When Prayer Becomes the Floor You Fall On

Good morning friends,

I have a message this morning. Its my birthday and I have a lot on my heart- for others - let me explain because you cant understand until i share the context of the heart and the posture of where this comes from.

There are seasons that bring you to your knees before you even understand what is happening. Not the ordinary hard days, but the kind of crisis that knocks you straight down to the ground and leaves you face to face with the deepest truth you know. Those are the moments when you meet God in places you never expected.

For me, it happened on a carpeted floor during one of the hardest chapters of my life. A storm that shook my world in every direction. Legal pressure, spiritual heaviness, financial strain, emotional pain, all of it pressing in at once. I could not hold myself up. I did not try to. I went to the floor because that was the only place that could hold me. In my own body, and resources i was helpless and vulnerable exposed to something that shook me.

I remember the feel of the carpet against my face. I remember the way my tears soaked right into it. I remember the heaviness in my chest as I yelled, yes, yelled prayers that were not pretty or polished. They were raw. Desperate. They were the kind that rise from a place deeper than words. If there was an X ray ability to show the soul this is where theses prayers came from. I told God I could not breathe under the weight of this and didn’t want to -I was angry and confused but I surrendered ……everything, not because I was brave, but because I was broken. AGAIN!

And here is the part that still humbles me. God met me there. Not in a magical moment. Not in a dramatic rescue. He met me in the carpet right there on the living room floor. He met me in the lowest, most surrendered place of my life. He did not lift me out right away. Instead, He strengthened me from the inside, slowly, quietly, gently. He forged something in me I did not know I would need. A backbone made from His strength, not mine. A steadiness that could hold weight I never imagined.

Romans 12 became my breath during that time. Be joyful in hope. Patient in affliction. Faithful in prayer. Those words held me like a hand on my back. To be faithful in prayer even when the prayer is nothing but tears. Faithful in prayer even when the carpet is the only altar you have. Faithful in prayer even when heaven feels far away and in my insecurity’s feels judgy.

Looking back now, I am proud of the woman I was in that moment on the floor. She was stripped of every plan, every illusion of control, every place to hide. All she had was God. And somehow that was enough. More than enough. That was the beginning of strength that did not come from me at all.

I can tell most of the time when I meet someone who has had those same encounters with God and those who never have. Both are a blessing in their own way. Those who have never fallen that low often carry a lightness that reminds me of what innocence feels like. And those who have been face down nose mashed into the carpet with heaven pressed close carry a depth and that only comes from surviving something that should have taken them out. You can feel it in the way they listen. You can hear it in the weight of their words.

Maybe you have had your own carpet moments. Maybe you know exactly what it feels like to surrender everything. If so, hear this. Heaven bends low in those places. The strength you rise with will not be the strength you fell with. It will be something deeper. Something holy. Something that stays. I promise you that.

There is a strange and beautiful joy that grows in a person who has been rebuilt by God. It is not loud. It is not forced. It is a quiet joy that understands where hope really comes from. It is joy without resentment. Joy without bitterness. Joy that knows what it cost to stand up again, yet still chooses gratitude over grief.

That kind of joy does not deny the pain. It honors it, It says this shaped me. It says the fire that tried to break me ended up forging my backbone instead. It says brave is not a feeling. Brave is a formation.

friends this was what was on my heart. If you have been broken and surrendered i celebrate you! if you haven’t then you're probably not even reading this right now and I pray that you will let God strengthen you in a way that will remain.

Romans 12:12 (a little birthday God wink) calls us to have joy in hope, patience in hardship, and faithfulness in prayer, even in the hardest seasons. Especially then.