If you read my email this week, you already know, my heart is heavy.
Prayer has been the only thing keeping me from completely crashing out. So here’s the rest of the story.
Last year, I was fifteen clients deep. Running on fumes. Writing non-stop, captions, emails, blog posts, show notes, you get it. Add in some family drama that only the oldest daughter can handle and I was cooked. Work-Life Balance? Non-existent.
One night after burning the candle at both ends (and probably somewhere in the middle), I climbed into bed thinking, this isn’t working.
So I did the scariest thing I’ve ever done in business: I fired half of my clients.
Not because I didn’t care. Not because I wanted to quit. But because I wanted to actually like doing what I was doing again. I wanted to breathe.
Prayer was the thing that gave me the courage to do it. And just so we’re clear, it wasn’t always a structured thing. Some days it sounded like gratitude. Some days it was, “Are you there God, it’s me.” And sometimes (most of the time) it’s me saying, “God, what exactly is your plan here because I am NOT seeing it.”
And here’s the thing…prayer didn’t magically fix everything. The hard stuff was still hard. The world was still loud. But it shifted me. It reminded me what actually mattered. (FYI it’s not your instagram grid.)
That reminder showed up again recently when I went to a funeral at the Lutheran church I grew up in. The first time I’d been back in over a decade.
It was probably one of the more beautiful funerals I’ve been to in a long time, and I’ve been to plenty. It makes me wonder why more people don’t have funerals in a church anymore…but that’s a different blog post.
Anyway, the smell was the same. The light through the stained glass was the same. And yes, I sat in the exact same pew because muscle memory is a thing. I went to youth group, lock-ins, and confirmation camps where we drank too much Orange Crush and thought we were too cool for church. (Spoiler: we were not.)
The pastor, the same one who married us and baptized our girls, gave me a hug and said hello like no time had passed. (We text now and then, he keeps me in the loop.) It wasn’t sentimental or dramatic, it just felt grounding.
For a bit of backstory, I’m what they call a cradle Lutheran. My grandmother (my mom’s mom) converted from Catholicism in the late 1950s to marry my grandfather because my German great-grandmother said so. IYKYK.
To make it more interesting my mom was raised Lutheran and my dad was raised Catholic. My dad’s mom (my grandma) didn’t care about this fact, just that we were raised in church.
We moved around a lot growing up, Buffalo, Rochester, a stint in Massachusetts, Scotia, and every move meant a new church but the same rhythm of hymns, liturgy, and prayers that run deep.
As a wife and mother, we’ve tried our fair share of other churches. Lutheran (of course), Methodist, Baptist (that one was wild for me), even non-denominational. Half my family is Catholic so I’ve sat in many Catholic churches as well. And here’s the thing, each one taught me something new about how people experience God’s love, and that’s beautiful.
For me personally the rhythm of the Lutheran church is my baseline. The cadence, the liturgy, the repetition it’s what ground me. After circling the block a few times, I can say that’s where I belong. (My Oma is clapping, probably in German.)
Faith hasn’t always been simple for me. There were whole seasons I didn’t show up at all. Times I avoided church on purpose. Times I was angry with God and wanted to give up on faith completely. It’s funny how life works sometimes. Turns out faith has always been there, waiting for me to stop trying to do it all on my own.
That’s the messy, imperfect side of faith. The wrestling. The ugly crying. The avoiding and then showing up again anyway.
And maybe that’s what prayer really is. Not a perfect answer. Not a magic fix. Just an invitation to stop. To rest. To breathe. To take the next right step.
And if prayer isn’t your thing? Totally fine. The heaviness you’re feeling still has somewhere to go. Write to your representatives. Show up at a school board meeting. Donate to a local nonprofit. Have the hard conversation you’ve been avoiding.
Prayer changes us. But so does action.
If your heart feels heavy too, maybe this is your reminder: pause. Pray (or act). Let yourself be changed.
Because this is not the way. But together, with prayer and action, we can find a better one.
