10 A Tear in the Veil

Paul and Shelby, servants of Jesus Christ, longing for His fullness.

To all who feel the quiet groaning for more of God — grace to you, and peace.

For me, Paul, there was no single dramatic moment. No conference, no sudden revelation, no point where everything shifted at once. I’ve always been the type who questions hard until convinced — and once convinced, I become a zealot. My zeal for Christ was real, but my understanding was shallow. I proclaimed the gospel to those who would listen, yet looking back I was living far beneath what Scripture described.

In 2021, after the loss of my paternal grandmother, then my dad, and then my mom’s parents soon after in 2022, I entered a season of numbness. I was disciplined, faithful in duty, but running on autopilot. I threw myself into work, often staying up four to six hours alone after Shelby went to sleep. Our marriage functioned, but we were living more like responsible roommates than partners in a covenant.

Meanwhile, Shelby’s hunger for God exploded. It was almost annoying at times — not because it was wrong, but because in my pride I felt threatened by it. I told her to slow down, to be careful, to not get carried away. Looking back, I see that part of me did not like that she was seeking God with more passion than I was. I confessed that to the Lord later and repented.

After losing my grandparents and my dad in tight succession, something in me finally began questioning what had become fixed assumptions in my mind. I wasn’t yet awakened, but I had begun to open. I started reading Scripture more diligently out of competition than conviction — but God meets us where we are.

The more I read, the more I wrestled: Jesus saying “go and sin no more,” Paul calling us to “imitate me as I imitate Christ,” and yet my own hidden struggle with intrusive temptations — especially bitterness and lust, which I knew was sinful and destructive. I couldn’t reconcile how, as someone filled with the Holy Spirit, I could sin in ways that felt alien to my own desires.

For Shelby, the story was different — and far more sudden.

Her turning point came in November 2021, during one of the most intense seasons of our lives. Earlier in the year, after my dad’s passing, Shelby had become severely ill. Our third child had a seizure. Her heart started racing violently at night. Sleep became nearly impossible. Waves of anxiety struck without warning. Her body felt unstable. Her mind felt overwhelmed.

It was a perfect storm of physical pressure, spiritual pressure, and sorrow.

For months, the Lord had been drawing her — quiet moments in Scripture, gentle pullings of the heart — but in that moment, everything collided. She reached the end of her strength. She couldn’t hold herself together anymore. She cried out to God, fully surrendered.

And that night, something happened that she had never experienced before.

She sensed Him enter the room.

The only way she could describe it later was in the language John uses in Revelation: “a roar like the sound of many waters.” She hadn’t read that description at the time — but it matched exactly. It wasn’t audible to her natural ears, yet it was real, overwhelming, and unmistakably Him.

That moment tore the veil. Something in her spirit woke up. Her life shifted from surviving to seeking — Scripture, prayer, repentance, obedience. From that point forward, pursuing God became daily, urgent, and consuming.

Looking back, we now see it clearly: for Shelby, that night was the pivot — the moment everything changed. What we didn’t understand then was that her surrender wasn’t the end of the battle but the beginning of a far greater one. The months and years ahead would reveal just how fiercely the enemy fights when a heart turns fully toward God.

As the years went on, something else stirred in us — a growing desire to understand what the earliest believers actually lived and practiced. Not in an academic way, but in a hungry way: What did following Jesus truly look like for them? How did they pray, love, endure, worship, and walk?

The more we read Scripture as one whole story, the more we sensed that the Christianity we were living was far smaller than the Christianity described in those early pages.

At the same time, in early 2021 and through much of that year, we were trying to carry far more than we were ever meant to carry. In our exhaustion and fear, we turned inward. I became an integrative health practitioner, and together we poured hours into research, natural protocols, testing, supplements, and alternative approaches. We refused to go to doctors because we didn’t trust the medical system, and without realizing it we began trying to heal Shelby ourselves in our own strength. Some of what we learned was helpful. Some was misguided. But underneath it all was the same quiet theme: we were trying to fix ourselves.

We didn’t yet understand how deeply the Lord desired to reshape our minds, our beliefs, and even the spiritual agreements we had unknowingly made.

That inner tension — the desire for God, the weight of life, the hunger to understand Scripture, the longing to walk more faithfully, the confusion of how to find it — became a holy unsettledness inside of us. Not depression. Not despair. A quiet drive. A restlessness that would not go away.

Jesus said, "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled" (Matt. 5:6). That promise began to unfold within us long before we recognized it.

Hunger for God began shaping every part of our lives — our prayers, our parenting, the atmosphere of our home, the words we spoke, and the way we responded to fear, sickness, and sorrow.

Little by little, our home shifted from a place of noise and striving into a place of seeking.

We had no idea what was coming next — only that hunger was the first sign of it. The quiet beginning of something deeper God was preparing.

If you feel that same holy restlessness — that ache that says, There has to be more of God than this — know that you’re not alone. And the One who begins hunger always knows how to satisfy it.

We’re grateful you’ve walked this far with us.

In the love of Christ,
Paul & Shelby