Column No. 3
There was a time when worship came easily.
Not because life was easy.
Because God felt close.
Prayer wasn’t something I had to schedule. Worship wasn’t something I had to manufacture. His presence felt familiar, and meeting with Him felt less like discipline and more like delight.
Then life happened.
Not all at once.
Just one hard season after another.
A marriage that unraveled.
The ache of raising children through heartbreak.
Responsibilities that multiplied.
People to lead.
Problems to solve.
Songs to schedule.
Emails to answer.
Meetings to attend.
Somewhere in the middle of all of it, I realized something that startled me.
I was still leading worship every Sunday.
I just wasn’t worshiping the way I used to.
The words were still on my lips.
My hands still lifted.
My voice still knew every melody.
But somewhere beneath all of that, something had grown quiet.
It wasn’t that I stopped believing.
Far from it.
I never questioned who God was.
I questioned where the closeness had gone.
I missed the woman who couldn’t wait to spend time with Him.
The woman who lingered in prayer because she wanted to, not because she felt like she should.
The woman who found herself overwhelmed by His goodness in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday.
I thought if I was ever going to lose my worship, it would happen because I walked away from God.
Instead, it happened while I was serving Him.
That realization humbled me.
Because it’s possible to become so busy doing the work of ministry that you slowly neglect the One the ministry is supposed to point to.
You can become excellent at serving God while quietly forgetting how to simply sit with Him.
No one talks much about that.
We celebrate faithfulness.
We applaud consistency.
We admire people who keep showing up.
And those things matter.
But every now and then, I wonder how many of us are quietly carrying an ache we don’t know how to explain.
Not because we’ve abandoned God.
Because we’ve become tired.
Because grief took more out of us than we realized.
Because disappointment made us a little quieter.
Because surviving left very little energy for lingering.
I’ve learned not to confuse His silence with His absence.
And I’ve stopped believing that worship is measured only by how I feel in a song.
Sometimes worship looks like opening my Bible when my heart feels numb.
Sometimes it looks like whispering a prayer that barely makes it past my lips.
Sometimes it looks like choosing trust before my emotions catch up.
Maybe that’s what I’ve been rediscovering.
Not the emotional high.
Not the perfect quiet time.
Not the version of my faith I had ten years ago.
But a God who has remained faithful through every version of me.
Including this one.
I’m beginning to think worship isn’t something we lose forever.
Sometimes it simply waits for us on the other side of honesty.
And maybe returning isn’t a sign that we failed.
Maybe returning has been worship all along.
♥️
