Your Walk With God Was Never Meant To Look Like Mine

I've tried a lot of things that didn't stick.

Not because they were bad. Most of them were genuinely good — recommended by people I respected, practised by men and women I admired. Early morning prayer at a specific hour. A particular devotional structure. A certain way of reading Scripture. I'd pick it up, carry it for a season, and eventually set it down — not dramatically, but quietly. The way you stop wearing something that never quite fit.

For a long time, I read that as a personal failure. Inconsistency. Lack of discipline. The conclusion most of us reach when the method doesn't work: something is wrong with me.

But I've been sitting with a different possibility lately.

What if the method was never meant for me?

I'm in a particular season right now, and three things have quietly settled into my life as anchors. Journaling. Running. Praying in tongues.

Nobody assigned these to me. There was no program, no curriculum, no pastor who handed me a plan. These are things the Holy Spirit kept drawing my attention back to — and as I've leaned into them, I've begun to understand why they work for me specifically.

Journaling slows me down. I'm someone whose mind doesn't stop — thoughts layer on top of thoughts, connections fire constantly, and without a way to externalise that, things get lost in the noise. When I write, I'm not just recording. I'm processing. I'm meditating. I'm giving form to what God has been saying so I can actually see it. For me, the page is a place of encounter.

Running does something different. It occupies my body enough that my mind can work freely — and what comes up in those kilometres is often exactly what I needed to hear. Prayers I didn't know I needed to pray. Clarity I'd been circling for days. Downloads, as I've come to call them. My feet move, and something opens.

Praying in tongues holds a different space entirely. Where journaling and running work with my natural tendencies, praying in tongues works beneath them. It bypasses the part of me that always wants to analyse and understand. It keeps me connected to God in a register that my intellect can't control — and for someone wired the way I am, that's not a small thing. That's necessary.

These three things aren't random. Together they form something like a complete ecology for this season — a way of being with God that fits my body, my mind, my wiring, and this particular moment in my life.

Here's what I've come to believe.

God is not handing out a standard template for intimacy with Him. He is inviting each of us into something particular — shaped by how He made us, attentive to the season we're in, and responsive to the environment we're living in. The invitation is always personal. It's always current. And it's always yours.

The problem is that most of us have never been told this. We've been given methods instead of invitations. Programs instead of presence. We've watched someone else's walk with God and tried to step into their footprints — and then felt like failures when our feet didn't fit the shape.

But your wiring is not an accident. The way you think, the way you process, the way you move through the world — God made you that way. And He takes it into account when He's drawing you close. He is not asking you to become someone else in order to reach Him. He's meeting you as you are, and He's showing you how you were made to come home to Him.

The question isn't what works for other people. The question is: what is the Spirit highlighting for you, right now, in this season?

That's the invitation worth paying attention to.

Maybe the routine that never stuck wasn't a sign of your weakness. Maybe it was never your invitation to begin with.

Your walk with God was never meant to look like mine. It was always meant to look like yours.