I Want to Return to God But I Don't Know How

This is what I expected.

I expected that the difficult seasons would be the ones that deepened my faith. That struggle would drive me toward prayer. That the years of single motherhood and financial uncertainty and building from nothing would make me depend on God in a way that easy, comfortable years never could. That is the version of the story I had seen modelled. That is the testimony I had heard most often. That the hard times are where faith is forged.

That is not what happened to me.

What happened instead is that the hard times made me self-reliant in a way I did not fully recognise as a problem until much later. When you are in survival mode and the bills need paying and your daughter needs things and the business is not yet what you need it to be and every day requires you to push forward regardless of how you feel, you develop a particular kind of muscle. The muscle of handling it. Of figuring it out. Of being the person who does not stop because stopping is not an option.

That muscle served me. I am not going to pretend it did not. The discipline and the pushing forward and the refusing to collapse when collapsing would have been easier, that is a real thing and it built something real.

What's In This Post

But somewhere in the building of it I stopped asking for help.

From anyone. Including God.

When Survival Becomes Your Religion

There is a version of self-reliance that is strength.

And there is a version of self-reliance that is a wall.

I think for a long time mine was both and I could not tell them apart because they felt identical from the inside. The discipline that kept me working when I was tired and the disconnection that kept me from praying when I needed to felt like the same thing. Pushing through. Handling it. Being the woman who figures it out.

I stopped asking God for help and started convincing myself that if I worked hard enough I could carry everything alone.

Not as a theology. Not as a conscious decision I made and could point to. But as a slow accumulation of days where the prayer did not happen and the work did. Days where I solved the problem myself and moved on and the part of me that used to bring things to God just brought them to my planner instead. To the next action item. To the strategy and the execution and the output.

Work became the thing I trusted most. Not because I stopped believing in God. But because work always responded. You did the thing and the thing produced a result you could see and measure and build on. The feedback loop was clear and immediate in a way that prayer, especially prayer in a season where you are not sure you are doing it right, often is not.

So I worked. And I survived. And I built.

And I did it mostly alone.

The Truth I Am Afraid to Admit

I do not want to write a fake testimony.

I have read enough of them and I have too much respect for the women who read HerDailySpace to offer one. The version where I tell you that prayer carried me through every hard season and that faith was the foundation of everything I built. That would be a cleaner story. It would probably be more comfortable to write and more comfortable to read.

But it would not be true.

There were seasons when I barely prayed at all. Seasons where opening a Bible felt like visiting a place I no longer had the language for. Where I would sit down to pray and not know what to say and stand up again feeling further from God than I had when I sat down. Where faith became something I held loosely at best, an identity I claimed without a practice to support it, a belief without a relationship.

I watched other women who seemed to have both. Who seemed to carry their faith daily in a way that was visible and real and sustaining. And I felt something I did not know how to explain. Not quite envy. Something more like distance. Like looking at something through a window that I did not know how to open anymore.

I drifted. That is the honest word for it.

Not all the way. But far enough that the connection that used to feel natural now feels like something I would have to rebuild rather than simply return to. And rebuilding something you once had naturally is a particular kind of humbling.

The Strange Part Is That Life Is Finally Better

Here is what I did not expect.

I expected that if I ever drifted from God the thing that would bring me back would be a crisis. Another hard season. A collapse that made self-reliance obviously insufficient. A moment where I had no choice but to turn somewhere beyond myself.

That is not what happened.

What happened is that life got better. The business grew into something real. The healing that I had been working toward started to actually feel like healing. The stability I had spent years building started to feel solid underneath me. The version of life I had been working toward started to actually exist around me.

And in the middle of all of that good, in the settling and the arriving and the life finally resembling what I had hoped it would become, I found myself missing God.

Not in a crisis. In the quiet.

In the mornings before my daughter wakes up when the house is still and I am sitting with my coffee and there is no emergency requiring my immediate attention. In those moments something in me reaches for something I do not quite know how to reach for anymore. A presence. A conversation. A relationship that used to feel like the foundation of my day and now feels like a room I have not entered in a long time and am not sure what I will find if I do.

It turns out that arriving at the life you worked for can be one of the loneliest feelings in the world if you have nobody to share it with in the deepest sense. Not lonely in the way that is about other people. Lonely in the way that is about something more vertical. About the space between yourself and God that you did not notice was growing until the noise quieted down enough to hear it.

What If God Didn't Forget Me

I need to say something about the years when things were hard and the prayers were few and the distance was growing.

There were moments in those years where it felt like being forgotten. Where I watched women around me receive things they were praying for and I was still in the middle of the difficult season and I could not reconcile those two realities in a way that made theological sense or emotional sense. Where I wondered whether the relationship had ever been what I thought it was or whether I had been building on something less solid than I believed.

When life takes longer than expected it is easy to convince yourself that God forgot your address.

That the blessings went to the wrong house. That something about you or your situation or your specific combination of mistakes and choices put you outside the range of what was available to other people. I am not proud of those thoughts but I am not going to pretend they were not there.

What I am sitting with now, in this season of things finally being better, is the possibility that the timeline was not abandonment. That the years of building and struggling and surviving without the faith I wanted were not evidence of being forgotten but evidence of a path that looked different than expected. That the house and the business and the daughter and the woman I have become through all of it are not despite the silence of those years but somehow because of what I was building in them.

I cannot say this with certainty. I am not a theologian. I am a woman sitting with her coffee in the early morning trying to figure out how to talk to God again.

But I am beginning to let myself consider that the story is not over and that the distance was not permanent and that maybe showing up imperfectly now counts for something.

Learning to Pray Again Feels Awkward

Can I tell you something that I think more people feel than admit?

Returning to prayer after a long absence is awkward.

It does not feel like coming home. It feels like showing up somewhere you used to belong and not being sure anymore whether your key still works. I sit down to pray and I do not always know what to say. I start sentences and trail off. I feel self-conscious in a way that I did not feel when prayer was a daily habit, when the language was familiar and the practice was fluid and I did not have to think about how to begin.

I have picked up my Bible and put it down again. I have started reading and lost the thread after three verses because my mind is somewhere else and I am not sure whether to force the focus or let myself be wherever I am. I have missed days after deciding I would be consistent and felt the familiar guilt of the person who knows what they should be doing and is not quite doing it yet.

I feel like I should be further along than I am.

That thought visits me often. The feeling that someone else in this situation would have figured it out by now. Would have built the routine. Would have the morning quiet times and the prayer journal and the consistent practice that looks like what I imagine returning to faith is supposed to look like.

But I am doing what I have learned to do with everything else that I have started imperfectly.

I am continuing anyway.

Maybe God Isn't Asking for Perfect

I do not have a revelation to offer here. I want to be honest about that.

But I have been sitting with a possibility that has made the returning feel slightly less impossible.

What if God is not waiting for me to have the perfect prayer routine before He receives me. What if the awkward half-sentences and the three verses before I lose the thread and the mornings where I sit in the quiet and do not know what to say are already the beginning of something. What if returning does not require me to arrive already reconstructed.

What if He is simply waiting for me.

Not the version of me who has it figured out. Not the me who has rebuilt the discipline and the consistency and the fluency in prayer that I used to have. Not the me who has resolved all of the theological questions and made peace with all of the hard seasons and has a testimony that is clean and complete and ready to share.

Just me. As I am. Uncertain and a little awkward and sitting in my kitchen in the early morning reaching for something I cannot quite grasp yet but that I have not stopped reaching for.

I think that might be enough to start with.

I am not sure. But I think it might be.

For Those Who Found Their Way Back to prayer, How Did You Do It

I am asking genuinely.

Not rhetorically. Not as a device to end a section. I am asking because I am in the middle of this and the voices of women who have been here before me and found their way through are the voices I most need to hear right now.

Did you drift away from God during a season of survival? Did the self-reliance that kept you going also quietly replace the dependence on God that used to sustain you? Did you arrive somewhere better and realise the faith had not kept pace with the building?

How did you find your way back?

Was it a specific practice? A specific moment? A community that held you accountable or a book that gave you language for what you were feeling or a morning where something shifted and the connection felt real again in a way it had not for a long time?

How do you maintain prayer when life is genuinely busy? When you are a mother and you are building something and you are managing the daily complexity of a full life and the morning quiet time is competing with everything else that needs your attention before the day properly begins?

How do you pray when you are not sure what to say?

How do you rebuild something that used to be natural?

I would love to hear from you in the comments. Not just if you have the answer. If you are also in the question I would love to know that too.

I'm Still Figuring This Out

I do not have a beautiful ending for this story.

I am still in it. Still sitting with the distance and the desire and the awkwardness of a returning that is not yet complete. Still opening my Bible some mornings and finding the thread and losing it. Still sitting in the quiet and not always knowing what to say and saying something anyway because the alternative is saying nothing and the saying nothing is what got me here.

I do not know what the rebuilt faith will look like when it is rebuilt. I do not know how long the returning takes or what it will feel like when I have arrived somewhere I can call a practice again.

What I know is that the wanting is real.

The missing is real. That quiet reach in the morning toward something I cannot quite touch yet, that is real. And I have learned to trust the reaching even before I can see clearly what I am reaching toward.

Maybe returning to God does not begin with having the answers. Maybe it does not begin with the perfect prayer or the consistent routine or the faith that looks like faith is supposed to look from the outside.

Maybe it begins with this.

With admitting that you miss Him.

With writing it down in a place where other women can read it and nod and feel slightly less alone in their own quiet reaching.

That is where I am.

If you have ever found your way back after drifting away, I would love to hear how.

With love,

Nia

FAQ

Is it normal to drift away from God during difficult seasons?

More common than most people talk about openly. Survival mode demands a particular kind of self-sufficiency and the practice of faith, which requires stillness and vulnerability and the act of bringing yourself to something beyond yourself, can quietly fall away when every resource you have is going toward getting through the day. Drifting during hard seasons does not make you a bad person or a person without faith. It makes you a person who was managing something difficult.

How do you start praying again after a long time away?

From what I am learning, you start where you are and not where you think you should be. You do not need to reconstruct the full practice before the first prayer counts. The imperfect, uncertain, I-do-not-know-what-to-say prayer is still a prayer. Starting there, repeatedly, seems to be how the fluency returns.

Can you rebuild faith after years of self-reliance?

I believe so. I am in the process of finding out. What I suspect is that the faith you rebuild after years of carrying things alone looks different from the faith you had before. It has more texture. More honest wrestling in it. More understanding of your own capacity and its limits. That version might actually be more real than what existed before the hard seasons, even if it takes longer to find.

How do you maintain a prayer life when you are a busy single mother?

This is the practical question I am also actively working out. What I know is that perfection is not the standard I can hold myself to. A consistent five minutes is more valuable than an occasional hour. The practice does not have to be long to be real. What it has to be is honest and repeated. I am still learning what that looks like in the specific shape of my days.

What if prayer feels empty or one-sided?

That feeling is real and I think more people experience it than admit to it publicly. What I am trying to hold onto is the possibility that the feeling of one-sidedness is not evidence that nothing is happening. Sometimes the connection that matters most is not the one we can feel most clearly in the moment. I do not have a complete answer to this one. I am in the question alongside you.

2 Comments

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Methusi says:
June 27, 2026 at 4:03 pm
May you find your way back sis Nia.Pray and meditate. I love you from Zimbabwe your stories resonate with me
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