How to Develop a Personal Relationship with God — The Older Tradition
⏱ 15 min read
You believe. You have believed for years. The faith is not in question. What is in question is something quieter, harder to name in conversation — the small private suspicion that the relationship you are supposed to have with God is, in your case, more theoretical than felt. The Sunday morning is there. The grace before the meal is there. The honest moments at the bedside of a sick relative, the silent prayers in the car when no one else can hear — they are real. But the daily knowing, the kind of nearness the older Christians wrote about in their letters, the small ongoing companionship with the Lord through the unremarkable hours of a Wednesday — that part has stayed a little out of reach. By the third decade of your faith, you have stopped asking the question out loud, because asking it makes you feel like a beginner.
This is the slow article on how to develop a personal relationship with God, and it does not begin with a chart of devotional levels or a programme for a deeper walk. It begins with Brother Lawrence — a seventeenth-century lay brother who washed dishes in a Carmelite kitchen in Paris and built, across years of small unremarkable hours, the most lived-with description of practical nearness to God the contemplative tradition produced — and the recognition that the relationship you are trying to deepen is built less by intensity than by the slow daily acknowledgement that He is in the room. The Stilling Waves Prayer Journal for Women carries Lawrence’s pattern into a daily companion — a single passage, a small structure for the slow attending, a page that does not demand more than you can bring on a tired Wednesday — if you would like a place to take the practice after the article. For now, read slowly.
The trouble with the modern instinct for a personal relationship with God is that it imagines the relationship as an event-based one. The Christian conferences, the worship-night encounters, the prayer-retreats where breakthrough happens — all of them imagine the relationship deepening in episodes. Lawrence would gently reframe the matter. The relationship deepens, in his teaching, almost nowhere in episodes. It deepens in the cumulative weight of thousands of unremarkable small turnings of the mind toward God across the ordinary hours of dishwashing, walking, sitting, cooking, working. The episode is not where the knowing grows. The daily kitchen is.
The lost shape of the practice
There is a kind of relationship with God the modern Christian shelf has largely forgotten how to describe. It does not look like the highlight reel. It does not look like a peak spiritual experience. It does not look like the breakthrough story told from the conference stage.
It looks like this: a woman who, while making the morning coffee, briefly acknowledges that the Lord is with her in the kitchen. A woman who, in the small pause between two emails, offers a quiet sentence — be with me through the next half hour. A woman who, walking the dog at half past four in the afternoon, notices the light and says, almost without words, thank You. A woman whose mind, across the day, returns to God in small unscheduled ways — the way the mind of someone in love returns to the beloved across the unremarkable hours.
That is what Brother Lawrence described in The Practice of the Presence of God. The knowing built not by elevated moments but by the small daily traffic of attention. He learned it across thirty years in a kitchen. The kitchen was not the obstacle to the practice. The kitchen was the soil the practice grew in, and the soil turned out to be considerably richer than the chapel he had imagined the practice would require.
If the relationship you are trying to deepen has felt thin precisely because you have been waiting for the next conference or the next breakthrough night, that is because the modern model is shaped around episodes that, for most people, are rare. The older model, the one Lawrence taught the novice priests and the visiting nobles who came to the abbey to ask him about it, is built in your existing Wednesday. The Wednesday was always enough. The practice is the small daily noticing of who is in it with you.
(For the moments when God seems silent — the long stretches that almost always come on the way to a deeper knowing — what to do when God is silent — the dark night tradition sits beside this article as the older companion. And if the dryness is the long present shape of the question, when you feel spiritually dry — the practice for the year God goes quiet is the slow letter for the silent year.)
The first passage: the simple walking before God
“Ever since that time I walk before God simply, in faith, with humility, and with love.”
— Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly.
Notice how plain the sentence is. There is nothing elaborate about it. Lawrence does not describe a spiritual technique. He does not name a methodology. He says I walk before God simply. The four adverbs do the whole work of the sentence. Simply. In faith. With humility. And with love. That is the entire practice.
The smallness of the sentence is its instruction. The relationship with God that Lawrence inhabits across forty years of kitchen work is not a complex one. It is simple. The simplicity is not naive; it is hard-won. He has lived past the temptation to elaborate the practice into a method. He has lived past the desire for spiritual experiences to validate the practice. What he has left, at the end of forty years, is I walk before God simply — and he is recommending the simplicity to you not because it is easy but because it is sustainable. The elaborate practice will not survive your fifties. The simple walking will.
This is the line that quiets the question am I doing this right. You have been asking, possibly for years, whether your relationship with God is the right shape — whether it is intense enough, deep enough, real enough by some standard you cannot quite articulate. Lawrence would tell you that the question of right shape is itself the wrong question. The shape is simple walking before Him, in whatever the day asks you to walk through. In faith, which means trusting He is present even when you do not feel Him. With humility, which means not requiring spectacular experience to be sure He is real. And with love, which means letting the small daily affection flow toward Him in the unremarkable hours, without measuring its strength.
That is the relationship. That is the whole architecture. You are already, on most days, walking somewhere. The practice is to walk before God — to notice, while walking, that He is the One you are walking before — and to let the noticing happen simply, in faith, with humility, and with love. Nothing more elaborate is required. Nothing more elaborate would actually be more useful.
The second passage: the daily applying of the mind
“Thus I continued some years applying my mind carefully the rest of the day, and even in the midst of my work, to the presence of God, whom I considered always as with me, often as in my heart.”
— Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God
This is the most practical sentence Lawrence ever wrote. Read it slowly, twice.
Notice the verb. Applying my mind carefully. The practice has a small ongoing effort to it. Lawrence does not pretend that the awareness of God’s presence happens automatically. He acknowledges that he had to apply his mind, repeatedly, across the rest of the day, even in the midst of my work. The applying is the practice. The application is conscious. The relationship deepens in the small daily volitional acts of bringing the mind back to the recognition that God is there.
This is the line that names the work without exaggerating it. The work is small — applying the mind is a much gentler verb than striving — but it is real. It is something you do, repeatedly, in the small intervals of an unremarkable day. The work is not heroic. It is closer to a recurring small habit of attention.
Whom I considered always as with me, often as in my heart. Notice the two locations. With me, and in my heart. Lawrence is not asking you to invent the presence. He is teaching you to consider the presence — to acknowledge what is already true. He is with you. He is in the room. He is in your heart, often, in ways the modern Christian rarely pauses to acknowledge. The applying of the mind is not the manufacturing of a felt presence. It is the slow daily acknowledgement of a presence that is already real, whether or not you happen to be feeling it at that particular moment.
For the woman whose relationship with God has felt thin because she has been waiting to feel something, this is the older permission. The feeling is not the relationship. The acknowledgement is the relationship. He is here. I know He is here. I acknowledge that He is here. That is the practice. Repeated, gently, across the small intervals of a Tuesday — the kettle boiling, the email loading, the child returning from school, the dishes being washed — the acknowledgement builds the relationship. Not the feeling. The acknowledging.
This is how to develop a personal relationship with God in the older sense. The relationship is not deepened by waiting for moments when it feels deeper. The relationship is deepened by the small repeated act of acknowledging Him in the unremarkable moments, until the unremarkable moments themselves become the texture of the relationship.
(For the wider companion on the daily verse that sits inside this practice — the small passage that can be carried through the unremarkable hours — starting your day with God’s word — 14 verses to wake up to is the morning companion to Lawrence’s pattern.)
The somatic that goes with the small acknowledging
Pause here. The practice has a body to it, and the body is where Lawrence’s older language becomes most translatable to a modern Wednesday.
Sit somewhere quiet, for a moment, exactly where you are reading. Let the shoulders lower by a small amount — not by trying to relax them, but by stopping the small ongoing effort to hold them up. Take one slow inhale. On the exhale, let the breath go all the way out, slower than the inhale. As the exhale finishes, let one short interior sentence form: Lord, You are here. That is the somatic-and-spiritual practice combined. The body lowering. The breath finishing. The small interior acknowledgement that He is in the room.
Then return to the reading.
The somatic matters because Lawrence’s applying of the mind is most easily done in a settled body. The braced body cannot apply itself gently to anything. The body that has learned to lower its shoulders, even by a small amount, can. The small daily acknowledgement of the presence works best when it rides on a slow exhale. Lawrence would not have used the word somatic. He knew the body was the carrier of the soul’s small practices, and the kitchen tasks he did across forty years gave his body a thousand small chances to settle into the rhythm of the applying-of-the-mind.
The Stilling Waves slow companion
The Stilling Waves Prayer Journal for Women was built around this older small-daily-acknowledging shape — a single passage, a small structure for the response, a slow page that does not demand performance. The journal is not the relationship; the relationship is His and yours. But the small daily appointment, kept at the same hour by the same lamp, with the page already shaped, becomes a small daily anchor for the practice Lawrence taught — the slow, ordinary, unspectacular returning of the attention to the One who has been present all along. The friction was not your character. The friction was the absence of a small daily shape that the older Christians built into their lives almost without noticing. The Stilling Waves journal carries that shape into the contemporary evening.
This is what how to develop a personal relationship with God looks like in a daily companion — not a programme, not a course, not a series of events. A slow daily acknowledging, made portable for the bedside table.
The third passage: the holy freedom
“It also begets in us a holy freedom, and, if I may so speak, a familiarity with God, where, when we ask, He supplies the graces we need.”
— Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God
This is the passage that names the slow harvest of the practice. Read it slowly, twice.
A holy freedom, and, if I may so speak, a familiarity with God. Notice that Lawrence hesitates on the word familiarity. If I may so speak. He is not quite sure the word is reverent enough. But he says it anyway, because the word is accurate. The relationship that the slow daily practice produces is, in its grown form, familiar. Not casual. Not irreverent. Familiar, in the older sense — the sense that the woman knows the One she has been walking with across decades the way one knows a deep companion, in the cadences and the silences and the small daily gestures that no longer require explanation.
For the woman whose relationship with God has felt formal even after years of faithfulness, this is the slow promise. The familiarity is on the other side of the practice. You cannot rush to it. You cannot manufacture it in a single retreat. It grows, almost without your noticing, across thousands of small daily acknowledgements, until one Tuesday morning you find that the prayer at the kettle has become the natural shape of your interior speech, and the Lord has become the One you are simply with, in a way the formal phrasings of your earlier devotional life no longer adequately describe.
A holy freedom. Notice the adjective. Holy. The freedom is not the casual freedom of irreverence. It is the freedom of a soul that no longer has to perform devotion, because the relationship has become real enough that performance is unnecessary. The depleted woman who has been performing her faith for thirty years arrives, in this older tradition, at the freedom that follows the practice — the freedom from having to prove the faith, from having to manufacture the feeling, from having to compete for spiritual experience. The freedom is what the small daily acknowledging eventually produces, when it has been kept long enough that the acknowledging has become the ground rather than the effort.
When we ask, He supplies the graces we need. Notice the order. The familiarity precedes the asking-and-supplying. The relationship has to be the ground before the prayer of need becomes the small, ordinary, expectant request of a familiar daughter to a familiar Father. The asking is easier when the relationship is established. The relationship is established through the small daily practice. The whole architecture turns on the unspectacular foundation.
For the woman whose prayers have felt like they are bouncing off the ceiling, this is the older diagnosis. The prayer was not failing because of the prayer. The prayer was failing because the relationship beneath the prayer had not yet been built in the small daily acknowledging that the older Christians built theirs in. The fix is not better prayer technique. The fix is the small daily applying-of-the-mind to the presence of God, repeated across years, until the familiarity grows and the asking finds its proper home.
How to actually begin tomorrow
Here is what Lawrence’s pattern looks like, translated to the day you have ahead of you.
Pick one small interval in your day to acknowledge His presence. Not the whole day. One interval. The kettle boiling in the morning. The walk to the car after a meeting. The few minutes after the school run when the house is quiet. Pick the one that is most reliably available.
In that interval, say one short interior sentence to the Lord. Lord, You are here. Be with me through the afternoon. Thank You for the light. The sentence is short. The sentence is yours. The sentence is unmonitored by anyone but Him. You are not building a practice for an audience. You are building a small daily appointment that no one else needs to know about.
Keep the interval for two weeks. Just that one interval. No more. The temptation will be to add three more intervals on day five, and the addition is what will collapse the practice by day eight. The slow growth is in the keeping of the single small interval until the keeping becomes automatic.
Then, after two weeks, add a second interval. Not before. The second interval grows out of the first being settled. Lawrence built his practice by accretion across years. The pattern was always one small interval at a time.
Let the practice produce nothing visible for the first hundred days. You will not feel a deeper relationship with God by the third week. You may not feel one by the third month. The familiarity Lawrence describes is built across years, not weeks. The early stretches are unspectacular by design. The relationship is growing underneath the surface in ways the woman keeping the practice does not yet observe.
That is how to develop a personal relationship with God in the older sense. Not a programme. Not an event-based deepening. The small daily acknowledgement that He is in the room, kept across years, until the acknowledging becomes the natural shape of your interior speech and the Lord becomes, slowly, the familiar One you are simply with.
(The sibling articles on the same contemplative ground sit at how to develop a quiet time with God — Brother Lawrence’s hidden method and how to pray morning and evening — Habermann’s daily prayers.)
What a decade of the slow practice looks like
A decade of Lawrence’s pattern does not look like a transformation arc. It looks like a woman who, in her early forties, was acknowledging God’s presence once a day at the kettle — and in her early fifties is acknowledging Him a hundred small times a day without thinking, the way you no longer think about which hand reaches for the cup. The acknowledging has become automatic. The relationship has become familiar. The asking has begun to receive the graces it needs without requiring a conference or a breakthrough night, because the relationship beneath the asking has been built in the unspectacular small intervals of a thousand unremarkable Wednesdays.
That is how to develop a personal relationship with God in the older tradition. Not by intensity. By accretion. Not by event. By the small daily walking-before-Him, simply, in faith, with humility, and with love.
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A daily home for the practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Prayer Journal for Women. Each evening, a short passage and room for the honest sentence — the small daily anchor that holds the practice of His presence together when the busyness of the week would otherwise crowd it out.
The Stilling Waves Prayer Journal for Women carries Brother Lawrence’s older vocabulary — walking before God simply, applying the mind to His presence, the slow growing familiarity — into a daily companion built for the woman whose faith is real and whose nearness has felt distant, and who is ready, slowly, to let the relationship deepen in the unremarkable hours.
