I grew up in a home where God was real. My mother held Bible study in our living room. My father worked two jobs and still found time to seek God. We went to church, sang in the choir, and memorized scripture. By every outward measure, I knew God.

Except I did not. Not personally.

I knew His name. I knew His stories. I could quote His Word. But knowing about someone and actually knowing them are two very different things — and for years, I lived in the space between those two realities without ever recognizing the gap.

You Can Have All the Information and Still Miss the Relationship

There is a Hebrew word at the heart of my book A Relationship with God — yada. It is the word the Bible uses for knowing God. And it does not mean knowing facts about someone. It means intimate, face-to-face knowledge. The kind that comes from time
spent together, from showing up through hard things, from conversation and trust built over years.

That is the kind of knowing God is after with every one of us.

But most of us settle for something much less. We attend church. We know the right answers. We believe the right things. And we go home unchanged — because the knowing stayed in our heads and never reached our hearts.

I did that for years. My Bible sat on my desk. I believed in God. I just was not spending time with Him — and the distance showed. In my anxiety. In my decisions. In the hollowness, I felt even when everything looked fine on the outside.

What Changed

What changed for me was not more information. I already had plenty of that.

What changed was intention — making a decision to actually show up. To open the Word as a conversation. To pray as someone talking to a Father who was actually listening. To sit still long enough to hear something back.

The Bible describes it as a seed principle. Whatever you plant in your heart will grow. Whatever you water will grow faster. For years, I had stopped planting — and the field of my heart had grown over with the cares of the world, the pressures of work, the noise of daily life. I did not notice how far I had drifted until I finally stopped long enough to look.

When I started planting again — reading His Word, sitting with it, speaking it over my life — something shifted. The same verses I had read a dozen times started speaking directly into what I was carrying. Something was actually changing in me. That is the Holy Spirit at work.

The Question Worth Asking

There is a question I ask in my book that I want to ask here too:

Do you actually know Him? Him, personally — the God behind the name you grew up hearing?

If the honest answer is not yet — that is exactly where this begins. You do not need more information. You need an introduction. And He has been waiting to make one.

The God who created you knows your name, your history, and everything you are carrying right now. He is not waiting for you to clean up, catch up, or figure it out first. He is waiting for you to open the door.

He has been standing on the other side of it your whole life.

A Relationship with God by Dianne Walker is available now.