Bible Chat

Stop Drifting From God

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I stopped praying almost two years ago. Nobody noticed, because I never stopped saying grace. The night I finally did the math, I was standing at the stove stirring soup my kids were going to complain about anyway. It was a Wednesday. Matt was late again. We sat down. I said the same grace I've said since I was nine years old. "Bless this food to our bodies." The kids said amen and grabbed their rolls. And I thought: that wasn't a prayer. That was a password. I tried to remember the last time I actually talked to God. Not recited at Him. Talked to Him. I went back through months in my head like flipping a calendar. I couldn't find it. That scared me more than anything had in a long time. Here's the thing nobody tells you. Faith doesn't usually leave with a door slam. Mine left like heat leaves a house in winter. Slow. Quiet. You don't notice until you're cold. I'm 36. Two kids, seven and ten. I work the front desk at a dentist's office three days a week. I grew up in church. I taught Sunday school for a summer once. At church, I'm the reliable one. I bring the casserole. I know all the verses on the wall art. There's a magnet on my fridge that says "Be still and know." A younger mom in our small group once told me, "I wish I had your faith. You're so steady." I smiled and said thank you. Then I sat in my car in the church parking lot and felt like a liar. What everyone saw: a woman with her Bible in her tote bag. What was true: the Bible hadn't left the tote bag since spring. I tried to fix it. I really did. I bought three devotionals in one year. Pretty covers, gold letters. The first one made it eleven days. The second made it four. The third is still in the plastic. I started a read-the-Bible-in-a-year plan. I died somewhere in Leviticus, like everybody does, and never told anyone. I set my alarm for 5 a.m. to have "quiet time." I sat at the kitchen table with coffee and an open Bible and my mind made grocery lists. I did that for six mornings. Then I stopped setting the alarm. I told one friend. Just one. She's a good woman and she meant well. She said, "Just pray anyway. God hears you even when it feels dry." I know she's right. But it was like telling someone with a broken leg to just walk anyway. I didn't need to be told to pray. I needed to remember how. And here's the part I've never said out loud until now. Some Sundays, when a kid woke up with sniffles and we had a reason to stay home, I felt relief. Actual relief. Like a snow day. What kind of woman feels relief about skipping God? I'd sit in service and watch women lift their hands during worship, tears on their faces, and I'd feel nothing. Worse than nothing. I felt jealous. I used to be one of them. I could see the room they were in. I just couldn't find the door anymore. Rock bottom wasn't dramatic. Rock bottom was a Tuesday. My seven-year-old came into the kitchen at bedtime. Her friend Ellie's mom is sick. Really sick. She said, "Mommy, can you pray for Ellie's mom? You're good at praying." I opened my mouth. Nothing came. So I faked it. I stitched together phrases from twenty years of church. "Lord, we lift up... we ask that you would... in Jesus' name." She hugged me and went to bed happy. I sat on the bathroom floor at 11:40 that night and cried into a towel so Matt wouldn't hear. My daughter thinks I'm good at praying. I'm good at sounding like praying. I whispered one sentence into that towel. "I don't know how to come back." That was the closest thing to a real prayer I'd said in two years. A few nights later I was scrolling in bed at midnight, the way you do when you're avoiding your own head. Something came up about finding your biblical archetype. Which woman in the Bible you're most like, and what her story says about how you hide and how you return. I almost kept scrolling. Honestly, it sounded like a personality quiz with a cross stuck on it. I've done those. "Which soup are you." I didn't need a soup. I needed God. But it said 15 minutes a day. And I remember thinking: I have failed at 5 a.m. quiet time and year-long plans and eleven-day devotionals. Fifteen minutes is small enough that even I can't ruin it. That was my whole reason. It was too small to fail at. The app was called Bible Chat. I answered the questions lying in the dark with the brightness turned all the way down, like I was doing something embarrassing. It said Martha. I laughed out loud in bed. Matt stirred and I froze like a teenager. Martha. The one who stayed busy in the kitchen while her sister sat with Jesus. The one who served everybody and got quietly bitter about it. I read one line that night that I still think about. It said Martha wasn't far from Jesus. He was in her house. She just kept finding jobs to do instead of sitting down. That's when it hit me. I hadn't lost my faith. I'd been hiding from it. In casseroles. In sign-up sheets. In being the steady one. Busy was my hiding place, and it looked so much like faithfulness that I fooled everyone. Including me. Day one was Esther. When to speak, when to wait. Fifteen minutes at the kitchen table with my coffee, after the bus came. That's my slot now. 7:50 to 8:05. Day three was Sarah. Letting go of control. That one stung. I read it twice. When something confused me, I could just ask. Right there in the app. I typed, "Why did God stay quiet when Sarah waited so long?" and it walked me through it in plain words. Not preachy words. Plain ones. One morning I asked it the real question. The bathroom-floor question. "How do I pray when the words won't come?" It didn't hand me a script. It pointed me to Hannah, the one who prayed so raw the priest thought she was drunk. It said start with one honest sentence. Just one. So I did. Out loud, alone in the kitchen. "I don't know how to talk to you anymore, but I'm here." That was it. That was the whole prayer. It was the best one I'd said in years. The second week was Ruth, and the Proverbs 31 woman, and Martha and Mary side by side. That last one felt like it was written after someone read my diary. Nothing exploded. There was no lightning. But things moved. Grace at dinner got longer. One night I added a real sentence about Ellie's mom, in my own words, and my daughter squeezed my hand under the table. About two weeks in, Matt looked at me over breakfast. He said, "You were humming this morning. You haven't done that in forever." I didn't even know I'd stopped. Then there was a Sunday, maybe a month in. Second verse of a song I've sung a hundred times on autopilot. And I felt it. Small and warm, like a pilot light catching. I didn't cry with my hands up. I'm still me. But I found the door. It was never locked. If your prayers have shrunk down to grace before dinner and nothing else, I wrote this for you. If people call you the strong one and it makes you feel like a fraud, I wrote this for you. If you can't name the day your faith went quiet because there wasn't a day, just a slow leak, I really wrote this for you. You're not backslidden. You're not broken. You're probably just hiding somewhere that looks respectable. I hid in busy. You might hide somewhere else. The women in that book hid too, every one of them, and every one of them came back. The app is Bible Chat. You start by finding your archetype, then it walks you through two weeks of women who struggled the way you do. Esther, Sarah, Ruth, Hannah, all of them. Fifteen minutes a day, and it's free to start. You can ask it anything, even the questions you'd never say in small group. For me, it turned a password back into a prayer. Last night I prayed with no food on the table and no one watching. Just because I had something to say.