled up with my desire to earn the approval of other people.
I was measuring too much of my value by how well I was performing, whether I was meeting expectations, and whether the people around me were pleased with what I was doing.
In its simplest form, I was living for the approval of man. And I knew better.
God had been trying to get my attention for a while.
Something I've been thinking on lately is how often we KNOW that something is off in our lives without being willing to really think what might actually be causing it.
For much of this year, I knew I wasn't feeling like myself. I was stressed, overwhelmed, and constantly trying to figure out how to get my body and mind back to a healthier place. I focused on exercise, nutrition, my nervous system, and all the practical things we're told to do when life starts feeling a little too heavy.
And honestly, those were good things to focus on. Taking care of our bodies matters. But I was trying to solve something physically that I believe had a much deeper spiritual component.
The issue wasn't just my schedule or how much responsibility I was carrying. It was my heart, and what I had allowed to fill so much of it.
I can see now that God had been whispering me to check my heart for months, but I was so busy trying to manage everything around me that I wasn't really listening.
Then, in September, my professional life changed significantly and unexpectedly, and I found myself having to reconsider a whole lot of things.
One of the first passages that came to mind was Colossians 3:23–24, which reminds us to work completely for the Lord rather than for people, because it is Christ we ultimately serve.
I've known that Scripture for years, but I don't think I've ever experienced it quite the way I have recently.
I started asking myself some pretty uncomfortable questions. Was I genuinely working for the Lord in the way I managed my responsibilities, or was I more concerned with earning someone else's approval? Had I placed too much emphasis on a position that was always temporary? And how had I allowed something I loved doing to become so intertwined with my sense of identity?
Those weren't particularly fun questions to answer. But they were necessary.
I've joked that God was basically saying, "Girl, you know exactly what you need to be doing and who you're supposed to be doing it for. Since you haven't been listening to the whispers, I am gonna have to get a little louder."
I don't pretend to understand every reason God allows things to happen, but I do believe He can use circumstances we never would have ask for to get our attention.
And He certainly got mine.
The timing of it all is what amazes me most.
Here's where this story gets really special to me, because I can now look back and see how God was already making room for something I didn't even know I needed.
Earlier this year, I had been struggling with feeling disconnected from the kind of Christian community I really wanted in my life. I loved going to church with my family, but I was missing the deeper relationships, the conversations about Scripture, and the opportunity to really study God's Word with other women.
In July, we went back in the Midwest, and something about being there reminded me of how much I missed those relationships. I missed sitting with people, having meaningful conversations, and being connected to a community in a way that I hadn't really made time for in recent years.
When I returned to Utah, I was invited to a women's brunch one Saturday. I said yes. And that one little yes opened a door I had absolutely no idea was there.
Within a week, I had been invited to join a women's Bible study here in St. George that had been meeting for fifteen years.
Fifteen years!
I had no idea this group existed, and suddenly I found myself surrounded by women who were committed to studying Scripture together in a way I had been craving for so long. We've been studying the book of Matthew, and I cannot begin to tell you what a gift it's been.
My Bible is covered in highlights, notes, pen marks, and crinkled pages because I am reading passages I've known for years and understanding them in ways I never have before. It isn't just reading a chapter and moving on. We're taking the time to understand what Jesus is teaching, what the Scripture actually says, and how it applies to our lives.
And every single week, something speaks directly to what I'm walking through.
Sometimes it's encouraging. Other times it's incredibly convicting, especially when my flesh wants to respond to something one way and God's Word is very clearly telling me something different.
But that's exactly what I need.
What amazes me is that I was invited into this group before the unexpected changes in September. Before I knew how much I would need those women, those conversations, and that time in Scripture, God had already been making a way for me to find them.
I don't take that lightly.
Matthew 6 has an entirely different meaning to me now.
One of the hardest weeks I've experienced recently happened to line up with our study of Matthew chapter 6.
If you've never spent time reading Matthew 6:25–34, I would really encourage you to!!
Jesus talks about worry, about how God provides for the birds of the air and the flowers of the field, and about how much more valuable we are to Him. He reminds us that our Heavenly Father knows what we need, and that instead of being consumed by tomorrow, we're called to seek His kingdom first.
I've read that passage before. Many times. But reading it during a season when the future felt so uncertain was something entirely different.
I was thinking about things I couldn't control, trying to understand what the future might look like, and wanting answers to questions that simply didn't have answers yet.
And there it was, right in front of me.
Seek first the kingdom of God.
Not the next opportunity. Not someone else's approval. Not the perfect plan that would make me feel secure again. Him.
I've been thinking a lot about how easy it is to slowly drift away from that kind of focus without ever making a conscious decision to do so.
It's almost like being out at sea. You can be floating along, thinking you're in roughly the same place, completely unaware of how much the current is moving you. Then one day you look up and realize you're a whole lot farther away than you thought.
That's what this year has felt like for me spiritually.
I never stopped believing in God. I never stopped loving Him. But I allowed other things to occupy a place in my heart that they were never meant to have.
And now I'm learning what it looks like to put those things back in their proper place.
I'm grateful God didn't leave me where I was.
I still love working hard, building things, and pursuing opportunities. I believe God has given me gifts and abilities that I'm supposed to use, and I don't think the lesson here is that ambition is somehow wrong or that caring deeply about your work is a bad thing.
But I am learning that even good things can become disordered when we start looking to them for the approval, identity, or security that ultimately belongs in Christ.
And I think that's something worth examining regularly, because it happens a whole lot more gradually than we realize.
I haven't figured out everything this season is meant to teach me, and I'm sure there are plenty more lessons ahead. But I can say that my relationship with God has become more intentional, my time in His Word has become something I genuinely look forward to, and my perspective on what matters has shifted in ways I'm incredibly grateful for.
If you're a believer reading this, especially if you're in a season where life feels unusually busy, stressful, or uncertain, I really want to encourage you to spend time with the Lord and ask Him to reveal anything that might be pulling your heart away from Him.
Listen to the promptings of the Holy Spirit. Make time for Scripture, not just when you're looking for an answer, but because you want to know God more deeply. Surround yourself with people who will point you back to Him, and be willing to check the things you've allowed to become more important than they should be.
Because sometimes the thing we need most isn't a change in our circumstances.
It's a change in where we've been placing our trust.
And I'm so grateful He's been reminding me of that. 🤎