Modern Burlap began, as many callings do, with something small.
Not a vision statement. Not a platform. Not a sense that I was doing something especially spiritual or important. It began with a product.
I was a new mother, and I wanted the words of Scripture and hope to feel present in our home, not confined to Sunday mornings or framed verses we rarely stopped to read. I wanted faith to feel woven into ordinary days, into feeding schedules and bedtime routines and the quiet work of loving someone before you know how. So I made something. Before I knew it, making more items like this became a hobby. Then it became a business.
At the time, I did not name it a calling. I did not imagine it would grow or gather people or carry weight beyond our own walls. It was simply a desire to create what I wish existed. Something placed into the world with care and prayer, entrusted to God to use or not use as He saw fit.
Scripture is filled with stories like this. God rarely begins with spectacle. He begins with what is already in someone’s hands. A shepherd’s staff. A few loaves and fish. A jar of oil. A young woman’s yes.
Over and over, God meets people where they are, not where they think they should be. He works through the ordinary, the available, the willing. He does not wait for readiness to feel complete. He waits for openness.
Faith has never been about starting from certainty. It has always been about responding from honesty.
When we read Scripture carefully, we see that God does not call people out of fully formed confidence. He calls them out of real life. Out of routines and responsibilities and relationships already in motion. He interrupts days that look like every other day and invites trust before explanation.
This is still how He works.
Many of us assume faith must begin once we are more disciplined, more informed, more resolved. We quietly believe that God is waiting for a future version of us to show up before He can do anything meaningful with our lives. But the story Scripture tells says otherwise.
God meets us in kitchens and offices. In exhaustion and longing. In seasons when faith feels sturdy and seasons when it feels threadbare.
Faith that meets us where we are is not weak faith. It is biblical faith.
It is faith that shows up without pretending. Faith that brings questions alongside obedience. Faith that continues to offer what it has, even when it is unsure what God will make of it.
Looking back, I can see that the product was never the point. It was simply the place where obedience took shape. The physical form faith happened to take in that season.
And seasons change.
Scripture does not shame seasons for ending. It honors them for what they carried. The same God who multiplies bread also tells His people when to gather what remains. The same God who sends people out also calls them to pause, to listen, to wait.
Faithfulness does not mean clinging to one expression forever. It means staying attentive to what God is doing now.
This journal exists because that attentiveness remains.
Not as a replacement for what was, but as a continuation of the deeper call underneath it. A call to live faith out loud in ordinary life. To notice where God is speaking before we feel ready. To offer what we have again, even if the form looks different this time.
If you are reading this and wondering whether your faith is too small, too unfinished, too tangled to be useful, Scripture would gently disagree.
God has always met His people on the road, not at the destination.
He meets us while we are becoming.
Faith that meets us where we are is not the end of the story.
It is the way the story begins.