When Angel Kendrew set out to explore the Christian faith she went in search of answers. What she found was something far more personal than she expected: a God who invites us into a lifelong journey of renewal and transformation.

I didn’t grow up in a Christian home, and for most of my life God wasn’t a part of the picture. My childhood and early twenties were unsettled in a lot of ways. I moved around a lot, left home young and spent several years in a relationship that was hard in ways I didn’t always have the language for at the time. I became the person who held things together, who fixed problems, who didn’t really stop to ask how I was doing. Looking back, I can see how much of that season was about surviving, not living.

It wasn’t until years later, after I’d rebuilt my life somewhere new, found steady work, and started to feel like myself again, that I met my now-husband, Liam Kendrew, the first real Christian I’d ever properly known.  

He didn’t look at everything I’d been through and see someone broken. He just saw me. He talked about his faith with passion but without pressure, and for the first time I found myself curious to know about the Christian faith. 

Walking into church as a newcomer, I was convinced everyone would take one look at me and know I didn’t belong. Instead, I found people who were patient with every question I threw at them—I had a lot of them.

I sat down most weeks with our pastor (corps officer), Major Mat Badger, who kindly walked me through the Bible, and somewhere in those conversations, something in me settled. For the first time, I didn’t feel like I was carrying everything on my own.

That’s when the real change started, not in my circumstances, but in my mind. I began noticing things I’d never questioned before: what I watched, what I listened to, how I measured a ‘good’ life, what I thought success or worth looked like. Some of it made me genuinely uncomfortable, in a way I couldn’t fully explain. I’ve since come to understand that the discomfort I felt wasn’t a punishment. It was growth.
It was the Holy Spirit convicting me.

Romans 12:2 has become an anchor for me: ‘Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind’. The word Paul uses for ‘conform’ is the idea of being pressed into a mould, like clay, shaped from the outside in by whatever’s around you. But ‘transformed’ is a completely different word. Paul uses the Greek word metamorphousthe to explain transformation, which is where we get the word metamorphosis from. This is the kind of change a caterpillar goes through to become a butterfly.

Not a surface change. But a deep inner transformation from the inside out.

That distinction has meant everything to me. I’m not called to just tidy myself up or blend in a little better with the people around me. I’m called to actually change from the inside, in the way I think, before it ever shows up in how I live. And that’s exactly what it’s felt like, not an instant fix, but a slow, sometimes difficult, always worthwhile unlearning and relearning.

It hasn’t been a straight line. There have been things I’ve had to let go of that I didn’t want to let go of—opinions and habits I’d never thought to examine, moments where I felt genuinely torn between the way I used to think and the way I was being asked to think now. I don’t think that tension ever fully disappears. I still catch myself slipping back into old patterns of comparison, or worry, or needing to control outcomes rather than trusting that God’s got them. But I’ve learned to recognise it faster now, and to bring it to Him instead of carrying it alone. 

Drawing near to God isn’t about arriving somewhere polished or having it all figured out. It’s a daily choice to let Him keep working in you, through Scripture, through honest prayer, through people who’ll tell you the truth even when it’s uncomfortable. The caterpillar doesn’t fight its way into being a butterfly overnight, and neither do we.

If you’re in a season right now that doesn’t make sense, if you’re surviving more than living, I want you to know none of it is wasted. I couldn’t see God at work in the middle of my hardest years. But looking back, I can see His hand in the timing, the people and the doors that opened when I least expected them to. He was renewing my mind long before I had a name for what He was doing and He’s still doing it now, reshaping me, refreshing me, one uncomfortable, worthwhile step at a time.