I couldn’t have told you exactly what was wrong.
From the outside, much of my life with God looked like it was working. I loved Jesus. I believed the Bible. Prayer mattered to me. So did Scripture, church, serving, learning, growing, and being faithful to whatever God placed in front of me. None of this was casual. Following Jesus mattered deeply to me, but somewhere along the way, the doing of things had become a lifestyle.
Faithfulness and responsibility had quietly become almost synonymous. Things that mattered required something from me, and I assumed it was my responsibility to figure out what that was. Growth meant pursuing what I needed to learn. Relationships meant investing, showing up, and often making myself useful. When an area of my life wasn’t working, I searched for what needed to change and got busy changing it. There was always more to learn, teaching that might offer fresh understanding, books worth reading, and places within me that could surely benefit from greater attention.
I wasn’t consciously living by a philosophy of self-reliance. This was simply how I had learned to move through life, and in many ways it had served me well. Responsibility mattered. Effort produced results. Somewhere underneath it all was an assumption I rarely had reason to examine: if I didn’t do what needed to be done, there was a very real possibility it wasn’t going to happen.
So when my life with God or my relationships left me dissatisfied, greater effort made perfect sense. When that effort failed to produce what I seemed to be looking for, I didn’t consider questioning the pattern. Frustration simply made me double down on what I already knew. I prayed more, tried to believe more, became more intentional, and kept looking for the place that needed my attention.
Looking back, what appeared to be relational faithfulness was often a relentless tending of belonging, an underlying belief that connection depended upon me. I certainly wasn’t walking around thinking I was afraid to be myself. But trusting that simply being me could somehow be enough felt terrifying, in part because I didn’t really know how to do that.
I had become remarkably skilled at sensing who other people needed me to be: responsible, helpful, encouraging, capable, available. Those ways of showing up gave me a recognizable place in relationship. They made me useful and helped me stay seen. I didn’t yet understand how different that was from knowing who I was and believing that person wouldn’t somehow be too much.
At the time, effort still seemed like the most reasonable response to dissatisfaction. Surely enough attention, prayer, responsibility, determination, and willingness to grow would eventually produce the meaning and relational connection I couldn’t seem to find.
It was a hamster wheel I didn’t yet know I was running.
Perhaps everyone else had figured out a part of following Jesus that I had somehow missed. I wasn’t examining any of this while I was living it. The rhythms of my Christian life were familiar, and I entered them sincerely and wholeheartedly. I only knew that despite everything I was doing, the frustration remained.
Eventually, that frustration began showing up as irritation in my relationships. I was becoming increasingly aware that who I was and what I so readily offered could be taken for granted. At times, it felt as though people were taking advantage of the very things I had made so consistently available to them.
I felt used.
I genuinely loved people, and much of what I gave came from that love. But something about the familiar exchange was no longer working for me. Being the one who helped, noticed, anticipated, encouraged, and could be counted on had once given me a dependable place in relationship. Now I was beginning to resent how easily that place seemed to depend upon what I continued to provide.
I would not have described the problem as wanting to be known. That language belonged to an understanding I had not yet reached. I only knew that being needed no longer felt like enough, even though I couldn’t have told you what enough would have looked like.
Looking back, I can name the deeper reality: I had mistaken being needed for being known.
I had no idea what it meant to trust that I might still have a place when I had nothing particularly useful to offer.
Beneath all of this was an empty ache I couldn’t shake. I wanted to get free of whatever was keeping me stuck, but I had no idea what I was trying to get free from. There was a place within me that simply had not been met.
Because what do you do when you genuinely love Jesus, have spent years learning about Him, and still live with a frustration and emptiness you cannot explain?
Scripture had shaped me. Prayer was familiar, although much of what I understood as prayer involved talking to God, telling Him what was happening, what I needed, or what concerned me. Worship was different. Worship could become a place where I actually felt an emotional connection with God. Church had been woven through much of my life, and serving gave sincere expression to my faith. I remain grateful for all of it.
And yet a raw truth was beginning to apprehend me:
What I couldn’t yet see was how easily participation could masquerade as intimacy.
I knew how to do Christianity, and I was good at doing. The practices themselves weren’t empty. The difficulty was that I brought the same assumption into my spiritual life that shaped so much of everything else: what mattered required effort, and when the outcome disappointed me, greater effort seemed like the obvious response.
That assumption is difficult to recognize when it wears the clothing of responsibility. It can look remarkably faithful.
I could remain genuinely devoted to Jesus while quietly assuming that the burden of producing the life I longed for rested largely with me. The same belief shaped my relationships. I adjusted, anticipated, gave more, and tried harder, without recognizing that effort could keep a relationship functioning without necessarily making it mutual. Some of what I understood as relational investment was preserving the very pattern that left me useful and increasingly resentful.
At the time, disappointment simply signaled that greater effort was required. That strategy had solved an impressive number of problems throughout my life and helped me survive circumstances I did not yet understand as formative. Giving up wasn’t an option. Neither was questioning whether the strategy I trusted might also be perpetuating what kept me stuck.
Except eventually, effort stopped being enough. Exhaustion settled into my life like an uninvited houseguest, the kind who arrives without being asked and shows no particular interest in leaving.
This wasn’t a dramatic crisis of faith. I hadn’t stopped believing. As far as I knew, I loved Jesus and had Him. I was inside a life sincerely built around Jesus, surrounded by practices and people that mattered to me, yet unable to explain the frustration and emptiness that remained.
Because responsibility was the lens through which I knew how to interpret difficulty, my first curiosity wasn’t whether the way I was living needed to change. It was whether I was somehow sabotaging the very life I wanted.
Was this my fault?
Maybe there was a blind spot I hadn’t discovered, an area I had overlooked, a truth I had failed to understand. Even my dissatisfaction became another problem for which I felt responsible. That question followed me beneath the activity, competence, serving, and learning, becoming particularly difficult to ignore in those rare quiet moments when there was nothing left to accomplish and no one immediately needed anything from me.
Eventually, all those smaller questions gathered themselves into one.
What am I missing?
Even then, I didn’t experience the question as a profound spiritual awakening. Mostly, it irritated me. My instinct was still to locate the deficiency. If I could discover where I was sabotaging myself, surely I could correct it. There had to be an answer.
Find the problem. Find the answer. Keep moving.
That was a language I understood because having an answer had been useful to me for a very long time.
Growing up with an alcoholic father, I learned how quickly a question could become a search for who was responsible when something wasn’t the way he wanted it. I learned to pay attention, read the room, and have an answer ready. Quickly. I didn’t understand this as self-protection. I only knew that being able to answer could keep me out of trouble, while not knowing could leave me exposed.
Long before I had language for any of that, having an answer had become one of the ways I knew how to stay safe. That history followed me into adulthood more quietly than I understood. Questions still seemed to require answers, and problems called for solutions. Discomfort prompted action. I knew how to respond when there was something to figure out.
There is wisdom in much of that. But I was beginning to encounter places where responsibility could take me only so far. A relationship could matter deeply to me and still resist all my attempts to make it work. Prayer did not always produce clarity. Doing what I believed was responsible did not guarantee the relational outcome I hoped for. I could search for what I had done wrong, make adjustments, try again, and still find the same ache waiting for me.
Perhaps that is part of what desperation eventually does. It brings us to the edge of what we know, and sometimes beyond the boundaries of what feels comfortable, until we become willing to consider that there may be something we simply cannot see from where we are standing.
We cannot know what we do not yet know.
For most of my life, that reality would have sent me searching for more information. But I was becoming tired enough to wonder whether more information was actually what I needed.
For a long time, the question had been What am I missing? I had searched for the answer in myself, in relationships, in faith, and in every new understanding that promised to help me live them better. Eventually, even that question began to feel exhausted. I had tried so many ways of becoming someone who would be wanted: enough, but not too much; present, but not needy; generous without expecting anything in return. Someone people would think of, invite, include, perhaps even pursue simply because they wanted me near.
Somewhere along the way, I began to wonder whether What am I missing? was still the question. Perhaps something deeper had been hiding beneath it all along:
Why had I believed it was always mine to figure out how to secure connection?
I knew how to move toward people. I knew how to notice, anticipate, offer, accommodate, and make room. I knew how to become valuable inside a relationship. What I did not know was what it felt like to stop managing connection long enough to discover whether someone might move toward me.
Beneath my longing to be included was something far more tender.
I wanted to be wanted.
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Not because of what I could provide, anticipate, carry, or become for someone else. I wanted to know the experience of being thought of first, reached for, delighted in, and pursued simply because my presence mattered. Perhaps I had spent much of my life learning how to maintain connection without ever realizing how deeply I longed to receive it.
That realization did not suddenly give me an answer. If anything, it brought me closer to an ache I had spent years trying to resolve without understanding what it was asking for. Somewhere within me, I think I already knew there was more. I simply had no language for what I was longing for and no familiar path that seemed to lead me there.
Part of the difficulty was that I trusted what I felt. My emotions could feel like reliable evidence of what was happening. If I felt overlooked, used, rejected, or unseen, the feeling itself was real. What wasn’t available to me was an understanding of the lens through which I was interpreting it.
I didn’t yet recognize how much that lens had been shaped by experience, beliefs about relationship, and the ways I had learned to protect connection. An emotion could alert me that something important was happening without necessarily giving me an accurate interpretation of why it was happening, what another person intended, or what the experience meant about me. That distinction belongs to what I understand now. I wasn’t making it then.
Desire was even less familiar. Beyond wanting to be seen, to belong, and to remain connected, I don’t know that I could have told you much about what I wanted. I had spent far more time learning how to recognize and respond to the needs around me than discovering the desires within me.
And that made turning inward complicated. I had certainly turned inward before, but even there my attention was often organized around relationship. I read my emotional responses for clues about what another person might be feeling, whether I had disappointed them, what they wanted from me, or what I needed to do differently. What I understood as self-examination was still largely shaped by the emotional cues of others, my sense of responsibility for what was happening, and the familiar pressure to adjust myself accordingly.
I didn’t yet know how to look within without immediately searching for what needed to be corrected. Desperation was beginning to tilt that familiar perspective.
Perhaps moving forward would require a different kind of inward journey. I couldn’t have told you what made it different or where it would lead. I only sensed that the way I had always gone looking for answers inside myself was somehow part of what I could no longer keep doing in exactly the same way.
And strangely, that created a kind of space I had rarely known. There was no immediate answer waiting there, no obvious correction or clear responsibility to assume. I was simply beginning to wonder what might happen if I stayed with my own experience long enough to notice it before rushing to make sense of it.
And perhaps, somewhere inside that space, there might also be room for God.
I didn’t know what that meant yet. I only knew I was tired of circling the same familiar explanations and arriving at the same place. The desperation that had once driven me to work harder was beginning, almost imperceptibly, to make me willing to stop long enough to wonder.
Maybe what I was longing for wasn’t going to be found by becoming more efficient at the way I had always searched.
I still wanted an answer. I wanted to understand and know what to do next. But something was changing in the absence of one. Instead of immediately sending me back into another search, the unanswered ache itself was beginning to hold my attention.
I had spent years asking what I was missing. Now, for the first time, I was beginning to wonder whether the better question might be what I had never learned to receive.
I didn’t know. I had no language for what was happening, and no revelation suddenly brought everything together. But somewhere beneath the frustration was the faintest curiosity that there might be something here I had never learned how to notice: something about myself, something about relationship, perhaps even something about the God I already loved.
The ache was still there. I simply wasn’t quite as quick to make it another problem to solve. And that left a little room for something unfamiliar.
Perhaps there was more here than I had known how to notice.
And somewhere in that turning, I was beginning to listen.