There is nothing wrong with exuberance; it’s endearing. Still, the room changed the moment he entered it.

I noticed because I’d spent the previous month attempting to move my own dial to slower-mo.

I challenged myself to eliminate rush in 30 days using the framework in my guided journal, Pay Attention to the Presence of God. I’m no long-distance cyclist, but I am an otherwise peaceful person who nonetheless overschedules her life. Like most women, I have a handful of projects simmering on all burners at once. I designed my journal practice around two thirty-day Walks. Each Walk asks you to choose a single goal--something you’ve never managed to reach on your own--and to walk it alongside Jesus, looking only for Him within that one narrow frame.

I deliberately didn’t read John Mark Comer’s book on the same subject first; I wanted to work this out privately with God. A month later, I still haven’t eliminated rush. But I did find out how rushing has insinuated itself into every part of my life, without me realizing it.

As the high-energy cyclist proved, pace is contagious. The way you move your body through a room reaches the people in it before you’ve said a word. Between you and me, I used to wear my propensity to say yes to every project that captured my whim as a badge of honor. Frankly, my unbalanced work-life rewarded me in many instances when displays of competence motivated me.

However, I now see the uncomfortable truth that rushing is most often the physical, demonstrated manifestation of my inner mood, the level of my patience or anxiousness in the moment, and even my doubt.

Some might argue that hurry is the price of caring: the person who moves fastest is the most committed, the most alive, the most needed. It’s tempting to wear exhaustion like a credential. But hurry is not proof of significance. Neither is it a character flaw. So, how does a person delete rush?

Week one: Find rush. The first thing I met was resistance. It’s easy to say, “Slow down.” It’s quite another to discover how often I needed to remind myself. I noticed the habit of brushing my teeth as though there were a gun to my head. Why would I brush at this pace when I literally choose to rise at 5:30 for the gentle, purposeful practice of sitting with a God who regularly tells me to “be still” (Psalm 46:10)? Hurry, hurry, hurry has never once been His voice. The first week became less about deleting rush and more about catching it.

Hurry isn’t harmless. In 1973, psychologists John Darley and Daniel Batson sent some seminary students preparing to speak on the Good Samaritan across campus past a man slumped in an alleyway, coughing and groaning. Of the students in a hurry, only 10% stopped to help, compared with 63% of those who were not in a hurry. The Samaritan topic of their talk did not significantly affect whether they stopped (Darley & Batson, 1973). Some stepped over the groaning man on their way to preach about him. Hurry narrows the cognitive map until the person in front of you disappears.

I made notes each day in my journal, and what I discovered was that the busier I felt, the less I actually finished. When my to-do list was overpacked, I went into autopilot, trying to get everything done.

Rushing became a signal to reevaluate what matters most in a given moment.

A key method I turned to for deleting rush is abiding in God. Rather than simply pausing to slow myself each time I noticed my pace speeding up, I asked God to show me what wasn’t essential, what could be set down. I stilled myself long enough to enter the peace of His presence. He reminded me, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Romans 12:2). Once I pinpointed tasks that distracted me from my goals, slowing down actually allowed me to complete more work. Autopilot is all well and good until you need to land the plane.

Week two: Accept the position. Each week the Pay Attention journal pairs readers with a woman in the Bible who most closely mirrors the reader’s own 30-Day Walk. My second week, I walked alongside Esther. This well-known verse presented a question I asked myself: “And who knows but that you have come to your royal position for such a time as this?” (Esther 4:14). Slowing down required more than altering my pace. Moving purposefully required accepting a kind of royal position I’ve been offered as a daughter of God but hadn’t fully believed I was allowed to occupy. In the same way, Esther had to grow comfortable in hers before she could use it.

I teach public speaking, and I witness, over and over, how speaking too quickly can kill good content. A speaker’s message gets missed when they’re rushing to get it over with. Even when a student tries to slow down, the class quickly notices it usually isn’t slow enough. It’s surprising just how clear, inviting, and understood words become when they are spoken carefully and given as a gift.

Over the course of my monthlong exploration, I eliminated rush by trimming it by fractions. Esther took her time, even when her people were at stake. She was thoughtful about her timing, her choice of words, and how she dressed and presented herself. She inspired me to keep trimming.

Week three: Observe non-hurry in the wild. One sunny Saturday on a bike ride to a local bakery with my husband, I lost my balance and fell in the parking lot, spraining my wrist. It was no big injury, but spending the following weeks with one arm in a sling forced me to move at half-speed. I flew to Canada to visit my mom, who has macular degeneration and has lost nearly all her sight. It is simply not possible to rush while helping someone who cannot see.

As I spent time with friends and my children, I practiced slowing down, and I noticed a big breakthrough. All my striving to check off the items on my to-do list had, by contrast, given me a frenetic pace, like the long-distance cyclist who put the people in our meeting on edge. Once it vanished, my loved ones relaxed, opened up, and shared more openly. It became clear to me how slowing down is incredibly comforting and safe for others. Deleting rush allows me to give what I most desire to give: more love.

Week four: Carry it outward. By the final week of my Walk, the more I abided in God, the more He turned me toward the people who needed me. Beyond the improvements in my work focus, my children, my parents, and the friends I’d been cramming into the margins of an overfull life became freer, more vocal, more willing to share what they felt, and I had more time available to be present, to help, to solve problems. They felt valued, and in turn they became more patient listeners for me. I noticed how I had been caring for others as I would want to be cared for. But slowing down illuminated for me how to show up in the ways most fulfilling to the people I care about. I could not do this while rushed. I cannot do it while caught up in my own head.

What surprised me was that deleting rush turned out not to be about time. It is about presence.

It allows me to rise to my best self, and to stop racing against some invisible deadline, the way I’d been brushing my teeth. Not rushing gave me time to love the person in front of me in the language their mind and heart already speak. It’s a powerful way to say, “I see you, and I understand you.”

The Lord is shaping me into the woman He calls me to be, and that work does not require me to hurry. It requires my attention.

You are not failing if you are running on caffeine and good intentions, and your to-do list is longer than your day. You are someone being invited back into the present, into your own life, into the people you love, into the unhurried voice of a God who keeps asking you to be still and know that He is God.

Grace and peace,
Rebecca

Grace and peace.

The first place I noticed this pattern was in my own life. Somewhere between the garden and adulthood, most of us get educated out of curiosity through a thousand reasonable interventions: common core classes, achievement metrics, and optimized curriculum objectives that declare unstructured looking a waste of attention. I know this personally, not because I rushed my kids through their childhoods, but because I showered them with opportunities for sports, art lessons, library trips, and scout meetings. One enriching thing after the next, each one a blessing, none of them wrong. But somewhere in the stacking, the fistfuls of sand were limited to the school playground (scheduled) and no longer a found solution to the occasional boredom resulting from free, unstructured playtime.

We left a bustling city for a good school district in a rural setting, and I noticed my kids lingered over mushrooms, moss, tide pools, and driftwood. Nobody assigned it. Nobody rewarded it. They simply remembered how to pay attention.

Years later, I would encounter that same kind of attention somewhere I never expected.

The capacity for curiosity, the unhurried, purposeless attention to an ordinary thing, doesn’t remain lost. It comes back when life finally slows down enough to allow it. The problem is that increasingly life seems to be hurrying up, not slowing down. In fact, hospice workers report curiosity returning, with striking consistency, in the final days of a person’s life.

Reading Bronnie Ware, I was struck by something she wasn’t even trying to assert. Ware spent years as a palliative care nurse recording what dying patients actually said, at the very end, about what mattered. (No surprise that it wasn’t achievement or net worth.) The regrets she documented clustered instead around things left unlived: working too hard at the expense of everything else, staying in touch with people who mattered, letting themselves be happy regardless of circumstance.

Alongside the regret, something else showed up just as consistently: an almost involuntary return to noticing. A patient began to notice a particular window, a specific voice, or laughter carrying in from another room; the kinds of things that catch the attention of children.

The dying, it turns out, spend some of their final hours doing precisely what a child does in an unsupervised garden: looking closely at something ordinary, as though it might be the last time they get to.

Attention is not merely a wellness habit; it is the faculty by which we recognize meaning, love, and even calling.

That observation made me wonder whether anyone else had noticed this before. Marcus Aurelius kept the thought of his own death at the front of his mind daily. He didn’t do this out of despair, but as discipline, a practice known as memento mori: remember you will die. Rather than cultivating morbidity, Aurelius was accepting that none of us is guaranteed tomorrow and to make the very most of what we have today.

What is remarkable is that modern psychology eventually arrived at much the same conclusion, but by a completely different route: terror management theory. When people are made aware of their own mortality, their stated values shift measurably, away from status and acquisition, toward meaning, relationship, and presence.

Scientists measured it. Novelists had already been telling the story. Tolstoy dramatized the same finding a century earlier in The Death of Ivan Ilyich: a man who lived correctly by every external measure, and who realizes, only in his final days, that the one thing he never gave his full attention was the people and moments he’d been too busy to notice.

And perhaps no one summarized it more simply than Annie Dillard, who put the whole argument in a single line worth carrying with you: how you spend your days is, quite simply, how you spend your life. There is no separate, more important life waiting once the ordinary one is handled.

So here is the turn I didn’t see coming until I laid all of this side by side: wonder was never a phase children grow out of on the way to becoming serious adults. It’s closer to a compass that gets buried under the schedule, and it resurfaces, fully intact, the moment nothing else is left to distract from it. The dying are not discovering something new. They’re simply no longer able to look away from what was true the whole time.

Once I saw the pattern, it was clear you don’t need a hospital bed to get it back. This year, like many people before me, I’ve adopted the phrase “Memento mori,” adding a secondary clause: “Con cuore aperto” — with an open heart. I don’t know how many days I have left, but I do know I have so much living to do. I want my heart to remain open because, while I do have tangible achievements I aim to complete, my overarching goal is to fill my days with love, family, wonder, and curiosity, all of which require an open heart.

This is where I think the stakes are higher than they first appear, because wonder isn’t just pleasant; it’s load-bearing. Regret isn’t the realization that life was short. It’s the realization that we weren’t paying attention while it was happening.

You cannot rise to a calling you’ve never sat still enough to notice.

If you’re feeling a bit overworked by things that you suspect you won’t cherish during your dying days, you may want to run a little test. Find a child, if one is near you, or the memory of yourself as one, and ask what they’re noticing right now. Let them show you. Stay long enough to actually see it.

We spend our first years naturally paying attention. We spend our middle years forgetting how. If we’re fortunate enough to reach old age, we spend our final days trying to remember. Perhaps wisdom isn’t becoming someone new. Perhaps it is recovering the child who already knew how to look closely.

Grace and peace, Rebecca

If this resonated, you might also enjoy The Day We Started Slicing Time and join the discussion on the Sabbath, manna, and the ancient argument against a life chopped into pieces.

What’s one ordinary thing you noticed today that you almost let pass by? I’d love to hear it in the comments.

“The gods confound the man who first found out how to distinguish the hours — confound him, too, who in this place set up a sundial, to cut and hack my days so wretchedly into small pieces!”

Plautus was complaining about a piece of technology that had, for the very first time, sliced a day into countable, inspectable pieces. It transformed the daily flow of tasks and creativity, forcing each portion of the day to be watched and measured as “wasted” or “productive.” It turns out Plautus wasn’t only cursing a sundial. He was cursing the entire logic we’ve since built a civilization on that more pieces, moving faster, is progress.

The Measure of Time

We tend to assume time fragmentation is a modern affliction, a side effect of smartphones, notifications, and overfull calendars. Plautus proves that the instinct to chop, divide, and speed things up is ancient. The impulse is not new. What’s new is the scale at which we’ve applied it and how we’ve convinced ourselves what counts as progress.

Time itself, the practice of literally watching the clock, diminishes the quality of our lives, both in worry about productivity and punctuality, but also in the urge to rush. Worse, society’s favorite tech facilitates scrolling, which chops our attention into unrecoverable fragments, stealing our attention in the form of a hundred glances a day. Paradoxically we ought to be producing increased value from such obsessive clock-watching, yet most people feel burnt out, exhausted, isolated, and yearning for a sense of meaning.

It seems we’ve traded fewer, better, and lasting for more, faster, and forgettable, and called it efficiency.

Doing Less, Gaining More

Nearly 3,500 years ago in the wilderness, God promised to provide food (manna) to His people, raining down bread from heaven with a simple instruction: gather only enough for one day. Not two days, and not a week’s reserve against tomorrow’s uncertainty. Those who tried to hoard the manna woke to find it had bred worms and maggots (Exodus 16:20).

Oddly, on the sixth day, they were told to gather double because the seventh was to be a day of complete rest, so no manna would fall and require gathering (Exodus 16:23-26). Provision came portioned by the day; rest came commanded by the week. It was the first Sabbath, issued before the Ten Commandments ever reached the mountain, embedded in the daily rhythm of eating.

More recently, computer scientist Cal Newport has made a modern, secular case for a similar idea: that real accomplishment does not come from doing more, faster, but from doing fewer things, well, and at a sustainable pace. It’s an approach he calls slow productivity. Journalist Elizabeth Cline reached a parallel conclusion by studying clothing racks rather than calendars, tracing how the industry’s shift toward speed and disposability came at a real cost to both garment and garment-maker. Different centuries, different vocabularies, same discovery: fragmentation doesn’t create more life. It just creates more pieces.

What Time Fragmentation Actually Costs

Let’s be practical for a moment. While earlier civilizations depended on rhythms of sunrise and sunset for work, school, and rest, there are concrete benefits to appointing an hour to meet, a time to take off and to land, a limit for our children’s bedtime or breaks in HIIT workouts. But we still have the same number of hours between sunup and sundown as did our foremothers and fathers. What “cutting and hacking the day” (time fragmentation) specifically removes from our daily human experience is the ability to savor. I have been exploring this idea while developing my guided journal, Pay Attention to the Presence of God: A 60-Day Guided Walk, and it keeps surfacing everywhere I look.

Human flourishing research shows that the ability to internalize a positive experience—to accept something good and stay with it long enough for the brain to encode it as memory, rather than letting it slide past unclaimed—is one of the most significant predictors of lasting transformation. It is called savoring: the deliberate, conscious act of staying with what is good. It rewires the brain. It builds resilience. It produces a kind of settled confidence that does not evaporate the moment circumstances become difficult again.

Savoring requires a pause, an awareness of the present moment. In short: stillness. I believe it’s fair to assert that stillness is not a virtue touted by modern society. Fragmentation is, by definition, time that never holds still long enough to be internalized, leveraged and enjoyed as a tool for transformation. A meal eaten in four minutes at your desk cannot be savored, no matter how good the food. A book skimmed in fragments or between notifications is rarely savored, no matter how transcendent the writing. A day chopped into “a hundred wretched little pieces,” as Plautus put it, cannot be savored either, no matter how full the calendar looks by evening. That dreadful feeling of never quite knocking everything off your to-do list doesn’t help, either.

But How Do We Break the Pattern?

Both the English word Sabbath and the Hebrew Shabbat (שַׁבָּת) trace back to the verbal root shavat (שָׁבַת) which means, simply, to stop. Sabbath is not rest as a reward for finishing. Neither does it mean to recharge so you can produce more tomorrow. Sabbath simply means to stop. It is a commanded interruption of the premise that time exists to be used. That distinction matters.

Nearly every ancient culture had festivals, seasons of rest tied to harvests, or days of ritual observance. The Sabbath was unusual in that it was a mandated, weekly, non-negotiable cessation from productive labor, built into the fabric of ordinary life rather than reserved for special occasions. Sabbath was not a vacation. It was encoded into the rhythm of life and work and family and faith, long before Plautus ever picked up a pen to curse the sundial.

Who You Already Are

You were not made to win a race against fragmentation by moving faster than time allows. You were made, and if the Bible is true, quite literally commanded, to stop long enough for good things to become real to you.

This might look like taking time to savor a conversation with someone you love, listening without rushing toward your next thought. It might look like deep-diving into a book or a short poem, line by line, letting its wisdom open you up to delicious daydreams or shifts in perspective. It might mean working less but producing higher quality results because you aren’t rushing to the next thing or sprinting to meet a tight deadline.

A Realistic Practice

This week, take one task you were already going to do—the grocery run, the walk around the block, time with your littles or your pet—and do it at half your normal speed. Give it your full attention, as though it were destined to become a core memory. Don’t add anything more to your day. Just slow the one thing you were already doing and let yourself notice it while it happens. Observe how others relax in your presence as you indulge the moment, savoring the blessings of meeting this one precious, albeit ordinary, day.

Or, choose to take an entire Sabbath day. It won’t be easy at first. It wasn’t designed to feel efficient; it was designed to teach you that you are more than what you produce. (Let me know if you’d like me to discuss this in a future post.)

If your days feel chopped into pieces too small to remember, or savor, or finish your plans, or be present for your loved ones, that is not a personal failure of discipline. It is the predictable result of living inside a civilization built on the sundial’s logic rather than the Sabbath’s.

You are allowed to stop. Don’t wait until you’ve done enough to earn it. Don’t wait until everything is finished; it never will be. Just stop, the way you were called and created: on purpose.

Grace and peace, Rebecca

What is one thing in your life that has been chopped into pieces too small to savor? I would love to hear it in the comments.

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Here is what tipped me off. Psychologist Kristin Neff’s research on self-compassion found something that should entirely reorganize how we think about composure: people who treat themselves with warmth rather than criticism are not the ones who fall apart under pressure. They are the ones with the deepest emotional resilience.

Neff says that self-criticism (the negative self-talk we use in an attempt to berate ourselves into behaving better) does not keep us composed and presentable. It turns out that self-criticism correlates with more anxiety, not less. Self-compassion, which sounds dangerously soft, in fact produces people who are steadier, not flimsier. In other words, you can’t hate yourself into being more likable. You can’t shame yourself into being more confident.

Behavioral researcher Chase Hughes describes something similar from a different angle. Hughes argues that shame keeps people tethered to their past mistakes, quietly assigning a portion of their attention to permanent guard duty, watching for the next thing to be embarrassed about. Sound familiar? He suggests becoming so thoroughly forgiving of your own history that you reach a place where you can laugh at your past mistakes, because self-forgiveness is what finally frees the attention shame was occupying. Hughes points out that the tighter your grip on the fear of social injury, the more energy you spend subconsciously defending your image, which paradoxically creates an energy we commonly refer to as “social awkwardness.” Unfortunately, one of the easiest things for others to detect (if only subconsciously) is insecurity. So, the stalwart efforts you make to cover that dumb thing you said five years ago are still playing out in your micro behaviors. The less you forgive yourself for your past mistakes, the less ease and composure you enjoy. Your anxiety and insecurity leak through, regardless of any false show of grace or confidence. Forgive yourself.

I know this fight personally. For years after becoming a Christian, I still couldn’t forgive myself for some poor choices I made in my teens and twenties, even though Christ already had.

According to researcher Dr. Jeffrey Young, the shame we carry often occurs before age seven. It is this early shame that we internalize and perpetuate throughout life, allowing it to color all our social interactions. Admittedly, our society has always asked us to put on a performance of sorts, and as we grow, it demands we “put aside childish things” (1 Corinthians 13:11). But Jesus knows it is our childish heart that remains closest to Him; it’s the place where goofy jokes, comfort in our own skin, and playful freedom live on. It’s also the place that, when revealed, makes us the most magnetic in the room. “Let the little children come to me,” Jesus said, “for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these... whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it” (Mark 10:14-15).

If moods and behaviors are “contagious,” and research overwhelmingly says they are, then we all want to be in the presence of grace, ease, confidence, and yes, a touch of childlike whimsy. Achieving that freeing level of charisma and magnetism comes through forgiving yourself. Allow your real and true personality to shine through, at any risk of social injury, because your ease and your witty, goofy, natural self will draw far more good into your circle than the few outliers who don’t vibe with you.

John Piper writes about a wonder most of us resist believing: that God doesn’t just tolerate us, He rejoices over us with actual singing, and that shame is the thing standing between us and being able to feel it (Zephaniah 3:17). We tell ourselves we’re too guilty, too far gone, too aware of our own past record for that kind of joy to be aimed at us. But Piper points out that Jesus knows exactly what that shame feels like from the inside; He was mocked, belittled, and slandered by his own hometown. Yet He is the One who can wipe our record clean (Piper, The Pleasures of God).

Both the research and the Scripture show us that self-composure has a ceiling.

It can make you presentable. It cannot make you magnetic.

What draws people, the thing we mean when we call someone magnetic, is the sense that they are not defending anything. They are not bracing for the next social injury that might embarrass them. They have stopped managing the room because they are the most comfortable person in the room. But ultimately, they gain the attention and esteem of those present because they have washed their shame, anxiety, and insecurity in forgiveness, and let it drain away until it is reduced to a funny story that happened once. Nothing puts people at ease faster than being near someone who is at ease herself; she isn’t performing calm but actually has it.

I realized I’ve finally forgiven myself as Jesus has forgiven me at a Forrest Frank concert over the weekend. In a crowd of twenty thousand people, I forgot to manage myself. I gave up a portion of decorum, yell-singing one of my favorite songs. I was belting out the lyrics at the top of my lungs, filming the stage, so there’s a very honest recording of exactly how off-key I actually am. My husband later joked that he felt sorry for the ten people standing nearest me. In the old version of myself, I would have remained dead quiet through the entire song, horrified by the thought of my voice getting picked up in the video. Well, here it is, one of my most joyous experiences was joining in a sea of worshippers to share in a song that lifts up God. What mattered was not the pitch, but the presence.

That’s the trade nobody warns you about: the more perfectly you manage how you come across, the less anyone actually gets to come close. Composure, held too tightly, doesn’t protect intimacy. It prevents it.

If you want to test this for yourself, here’s where I’d start:
TODAY: Pick one small, low-stakes moment and let it be unmanaged. Sing badly in the car. Dance in the kitchen. Tell the joke before you’ve checked whether it’ll land. Let one moment be for delight instead of impression.

GOING DEEPER: Write down the stories you still replay in your head: the embarrassing, the regrettable, the ones you’ve never said out loud. Write by hand, not on a screen; let the stories leave your body, falling away onto the page. Then take the list to Jesus, one by one, and let Him wash them all clean, for good. What’s left, you’re free to laugh about as a past event when you were a different person. Or, never think of again.

And then look for the person nearest you who’s still determinedly managing themselves, vigilantly watching the horizon for fear of social injury: the friend or coworker who’s careful, overly correct, and a little far away, because she’s decided that’s the safer version of herself to offer people. Tell her the truth: you’d rather have her whole and a little undone than composed and out of reach. Be the one who makes it safe for her to stop managing herself around you, the way I hope this made it safe for you.

Grace and peace,

Rebecca

It’s a good strategy for a data center, but not so great for a spiritual life.

Here’s my confession: not too long ago, I had multiple devotionals open on my nightstand, worship playlists queued for whichever mood struck, and a shelf of half-finished books on hearing God’s voice. If one wasn’t filling my thirst for God’s Word, I had backup. I had built myself an availability system with overlapping redundancy. What I hadn’t built was depth with any single one of them. Even my women’s group went from one deep-dive study to the next without pause. I was maximally available to input and minimally available in relationship with any of it.

I suspect most devout people are running the same architecture without knowing it’s got a name.

We treat “pray without ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5:17) as though Paul was describing an uptime requirement: never let the connection drop, always keep a channel open, stack enough spiritual practices that no single failure takes the whole system down. More prayer time as backup for when worship falls flat. More sermons are queued in case yesterday’s somehow didn’t land. More devotionals in rotation, so no day goes unfed.

But notice what redundancy actually optimizes for: it optimizes for never going down, not for going deep.

A server cluster running five redundant instances isn’t running any of them particularly well; it’s just guaranteeing that something, anything, stays up.

Zero downtime, zero depth. That’s not intimacy; that’s distraction from God’s voice.

It comes at a real cost, not just a spiritual one. Stanford researchers Eyal Ophir, Clifford Nass, and Anthony Wagner ran people through a battery of attention tests in 2009 and found something that should have been reassuring and wasn’t: the heaviest multitaskers, the people most practiced at running many streams of information at once, were worse at filtering out messages not specific to their needs, and worse at holding onto what was. Practice at breadth didn’t build a skill. It built a deficit.

The mind trained to stay available to everything gets measurably worse at being present to anything.

I don’t think our souls are exempt from that finding. We are, spiritually, some of the heaviest multitaskers alive, sampling sermon after sermon or devotional after devotional, before we’ve obeyed a word of the last one. We’ve confused availability, the channel staying open, with attention, something actually getting through it. They are not the same system, and only one of them was ever the point.

So what was Paul actually asking for, if not redundancy? Look at what he says elsewhere: “Whatever you do, work with enthusiasm, as though you were working for the Lord” (Colossians 3:23). Not everything, stacked. Whatever: singular, present, in front of you. The laundry, unto Him. The commute, unto Him.

Unceasing prayer is, in truth, awareness. It is living with a sense that God is near. It is inviting Him into decisions, frustrations, and fears as they arise. It is intercession woven into daily life.

Pray without ceasing was an instruction to stop treating your attention like a system that needs a constant redundant backup and start treating it like the portal to personal growth and authentic learning that it is.

I observed this difference in, of all places, a yoga class. Over the course of ninety minutes, our instructor led us through a mere six poses. Each pose felt like the passing of geological time. At first, it was almost unbearable. I kept watching the instructor, certain the next move was coming any second, my muscles locked tight trying to hold everything together at once.

I wobbled. I recovered. I wobbled again, the way you do when you’re bracing for the next input instead of settling into the one you’re already in.

Then, somewhere past the point I thought I could stand it, something let go. I stopped waiting for the next pose. I released the breath I’d been holding. What had been rigid and unstable simply unwound.

I can still feel the muscle over my shoulder blade releasing like a hose spinning off its hook, tension I hadn’t even realized I was carrying. I left that room steadier than I’d been in months, and I hadn’t earned it by packing in a multitude of poses. I’d earned it by becoming intimate with the one I was in.

Similarly, as I develop my journal process for Pay Attention: Learning to Recognize God’s Voice and Guidance While Walking with Mary, Ruth, Esther, and Mary Magdalene, my ability to discern God’s hands in my life has grown exponentially as I repeat my daily journal rhythm, allowing space to master the prompts and explore intimately what God is saying to me personally. It is simultaneously an intense focus and a release and surrender.

That’s the architecture I think we’re actually being asked to build with our Heavenly Father: not a cluster of redundant inputs standing by in case one fails, but a single sustained connection, held long enough that it stops being effortful and starts being where you live.

So try this, if you will. Pick one ordinary task: the laundry, the dishes, the commute, or the devotional. Do it as though directly for Him, with no backup input running alongside it, no podcast, no scrolling, nothing queued in case this one moment isn’t enough. Stay in the one pose. Let it be the only server you’re running. Be with God in it. Listen for His voice speaking to you, not the crowd, not in general terms, but in an intimate relationship with you.

You may find, as I did, that you were never actually short on availability. You had availability to spare. What you were short on was the willingness to stop switching long enough to let His voice break through to you and only you.

If you could only choose one God-honoring behavior or action (or Scripture passage) to practice until you mastered it, what would it be? Tell me in the comments.

Have you ever overlooked something that was right in front of you?

Even though it was within eyesight or within reach, instead, you went looking where it ought to be, or where you saw it last.

That’s what discernment can feel like, too: less about finding something new, and more about finally seeing what was there all along.

My problem was that I couldn’t get quiet enough, and I couldn’t stay focused long enough. I went looking for God everywhere and got distracted. God may see all, but I don’t.

Cognitive psychologists Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris spent decades studying what they called inattentional blindness: our (frustrating) ability to overlook something fully present because our attention is occupied elsewhere.

Their work isn’t about God, but it does reveal something fascinating about ourselves: we often fail to notice what is directly in front of us, not because it isn’t there, but because we’ve trained our attention elsewhere.

I can’t help wondering whether something similar happens spiritually.

Maybe when I was too busy wondering whether God was listening to my prayers, I missed the creative ways He answers them. In trying to find God “everywhere,” I risk ending up finding Him nowhere. Or, I settle for finding Him secondhand, through where others have already found Him. This can satisfy me for a moment, but delays me from cultivating my own relationship with God.

While it’s difficult to hear the Lord while doomscrolling, it isn’t impossible. The answer isn’t necessarily to focus harder; discernment isn’t something I manufacture through willpower. It requires the Holy Spirit. It also requires my cooperation: time invested in a relationship with Jesus, with enough conversation to start recognizing His replies.

He says, “Be still, and know that I am God;
I will be exalted among the nations,
I will be exalted in the earth.” – Psalm 46:10

Exalted on earth, exalted among nations—yes, amen and well deserved. But where I need Him now is among the ordinary day-to-day tasks of living, in the valley when everything falls apart, and out on the playing field of life, where risks are taken and the stakes are high; in sickness and in health; in my love for my husband, my children, and family; and in the quiet yearning to fulfill the purpose of my life, the itch each one of us has to uncover and pursue what the Lord made us to do. I will exalt Him. I do exalt Him. Now, how do I stop overlooking Him?

Looking for God through a Pinhole

There are many paths to discernment, but I decided to stop looking everywhere for God and narrow my vision.

I chose one goal, a book project I’d carried in my heart for a long time. As an author, writing is my job, but I’ve played around with outlining a book for longer than a decade because it is so far outside my comfort zone.

It involves a topic I’d never written about before, neither as a Young Adult author nor as a social-emotional learning researcher. It’s also a new genre for me, which presents another learning curve. I knew the book’s narrative would require more vulnerability than anything I’d written to entertain or to educate.

I made a plan for a specific, achievable volume of work over 30 days. Then, every morning, I met with the Lord and came up with one small action I would take that day toward my goal.

I also chose an attitude for the day (often a fruit of the spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control). This small gesture helped frame the day and how I would approach not only my goal but everything on my to-do list. This practice also prompted me throughout the day to return to conversation with God, because I would forget how I’d promised myself I’d behave. Or, I found myself doing the opposite, and feeling the Lord’s gentle, loving correction. (He was with me!)

Last, I sealed a sort of mini-covenant with God by placing the day before Him: together, we walked through the day like a playbook: this could happen, so here’s the play I’d run. He helped me envision a best-case scenario and notice potential roadblocks before the day had begun.

At the end of each day, I wrote down what actually happened.

What followed surprised me. Some of it was answered prayer. Some of it was self-confrontation.

What Answers to Prayer Look Like

The notes I made in response to our early morning conversations took shape in real time. When I admitted I needed help from someone more experienced, I was better able to recognize the person He sent my way. I might have thought it was a coincidence if I were not specifically watching for God in the context of my 30-day goal.

When I was torn between two directions, He showed me which resources I already had on hand. I paused and invited Him into my consideration of those resources, and He showed me which ones fed the vision we were building together.

Some days, fear made me freeze, and I did nothing. But I still showed up to my notebook the next morning, and He brought me back to the goal. It was the daily writing-down-and-watching that kept me on track.

And when I slammed into moments of thinking that this dream was outside my reality, I looked at the pages, at the evidence of how many days He had already responded, redirected me, or shown me a possibility I wouldn’t have found on my own.

He was with me on the journey. He was invested in what I was building.

God knows that I can only really manage the present moment, and that’s where He wants to meet me. He is eager to light my next step, or even to turn me in a direction I hadn’t considered. He rarely lights the whole journey at once. So the practice of watching for Him has to live in the present moment, something I return to daily.

Over the course of that first month, something started to shift.

Chaos lost its grip; not all at once, and not without effort. But the small confirmations began to accumulate into something I could point to: pages of evidence that God is real, present, and actively involved in my life.

I should also confess what I discovered about myself in the process: on occasion, I am pointlessly rebellious with zero cause.

There were days when the one small action I’d promised to take was the exact small action I avoided; sometimes several days in a row. I love talking to God on walks in the woods, and I found myself avoiding those, too. The truth was that I didn’t want to be held accountable for finishing. I was afraid that if I completed what we envisioned together, I’d have to commit myself even further to the project. The very project that made my heart sing also made me want to hide.

But returning to our conversations day after day, even the avoidant days, He gently showed me that the space outside my comfort zone wasn’t as threatening as I’d made it out to be.

I discovered that there were goals I could never reach on my own, not because the goals were too large, but because I needed the guidance He was giving me to see me to the finish line.

I wouldn’t have seen what a fearful self-blocker I could be if I hadn’t remained attentive to God through the narrow lens of one small commitment to one project that mattered to me.

I saw God more clearly when I stopped searching for Him everywhere.

Attention research shows us that perception is not passive.
We learn to notice what we repeatedly practice noticing.

Documenting your daily conversations with God changes the way you think, move, and act, especially when you are trying to make progress on something specific. But it also changes what others looking on discern about you.

When you practice discernment, you are not just becoming wiser for your own sake. You are becoming a different kind of presence in the world.

Building your own pages of evidence, proof that the Lord is genuinely at work in your world, transforms you into a person who carries a peace that others can’t quite explain.

When things fall apart, instead of catastrophizing, you return to the goal you’ve been working on with Him, the one small place where you can see His hand. That’s what this practice has been for me. Over months, I’ve accomplished things that I’d only dreamed about for years, and I’ve overcome hurdles and setbacks. I had to keep discerning not just God’s guidance, but my own resistance to receiving it. Improving self-knowledge is part of the discernment practice, not a detour from it.

I’ve brought to life more of my guarded-heart dreams than might seem humanly possible.

Maybe that’s because I’ve learned to ask for help, and more importantly, discern the guidance when it arrives, even on the days I want to hide from it. (It’s a work in progress I return to daily. I’m still learning.)

This is how my current manuscript, Pay Attention to the Presence of God: A 60-Day Walk, came to be. It’s the daily structure I built for discerning God’s hand in every area of my life.

I’m now in a second draft, testing it with longtime Christians, and I am continually awed by what I see: distractions falling away, attention focusing, one goal at a time, in daily conversation with God. Over 30 days, prayers get answered. Patterns become visible. And what starts as private faithfulness starts to change what others see in you.

From the outside, it might look like a goal-setting journal. And yes, the first group of readers who committed to testing it over eight weeks pushed past real limitations.

But the goal is simply the framework, the narrow pinhole through which God teaches discernment.

What’s the “pinhole” in your own life right now, the one place you’ve narrowed your focus and started seeing more clearly because of it? I’d love to hear it in the comments.

I’ve been carrying that question with me lately. At first, I’ll admit it made me feel guilty; as a writer, I tend to spend time purposefully observing people, without considering how I might be perceived.

To bring life to fictional characters, it’s helpful to watch how someone pauses before answering a difficult question, how grief changes a face, or how hope quietly returns after disappointment. Tiny details reveal the deepest truths. Writing has taught me to see ordinary moments differently.

We often think our witness is found in extraordinary acts of faith. Yet most people encounter something much subtler: they watch how we respond to interruptions, disappointments, unexpected opportunities, and the people placed in front of us each day.

The more I thought about that question, the more another one emerged:

How do we learn to recognize God’s guidance
in the middle of our ordinary lives?

Many of us sincerely want God’s guidance. We pray, we ask for wisdom, we read our Bibles. We trust that our Father in heaven is listening. Yet many of us quietly wonder, Why is it so hard to know when God is speaking?

A while back, my longing to deepen my relationship with God changed the way I look at my own life.

I developed a simple morning and evening prayer practice that slowly taught me to recognize God’s hand in ordinary days. It nudged me toward opportunities I never would have chosen for myself, and over time, I began collecting what I now think of as pages of evidence that God is real, He’s listening, and when I let Him, He will gladly guide me in the way I should go.

Discernment begins as an internal shift, but eventually it becomes visible from the outside. Think about the people who quietly observe your life every day: your children, your coworkers, your neighbors, the friends who have not yet found their way to faith. What do they see?

Do they see someone merely surviving? Or someone being guided?

I ask because our faith is revealed in ordinary moments: the way we speak when we’re frustrated. The patience we extend when plans fall apart. The self-restraint in a time of temptation. The gratitude we express for answers to prayers we had nearly forgotten we had prayed.

People notice more than we realize.

Another person may find their way to Jesus in those ordinary (and sometimes extraordinary) behaviors we choose every day. Similarly, the way God works in our lives can be subtle, but nonetheless recognizable when you look for it.

One of the greatest surprises in my own life came after graduate school. I applied for teaching positions at universities and colleges, and got nowhere. I completed a teaching certification through Harvard and continued applying, convinced I knew exactly what kind of position I wanted. Then the Lord introduced me to someone at church who connected me with a private Christian university in my region that I hadn’t even known existed. They hired me to teach English Composition and American Lit, exactly my kind of wonderland-heaven-on-earth.

Except for the first course, they asked me to teach Speech Communications.

Public speaking terrified me. I have spent much of my life trying not to be noticed. I have a quiet voice. As a student, author, and parent, my milieu was carpools, doing research, and overseeing homework. After speaking at my book launches, I would retreat to recharge. But I wanted to teach. So I said yes.

A few years later, I’m still teaching Speech Communications, and I love it. I have grown as a public speaker because I had to actually demonstrate the required skills. Teaching public speaking deepened my compassion for students who arrive carrying the same fears I once had. It has been an unexpectedly blissful calling for me, and has changed my confidence and my self-image. My students tell me they feel transformed, too.

The very thing I would never have chosen became one of God’s kindest gifts. God knew. He knew what I needed. He knew what my students needed. And He found the one place where I could teach it, a place that’s also allowed me to speak openly about faith and finding your God-given voice.

If I’d been hired anywhere else I’d applied to and prayed for, I would have missed all of it.

Many Christians struggle to distinguish His voice from their own hopefulness, their own fear, or the noise of the world. Discernment is the trained ability to tell the difference. By the end of an ordinary day, we’ve taken in thousands of voices, and then we wonder why God’s gentle leading feels so difficult to recognize.

Discernment is learning, over time, to recognize God’s character so well that His ways start to stand out.

It isn’t a mystical gut feeling, some spiritual sixth sense reserved for the especially holy. Hebrews 5:14 describes mature believers as those whose senses have been “trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil.” The words “trained” and “practice” point to repetition, intention, and a daily decision to pay attention.

He is eager to light your next step, or even to turn you in a direction you hadn’t considered. He rarely lights the whole journey at once. So the practice of watching for Him has to live in the present moment, something we return to daily.

If someone followed you for the last 24 hours yesterday, they may not have been led to Jesus.

But the only 24-hour period we actually have is the next one. If someone followed you through tomorrow, would they see someone trying harder? Or would they see someone who has learned to pay attention to God?

This article is the first part of a two-part series on Discernment. Read part two, “Looking for God Through a Pinhole,” wherein I share the surprisingly simple practice that helped me begin collecting my own pages of evidence, one ordinary day at a time.

Over the past week, I’ve been examining Ruth and Esther’s stories for my manuscript, Paying Attention: Walking with Mary, Ruth, Esther, and Mary Magdalene While Learning to Recognize God’s Voice and Guidance.

I noticed they share one critical detail: before the miracle, before God’s favor, before everything changed, they both dressed beautifully.

There is a moment in every woman’s story when the circumstances are hard, the outcome is uncertain, and everything in her wants to shrink, to stay home, to wait until things feel better before she shows the world who she is.

Ruth and Esther, separated by centuries but united by a commonplace yet utterly radical act, can show us why the ritual of preparing ourselves has tremendous significance. Biblical significance.

The Threshold Moment Nobody Talks About

You may know the story of Esther: the Jewish woman who became queen and saved her people from genocide. She walked into the king’s court uninvited, risking her life.

But do you know what Scripture says she did to prepare?

“On the third day, Esther put on her royal robes.” (Esther 5:1)

She’d survived three days of fear, three days of fasting and prayer, and the weight of a people’s survival on her shoulders. And then, she got dressed deliberately, beautifully, and royally.

Now consider Ruth, the Moabite widow gleaning leftover grain in a foreign field, with no security, no guarantee, no clear future. When the moment came for her to step forward and claim the covenant that could redeem her family’s future, her mother-in-law Naomi gave her a striking instruction: wash, put on your best garments, and go (Ruth 3:3).

Not, “It doesn’t matter what you look like.”

Go, she said, and take care with how you present yourself. Both women were at the most precarious moments of their lives. Both chose to honor themselves and then walked into their destiny.

We’ve Talked Ourselves Out of This

Many of us have absorbed a message that caring about our appearance is shallow, vain, or spiritually suspect. We speak of modesty and simplicity as virtues, and rightly so. It’s important to point out that modesty and simplicity are also, in fact, the hallmarks of elegance.

The opposite of elegance is cultures of excess, designer worship, and the exhausting performance of beauty standards that were never designed with natural beauty in mind.

It’s also worth noting that in many faith traditions, specific clothing is itself an act of devotion, a beautiful, intentional choice to honor God through dress. This too is a form of adorning oneself with meaning.

But somewhere in the busy rhythm of life and trends toward comfort over effort, many of us stopped honoring our own form, the one God gave us, the one He calls “beautifully and fearfully made” (Psalm 139:14).

We wear clothes that don’t fit. We wear colors that drain us, or whatever was on sale or happens to be clean. We tell ourselves it’s humility, or that we’re preoccupied by more “important” things.

But by avoiding dressing beautifully (as defined by the individual), are we prolonging the tough times, the potential for defeat, or even inviting in grief?

Could Ruth or Esther have been successful without their best garments and royal robes?

Perhaps dressing well is a form of holiness.

What Getting Dressed Actually Signals

This might seem like a controversial topic, but whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much (Luke 16:10). And honoring yourself, caring for your hygiene, and your body as a temple to God is hardly “very little.”

Let’s picture a woman who rises and takes care with how she presents herself: she washes her face, wears clothing that honors her body, and chooses colors that bring out the life in her eyes. Her spine straightens, her shoulders settle, and her gaze lifts, responding to her reflection in the mirror. She is not performing for an audience. She is signaling to herself: I matter. I am worth stewarding. I am ready. I was made in the image of God.

Research suggests that dressing well triggers a psychological phenomenon called enclothed cognition, meaning that clothing alters brain chemistry and cognitive function. It boosts confidence, reduces morning stress, and prompts neurotransmitter releases by attaching symbolic meaning to what you wear. There is a positive internal shift when we stop treating ourselves as an afterthought. This is yet another phenomenon of our divine creation.

Dressing well does not require expensive clothes or designer brands. The solution to dressing well is a worthwhile investment in knowing, loving, and honoring yourself. Consider the unique beauty of every woman on the planet: the range of variability in facial features (eye size, face length, etc.) and body features ( arm length, waist-to-hip ratio, etc.), and further, her sensitivity and appreciation to art and aesthetics, be they urban, contemporary, cultural, modern, or fantastical.

Knowing and loving the form God gave you can inspire you to wear the colors that were made for your specific skin tone, your hair, your eyes, in the palette that makes you luminous rather than washed out. It is about choosing cuts and silhouettes that honor the particular shape the Lord gave you, not the shape fashion magazines decided was acceptable this season. It is about having a beloved dress altered so that it fits your actual body, rather than contorting yourself to fit it.

Your body is your private temple. It deserves to be adorned with intention.

Honoring your true self, you have the power to change your future, as Ruth and Esther did.

The Vision: You, Dressed for the Threshing Floor

The threshing floor is the place in Scripture where grain is separated from chaff, where what is lasting is revealed from what is temporary. Ruth went to a threshing floor on the night she stepped into her future. She went clean, dressed in her best, with her dignity fully intact.

You may be at your own threshing floor right now.

Perhaps you are in a season of grief, or uncertainty, or an enduring faithfulness that no one seems to notice. Perhaps you are right at the edge of something you cannot yet see: a pivot point, a redemption, an open door.

This is precisely the moment to get dressed beautifully.

Honoring yourself in the small things, in the daily act of presenting yourself with care, is a declaration:

I am worth caring for.

I am worth being seen.

Esther did not put on her royal robes as a costume. She put them on as a covenant with herself and God before she walked into the most important moment of her life. The robes did not make her brave. But they were the outward expression of an inward decision: I will show up fully. I will not shrink.

And others recognized her for who she was: a queen.

Rise Up, Beautiful One

This week, open your closet with new eyes. Ask yourself: Do the colors I own serve me, or do they dim me? Do my clothes fit the body I have today, or the body I think I should have? Is there one piece I love that could be altered to better fit me?

Then take one step: donate what diminishes you; have one thing tailored; or learn your season’s colors. Treat your personal presentation as the act of stewardship that it is.

Then, look around at the women in your life.

Do you have a friend who is in a hard season? Who has spent more time making sure everyone else is cared for at the expense of herself? Who has stopped believing she is worth the effort?

Be Naomi for her. Naomi, who looked at her widowed daughter-in-law and said: Wash yourself, put on your best, and go. She didn’t flatter Ruth; she called her upward. She saw the heroine in her before Ruth could fully see it herself.

Tell your friend she is beautiful. Offer to help her find her colors. Take her shopping, not to spend lavishly, but to help her see what you already see in her. Cheer her toward her own dignity.

The World Needs Women Who Honor Their Value

Esther’s courage that day in the royal court matured. The woman who once trembled at the thought of approaching the king ultimately wielded the king’s own signet ring, writing a new decree that protected her people. What began in fear grew into confident authority.

Ruth’s faithfulness, gleaning in a foreign field, trusting God one small step at a time, led to a redeemed family line, a son named Obed, and a place in the ancestry of King David himself, and beyond him, Jesus Christ.

Both stories began with a woman who, in a moment of uncertainty, chose to honor herself and step forward.

You are a woman of noble character. You are called to dress like it.

Grace and peace,

Rebecca

Share this with a woman who needs to hear it. And then tell her what you see in her, because she may not be able to see it herself.

For years, I assumed faith was mostly about believing.

Then I began paying attention.

As I brought my goals, questions, prayers, and daily decisions into conversation with God, I began to notice something remarkable: evidence. Evidence of His guidance. Evidence of His provision. Evidence of answered prayers, unexpected opportunities, timely encouragement, loving correction, and grace that arrived exactly when it was needed.

Pages of Evidence is a place to explore what happens when we learn to recognize God’s presence in everyday life.

Here you’ll find reflections on faith, discernment, Scripture, spiritual growth, prayer, journaling, and the surprising ways God works through ordinary days.

I’m not asking you to believe because of my experience.

I’m inviting you to pay attention to your own.

From the creator of Pay Attention: Walking with Mary, Ruth, Esther, and Mary Magdalene While Learning to Recognize God's Voice and Guidance, a forthcoming guided journal for women pursuing meaningful goals with God.

Rebecca Lacko is an author, educator, and social-emotional learning specialist whose work explores faith, transformation, and the formative power of story.

She is the author of multiple books and journals for young adults and adults. Her writing has appeared in literary journals, anthologies, and educational publications.

Rebecca holds a master’s degree in Humanities with concentrations in Creative Writing and Social-Emotional Learning. She teaches college communication and writing courses at a private Christian university in Washington and is pursuing a PhD at the University of Birmingham, where her research explores how literary narratives shape emotional, ethical, and spiritual formation.

Through Pages of Evidence, Rebecca invites readers to pay closer attention to God’s presence in everyday life and to discover the surprising ways He guides, provides, teaches, and transforms us.

My Tuesday night Bible study, comprising 15 Bible scholars I’m humbled to learn from, worked through that first journal prototype twice over eight weeks. By the end, they had achieved far more than their goals. They had developed a deep, soul-satisfying relationship with Jesus. They broke through former limitations. One small detail pierced my heart: they began referring to the book as “pages of evidence.” Evidence of God at work in their lives. The process I’d developed guided readers to see Him, hear Him, and be directed and corrected by Him.

But what does evidence of God actually look like? This is part one of a three-part series on finding evidence that God is real and wants to be in a relationship with you.

Let’s begin with a small but telling observation: as we worked through my journal prototype, it became painfully clear that much of Christian life is focused on making requests, while very little time is spent watching for a response.

Many Christians faithfully attend church, read Scripture, pray, and serve others while quietly wondering:

• How do I know God is guiding me?

• Why does His voice feel so difficult to recognize?

• Is He truly involved in the details of my life?

If God is with us, what evidence should we expect to find?

As Christians, we often look for miracles while overlooking the ordinary ways God consistently moves. The journal provides tools for building a daily conversation and discernment practice, guiding the reader to notice when provision is divine; when correction comes from a protective love; when wisdom arrives at just the right moment; when peace settles in unexpectedly; when conviction compels a bold step forward; when timing shifts in our favor; or when community shows up to serve, guide, or comfort.

God is present in the small details. He is guiding conversations. He is opening (and closing) doors. He is revealing wisdom, support, and truth. He is illuminating what needs healing. He is strengthening what has grown weak. He is preparing us for things we cannot yet see. He is sending teachers when we need to learn, and opportunities to lead and share our gifts. He is course-correcting while offering comfort and encouragement. He is revealing competencies and capabilities we may not have known were ours.

We often miss these movements because life moves too quickly to notice them. Or perhaps we look for God everywhere except right in the middle of our own story.

“Show me the way I should go, for to You I entrust my life.” — Psalm 143:8

The psalmists did not simply speak to God. They watched. They remembered. They waited expectantly.

At the end of our eight-week experiment, I returned to my manuscript and rewrote the entire journal, weaving together what I had observed to be true and illuminating it with the insights, breakthroughs, and revelations of that first group. It was an incredible experience; many of the readers had engaged in Bible studies for three or four decades and had not previously been able to discern God the way this process revealed Him at work.

As the manuscript has developed, I’ve been drawn to this title: Pay Attention: Walking with Mary, Ruth, Esther, and Mary Magdalene While Learning to Recognize God’s Voice and Guidance.

Finding evidence of God’s presence and grace asks us simply to pay attention. Here are some ways to spot Him:

• A Scripture passage speaks directly to your heart about a specific issue you’re facing.

• A wise mentor appears just when you’ve admitted you need to learn something new.

• An unexpected opportunity turns up: a perfect fit, but nothing you would have chosen yourself.

• A conviction changes your direction and compels you to speak up when you might have stayed quiet.

• A door closes on something you’d hoped for, but God shows you something better.

• A peace that makes no earthly sense helps you rest.

• Abilities, competencies, and capabilities you didn’t know you had are revealed.

• A compassion grows for someone who is struggling, and you offer comfort.

As I began paying attention, something else became clear: God’s answers were not always the answers we had requested. Sometimes, He changed our goals entirely. Sometimes, He showed us how small they had been.

Again and again, we discovered that His imagination is bigger than ours. His plans are wiser. His timing is better. But we cannot fulfill all He has called us to do without His help. We need Him to light each step. We need Him to walk before us, behind us, and beside us.

And because He loves us, He does.

In the Pay Attention journal, readers focus on one meaningful goal over two 30-Day Walks. God is pleased to bless us with achievement, certainly, but more importantly, pursuing one goal at a time with Him narrows our focus in a way that makes Him easier to see, sense, and hear. When we look everywhere for God, it is easy to miss His hand at work. When we look through a narrow pinhole, the distractions fade, and He comes into focus. Evidence begins to accumulate. We begin to notice. And noticing changes us.

“I remain confident of this: I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.” — Psalm 27:13

Faith is not blind. This work is what I have come to call Informed Faith. Many theologians suggest that faith is not a leap into the dark but a step into the light, grounded in evidence, a trust in God’s character shaped by past experience, testimony, and thoughtful reasoning.

“Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.” — Hebrews 11:1

Faith leaves evidence. Not once or twice if you’re lucky — but pages of evidence.

Grace and peace,

Rebecca

I wondered if I was having some stress hallucination. I’d never imagined Jesus would or could speak to me, let alone in a crowded room of hundreds of people. The experience left me teary and overwhelmed, but in the week that followed, I couldn’t get it out of my mind.

I returned the following Sunday. He was there again, speaking directly to my heart. Still, it was probably a coincidence. Much of my faith felt abstract, foreign, and unexplored. So I returned the following Sunday to see if He would speak to me again. He did. This time, He showed me how He had been with me all along.

What surprised me most was not that He was there in that moment. It was realizing that Jesus had been there all along, guiding, protecting, providing, and patiently pursuing me long before I knew how to recognize His hand.

I simply hadn’t been paying attention.

I am still showing up every Sunday at a different church in a different country. And I’ve since learned to hear Him every day, all day. I want to share how you can see His hand at work in your life, too.

The Problem

Many Christians spend years faithfully attending church, reading Scripture, praying, and serving others, yet still quietly wonder:

• How do I know God is guiding me?

• Why does His voice feel difficult to recognize?

• Is He really involved in the details of my life?

• How can I tell when He is answering prayer?

I don’t think the problem is that God is absent. The problem might be that we often expect Him to show up in dramatic ways while overlooking the countless ordinary ways He is already moving.

We look for burning bushes.

Meanwhile, God may be speaking through a conversation, a closed door, a mentor, a Scripture passage, an unexpected opportunity, a moment of conviction, or a quiet nudge we almost dismiss.

And yes, sometimes we get a proverbial burning bush, as I did. Right on time; Jesus’s time, not ours.

The Experiment

As a young believer, I was skeptical. Feeling an unexpected pull to change my entire life and belief system left me feeling unsure, second-guessing, and wondering if it was safer to carry on with the familiar. I decided I needed evidence.

I began a simple experiment: paying attention.

I started purposefully talking to Jesus because He said He was “with me always” (Matt. 28:20) and that “all things are possible with Him” (Matt. 19:26). I wanted to believe. So, I tested Jesus.

I wasn’t only skeptical of God; I was skeptical of my test. If I’d gotten as far as Matthew 19, I’d also read Matthew 4:7: “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.” My test was not to demand signs, to try to control Him, or to be in my life on my terms. I was learning to seek Him as the psalmists did: asking, listening, and watching expectantly.

“In the morning, Lord, you hear my voice; in the morning I lay my requests before you and wait expectantly” Psalm 5:3

I started bringing my doubts, questions, and daily decisions into conversation with Jesus. I would choose one meaningful area of my life and intentionally invite Him into it. Each day, I listened, responded, watched, and journaled. What I discovered changed me.

The more closely I paid attention, the more I recognized God’s hand in my life. He sent wisdom, encouragement, opportunities, mentors, corrections, and unexpected blessings at exactly the right time. Sometimes, He moved me toward a goal I was pursuing. Other times, He revealed places within me that needed healing first.

As I shared my personal concerns and family dramas, He taught me to see others through His eyes, prompting compassion and understanding. Feelings of distance melted away.

Over time, evidence accumulated. I had a comforting feeling that I am not alone. Even better, I am loved. He is paying attention to me. And He is paying attention to you, too.

What Changed

The more closely I watched, the more I noticed. There were times He moved me directly toward what I wanted; other times, I was redirected. Admittedly, He also revealed traits and habits that needed refinement before I could move forward. Repeatedly, I discovered that His imagination is bigger than mine. His plans are wiser than mine. His timing is better than mine.

What began as a search for evidence became a relationship. The evidence deepened my trust and taught me the soul-deep pleasure of authentic gratitude. My growing faith eased much of the anxiety I had carried for years.

In many ways, life felt a lot easier. I still had the same troubles, but I no longer had to face them on my own. As I learned to discern each step He was leading me, I caught myself making different choices that ultimately sidestepped unnecessary strife. I wondered how often I’d been stuck because I had stood in my own way.

What If

What if God has been present in your life in ways you haven’t noticed yet?

What if some of the things you’ve called coincidence, luck, or chance are worth another look?

What if God is already speaking?

What if the first step is paying attention?

A Small Challenge

For the next seven days, keep a simple list. I’ve created a free one—Where Might God Have Been at Work Today (and it’s pretty.)

At the end of each day, ask yourself:

Where might God have been at work today?

Pay attention. Write down anything that catches your attention:

• an answered prayer

• a helpful conversation

• an unexpected opportunity

• a moment of courage

• a timely Scripture

• a sense of peace

• an open door

• a closed door

Pay attention. You may be surprised by what you find. If you try the experiment, I’d love to hear what you discover.

Grace and peace,

Rebecca