I was born into a household of practising Catholics. I went to Mass. I sat through catechism. I have taken all the sacraments in order except Holy Matrimony. I served as an altar girl in secondary school, became choir mistress in my final year of secondary school, and was a lay reader (also called lector) who read at Mass at university and in my parish for a long time before I stopped. I also joined many societies and was even treasurer, then later president of the St Vincent de Paul Society.By every visible measure, my relationship with God was in good standing.But it was functional. That is the most honest word for it. I had always known about God. I had never doubted that he made heaven and earth. I understood him as the arbiter of moral justice, the one who kept the ledger. You do bad, you get punished. You do good, you get rewarded. That was the framework I had internalised, and it had shaped my entire spiritual life around fear rather than relationship.What I had never believed, not really, was that a relationship with God was possible in the way I had relationships with my friends, my parents, my siblings, the people I worked with. Something tactile. Something personal. Someone I could have actual encounters with, who could reshape my life from the smallest inconsequential detail to the largest. That was not a belief I operated from. It was not even a category in my mind.And then I had burnout and depression, and I had to reckon with all of it.The Question I Could Not AnswerI want to be honest about something before I go further: this post is not about something clean or resolved. I do not have a full grasp of what I am describing. I am writing from the middle of something that is still unfolding.Part of what I had to face during my time away was that my relationship with God had been shaped by fear, and that fear had a specific root. I had never understood why a good God would allow bad things to happen in the world. I will be honest and say I still do not fully understand it.What I have started to recognise is that some of what we categorise as bad turns out to be the instrument through which good enters. Discomfort looks like evil. Pain looks like evil. Death looks like evil. And yet these are the very things through which growth and meaning and transformation arrive. Is the death of a zebra bad because a lion gets to eat? I genuinely do not know how to answer that. I only know that some things are simply the shape of life in a fallen and complicated world.I had also absorbed a belief I did not know I was carrying: that if something was truly good, it should arrive easily.That good things should not require difficult endeavour. That real blessing comes at the snap of a finger. Studying nature dismantled that. Nothing in creation grows without cost. Nothing arrives without something else giving way.So one of the fundamental things I had to tear down during that season was my idea of God. Not God. My idea of him.And that process is still ongoing. I know it will never ever stop.The Prayer on the FloorBy mid-2022, I had done a great deal of work. I had allowed the breakdown. I had learned to name my emotions. I had taken psychometric assessments and started to understand my own nature. The suicidal ideation had subsided. My nervous system had begun to reset.But something at the core was still unstable. There was a constant buzzing in my mind, a low-grade fear of the world and of everything that could go wrong. The foundation of who and what I am had not yet been settled.So one day, in desperation, I lay face down on the floor of my room. Fully prostrate. My forehead and nose were the only things keeping my face off the concrete. The words were not really verbal.What I said, in essence, was this:“Lord, if you are truly out there, and if you made me, then you could not have made me to feel this miserable. Your word says the joy of the Lord is our strength. It says your mercies are new every morning. So take me through a process where I resolve this misery and put it where it belongs. Take me through a process where I no longer surrender hope and give in to despair. I am surrendering my life to you. Take control of my existence and lead me to and through the paths that connect me to your purpose, so that I stop hating myself and start loving you and start loving me.”In that moment, I felt calm. And then I started to hear instructions.I will be honest and say those instructions confused me, annoyed me, and made me almost regret praying at all. But there is something that happens when you pray from a genuinely broken heart. When God answers, he answers with a conviction that you know is him. And that conviction produces compulsion. You know you must act.The first instruction was that I was to spend a year in Dubai.The WildernessI went. I spent the year. I blew through my entire savings and reset myself to zero financially.I thought to myself that Dubai would be the fast track to the high-powered infrastructure financing role I knew I was qualified for. That was my logic. That was not what it was for. It was God teaching me detachment through Isolation, wilderness style.There is an isolation in the wilderness experience that is not incidental. It is the point. It is you and God, alone, while he chips away at your perspective of what life should look like, how it should grow, what it should become. And what he is doing underneath all of it is tearing down a foundation that was never his and rebuilding one that is.I had assumed that coming under God's covering meant protection from harm. That was the rudest shock of the whole thing. He does not shelter you from the front line. He sends you to it. He allows you to experience shame in ways that teach you, viscerally, that the opinion and the love of human beings do not carry the weight you have been giving them.But there was provision. When the people I had worked closely with and expected to help me could not, a woman I had known in university, someone I had been in a dance group with and had not spoken to in years, found me on LinkedIn and offered me a place to stay. That was not the shape I would have designed. It was better than the shape I would have designed.And it was in Dubai that the ideas came. Today's Kind Reminder. The Substack, Notes on Project Development. The idea of providing data as a service. All of it surfaced in that season, while I thought I was failing.Child of God, Then Friend of God, Before Instrument of GodWhat I have come to understand is that there are three pathways in a right relationship with God, and they come in order.The first is child of God. This is the foundational reset. God strips away every name you have been called that did not come from him. Your identity stops being your title, your bank balance, your health, your reputation. It becomes only what he says you are. When he says you are good, you are good. When he calls you child, you are child. When he calls you beloved, that is what you are. That identity is immutable because he is immutable.The second is friend of God. This is where you begin to understand his mind. How he chooses. Why he moves the way he moves. Reading the creation account again while I was in Dubai, something struck me that I had never noticed. God said let there be light, and light came. But he did not drive the darkness away. He made room for both. Darkness, then light, then darkness, then light. That is the actual sequence of life. Which means darkness in itself is neither good nor evil. It is the motive behind what happens in it that carries the moral weight. Even light applied with evil intent is not good.And he chooses so strangely. A teenage virgin. A manger. Uneducated disciples in sandals. A cross rather than the domination of Rome. Human beings push every boundary we are given and then test the ones we are not. God does something else entirely. Becoming a friend of God means your choices stop being shaped by human wisdom, and that is precisely what makes it difficult.The third is the instrument of God. But it comes last, deliberately. God would rather spend time with you than send you out. He does not want your purpose fulfilled at the cost of your relationship with him or your identity in him. Child first. Then friend. Then, and only then, instrument, where you are now fully focused on advancing His Kingdom on earth, using strategies that come directly from His Spirit and Mind, without getting in the way, because many times His leading, will, and purpose do not align with the wisdom that men follow.Do the Dangerous ThingI am still in this.I do not always agree with what I hear.Half the time I do not understand it.There are things I do that I know he is not pleased with, and we are working those out between us.It is no longer death and destruction when I fail. It is simply more surrender, moment by moment.Asking God to step in and reset your life is a dangerous thing, and I will not pretend otherwise. The way he moves is not the way you would move. It will come with confusion. It will come with shame and derision. But those things stay at the surface. They stop reaching your core.And that is the freedom.Your identity becomes anchored to the immutableYour peace becomes stable.Your fears get managed faster. The results, whatever shape they take, stop damaging your sense of self, because you were never fully responsible for them anyway.If you want lasting peace, do the dangerous thing.Surrender to God.Let him keep shocking you until you get used to it.There is no perfect way of being other than being in the centre of his will.

I lay face down on the floor and asked God to reset my life. What followed was a year in Dubai, a stripped identity, and the slow rebuilding of faith after burnout and depression.

I Asked God to Reset My Life. I Did Not Know What I Was Asking For.

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I Asked God to Reset My Life. I Did Not Know What I Was Asking For.

I Asked God to Reset My Life. I Did Not Know What I Was Asking For.

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