What Draws Me Toward God? Recognizing the Patterns of Grace Within Me

A person walking attentively along a softly lit woodland path, reflecting the patterns of grace through which we learn to recognize God drawing us closer.

There is something that often happens to me during morning prayer - a name rises. Sometimes it belongs to someone I have spoken with recently. Other times, it is someone I have not thought about in months. There is no obvious reason for this person to have entered my awareness. I wasn’t thinking about them before I sat down to pray. Nothing I was reading necessarily reminded me of them, and yet, there they are.

Over time, I have learned to pay attention when this happens. I don’t immediately assume I know what it means. A name rising in prayer is not an instruction from God that I must obey without question. Instead, it has become something more subtle. It is familiar.

I recognize it as one of the patterns of grace that has developed within my relationship with God. So when a name rises, I become curious.

Why this person, Lord?

What is stirring within me?

Am I being invited to pray? To reach out? To simply remain here for a while and listen?

Sometimes I send a text or an email. Occasionally, I call. And sometimes the person whose name rises is exactly the person I would rather not contact. That is when this pattern becomes especially interesting.

Patterns of Grace Are Not Always Easy

There are people I am delighted to reach toward. When one of their names rises within me, responding can feel almost effortless. But that is not always what happens. Sometimes a name carries history with it. There may be disappointment or resentment. Perhaps the relationship is complicated. My immediate response may be quite clear: I don’t want to do this. Yet, beneath that resistance, I have noticed something else - Ease.

It is difficult to describe because ease does not mean that what I am being invited into is easy. I may still grapple with whether I really want to participate, which can demand time to sit with what has arisen before I understand how, or even whether, I am being invited to respond. But somewhere beneath all of that, there is room within me. I don’t feel driven or forced, for that matter; there is simply enough freedom to remain with the invitation.

Over time, I have come to recognize that interior ease as important. It doesn’t automatically tell me what God is asking. But it causes me to lean closer. I know something about this movement. And so I listen.

Ease does not mean that what I am being invited into is easy.

Learning to Recognize My Patterns of Grace

This is one of the things I find so beautiful about discernment. Relationship has history.

As we spend time with God, we begin to notice how we experience that relationship; and therefore, certain movements repeat, and certain interior responses become familiar. We begin to recognize what happens within us when we are being drawn closer to God.

For me, one of those movements is this underlying ease that makes participation possible. For someone else, the experience may be entirely different. That matters! God knows us personally. God knows the particular creation standing before Him. Therefore, the relationship you have with God will not be identical to mine.

This is why I hesitate to give someone a list of things they should experience when God is near. The invitation is much more personal than that. Instead, perhaps we can begin by asking: What happens within me when I am being drawn toward God? Not what should happen, but what actually happens?

A Pattern Is an Invitation to Pay Attention

There is another distinction I have learned to hold carefully. Recognizing a pattern does not mean I know what God will do next. When a name rises in my prayer, I do not assume that because I reached out the last time this happened, I should automatically reach out again. The pattern gets my attention. It does not make the decision for me.

A pattern of grace is not an instruction. It is an invitation to pay attention.

Perhaps this is one reason noticing our patterns can become so important in discernment. They give us somewhere to begin. We notice something familiar and become curious: God and I have been somewhere like this before.

That recognition invites us deeper into relationship rather than giving us an answer. God can still surprise us! The person whose name rises may need nothing from us at all. Perhaps we are simply being invited to hold them in prayer. Or perhaps their name has stirred something within us that God wants us to notice. The pattern does not confine God to what happened before. Rather, it teaches us to listen when something familiar returns.

What Draws Me Toward God?

I wonder how often these patterns of grace are already present in our lives and we have not thought to notice them. We may look for God in the extraordinary while overlooking the repeated movements that have quietly become part of our relationship.

This is not about chasing a particular feeling or trying to reproduce a past spiritual experience. It is about becoming attentive to ourselves in relationship with God:

When have I felt drawn closer?

What happened within me?

What allowed me to participate?

Where was there freedom, even if what I was being invited toward was difficult?

Becoming more discerning begins, at least in part, by becoming more familiar with the landscape of our own souls. Not so that we can predict God, but so that when grace touches something familiar within us, we notice, and we lean a little closer and say: I recognize something here, Lord. Help me listen.

An Embodied Pause: Remembering Grace

Find a comfortable place to sit and allow your feet to rest against the ground. Rather than searching for something new, allow yourself to remember. Bring to mind a time when you felt drawn toward God. It does not need to have been dramatic. Let one experience come.

Notice what happens in your body as you remember it. Was there something within you that allowed you to remain, receive, respond, or participate?

Don’t try to name it too quickly.

Take a slow breath in: You know me, Lord.

And as you exhale: Help me recognize Your grace.

Remain there for a few breaths and notice what returns.

Journaling with God

When you are ready, bring your noticing into conversation with God:

• When I remember times I have been drawn toward God, which interior movements recur?

• Have I ever experienced freedom or ease within something that was still difficult? What did that movement make possible?

• What pattern of grace might God be inviting me to notice more carefully?

  
  

A Closing Prayer

Loving God, You know me more intimately than I know myself. Help me notice the grace already moving through my life. Teach me to recognize without assuming, to listen without rushing, and to remain curious about the ways You draw me toward You. Amen.

From the garden within me to the garden within you, where God awaits,

Kimi