Sitting at the Feet of the Teacher
This week's message is by Zuzana Komendova.
How did embracing a grid shift and embracing a kingdom worldview change my life? How has God impacted me through Belonging House?
When I was thinking about my answer to these questions, I realized that I didn't have a single great point I could pinpoint and say: this is it, this is when the change happened. The change in me was gradual. I am definitely a different person than I was 10 years ago, and a great deal of that is thanks to Christ and the Belonging House community — the people I met and prayed with here.
As Christ likes to say — context is everything. And it is about not taking Bible verses out of context, but hey - here is mine.
Everything for me started with a simple prayer: Lord, give me a good teacher who will teach me everything.
I prayed that prayer in 2014, finishing my Bachelor's degree in Jewellery and Object Design.
That prayer came out of a painful place. I'd just spent four years in a studio under a professor whose relationship with the students was, looking back, an abusive one — I can't count how many of us he made cry through his criticism. I loved the craft itself: discovering silversmithing, working with metal, coming up with concepts and ideas. But the whole culture around "being an artist" at art school felt like an idol. I didn't want to belong to that. And I refused to learn from a person I didn't respect. So I was praying for someone who would teach me silversmithing techniques and the ins and outs of metalcrafting — a man or a woman who would take me under their wing so I could be an apprentice and learn how to make vessels that carry precious content: chalices, patens, tabernacles, or simple vases for flowers.
Then in 2015, my father died suddenly, and grief burned through my relationship with God. For almost two years I could barely pray without sobbing. I wanted, badly, to walk away from God — but my life by that time was too woven into His to actually leave. So, although I was in a lot of pain, I decided to stay with God. But our relationship was hurt by my dad's sudden death.
The Old Grid
My grid at that time was full of pride and self-pity. I lived in a victim identity. I was fearful and reactive. And although I was hearing from God, more often than not, I was just hearing myself. And I didn't know how to tell the difference.
God Sends a Teacher, Just Not the One I Expected
Ten years ago, in 2016, while I was writing my Master's thesis (on the Christian visual artist as an agent of new evangelisation, if you want to know), I came across a book called An Army Arising. It was one of the best books on discipleship I had read, and I looked up the author, found his newsletter, and signed up for Christ's Friday emails.
Then, week after week, for years, those emails spoke directly into whatever I was living through. It was like they'd been written for me specifically.
In 2018 I moved from Slovakia to the UK and joined a missionary community. A few months in, one of those Friday emails told the story of a student who'd challenged her professors' behaviour as her final project. I wrote back: I wish I'd had that kind of courage with my own professor.
Christ replied. He offered to meet and pray with me over Skype — for the healing of that old wound. It surprised me, as I didn't expect that kind of personal involvement from someone with a public profile. So we met, and Christ prayed for me. Then we said goodbye, and I thought that was that.
Half a year later, he was teaching on Bezalel in a small Oxfordshire village, and I happened to be free that weekend, so I went. That's where we met in person for the first time. And I felt prompted to start praying for Christ and for Belonging House. So I shared that with him, and he was okay with me praying for him. The teaching was great — I remember the key sentence for me was: "Every calling comes with provision." And I think I remember it so well because Christ, quite randomly as far as I was concerned, felt he should give me some of the money he had received from the teaching he had just given. I was working as a missionary for a small stipend, so I didn't have much money. Although I didn't have any specific expense, that money helped me keep my dignity when I went home on holiday that summer.
I am unsure about the exact timeline here, but I got more and more involved with Christ and Belonging House. We met multiple times in London, and then, during the pandemic, I joined Sunday online church, then the prayer group, and other events that Christ organised. Somewhere in all of it, I realised what had actually happened: God had answered my prayer. I was sitting at the feet of a teacher. I just hadn't recognised it at the time, because I was praying for a different kind of teacher.
I was learning as I read those Friday emails each week, letting them touch my heart and transform my thinking. Drop by drop. A weekly portion of transformation.
Personal meetings have been impactful in a different way — they gave me the opportunity to meet Christ as a whole person, to see how he approaches life and other people, and to notice his culture and his quirks.
Then Sunday church and the prayer group especially have become like a discipleship school for me. I get to hear Christ share openly and to witness the way he lives and prays. I can witness how he relies on God in everything, and even in tough seasons, he keeps trusting God to provide everything He has called him to do.
Sitting at the Feet of the Teacher
There's a line from Pope Paul VI, from the encyclical letter Evangelii Nuntiandi, that's stayed with me: modern people listen more willingly to witnesses than to teachers — and when they do listen to teachers, it's because the teachers are witnesses first.
That's what being part of Belonging House means to me — watching a witness who is also a teacher, and gradually becoming that kind of witness myself. It is not only about hearing informative teaching, but about the incarnation of the message he preaches with his whole life. So I am transformed in a way that I can't help but live it out.
An important thing for me is that Christ hasn't had to stop being fully himself to be used by God. He's a middle-aged New Yorker with his own quirks and cultural things, about as different from a thirty-something European woman as you can get.
He loves collecting Santa Claus figurines — not because it's holy, just because it's fun. And somehow that's part of the testimony too: incarnation doesn't erase your personality. In God, you become more fully who you already are.
That gave me permission I didn't know I needed. I don't have to pretend to have it all together, or perform some flat idea of "holiness." I get to be fully myself — full personality, quirks and all — and be transformed at the same time. It is normal to dream and have desires. It is normal to live life to the full.
The Grid Shift
So what changed in my grid? Sitting at the feet of the teacher redefined what is normal to me. A couple of years ago, I wrote the Normal Manifesto — a list of things that are normal in the Kingdom. It has become an expression of the transformation going on in my life.
It is normal to be loved and to receive love. It is normal to be me. It is normal to be in an intimate relationship with God. I am a daughter of the King. That's my identity. I am no longer a victim of my circumstances, but a beloved child of God. The God of the whole universe wants to have a relationship with me. I can't point to one single moment for this change, as it has been gradual. But somewhere along the way I started realising I'm beautiful in my own way, strong, interesting, genuinely valuable — when there were years in my past I truly hated who I was.
It is normal not to be afraid. I used to be genuinely afraid of evil — deep in a victim identity, believing I was too weak to resist temptation or fight against sin. I don't live from that perspective anymore. I know now that I can renounce evil and its schemes, and declare God's truth over my own life and over the lives of my beloved ones.
It is normal to rest. It is normal to hear His call and answer it. I've learnt that it is okay to do just what God is calling me to do, and nothing more. Last year, God called me to lead an Alpha course at my parish. I did, and it was good. Afterward, people tried to pull me into more projects. But God didn't call me to more courses — just to Alpha. Learning to hear the difference between what God is asking of me and what people expect of me — that's new.
It is normal to hear His voice clearly. Some years ago, I was at a conference when I heard a voice speak a very strong and serious message that I could not ignore, and then I saw an image and heard an interpretation. That word ended up defining years of my life — and it took me a long time to work out what part of it was the enemy, what part was God, and what part was just my own reasoning. But going through the process of discerning it taught me something I couldn't have learned any other way: God is a good Father. He does not wish me evil. I can trust Him. I am learning to discern His voice more and more by letting myself be saturated by Scripture. Last year, I started a small project of recording daily Gospel voiceovers in Slovak for my YouTube channel, and while I started because I wanted to bless people around me, I am sticking with it more than 250 days later because reading Scripture this way changes my heart.
It is normal to trust God that He takes care of everything. It is normal to see what God is doing. And then there's my friend. He recently had a serious heart attack and he's still in a coma. So Many people are praying for him, for his complete healing. This week, his kidneys started working again. The swelling in his brain has gone down. I realised that I am praying differently than before. I am praying from a place of who I am and who God is, declaring what's good and true over him, and cancelling out anything spoken over him that didn't come from God. I can feel the difference between pleading from a place of fear and desperation, and praying with authority from a place of trusting God.
It is normal not to limit God. It is normal to be in His presence. It is normal to think like God and to know His thoughts. One of the things I've learned in the prayer group is what "no limits for God" actually means in practice. In prayer, we don't come up with our own plan and ask Him to bless it. Instead, we ask Him how we're actually meant to pray, and how Jesus is praying, so that we can come into agreement with His prayer. For example, we pray for a million sanctified artists, set apart for God and for His Kingdom. Someone could say that's an unrealistic number, that we should aim lower to stay realistic. But in the Kingdom, when God declares something, it comes to life — so that is how we pray.
It is normal to bring beauty to desolate places and to see their transformation. Bringing beauty to desolate places is becoming the vision behind my actual work now. I work for a company that produces resources for Catholic schools — multimedia presentations that show children they are beloved children of God, that they have great value, and that they can live their lives to the full. All these beautiful, truthful messages are packaged in high-quality content that I am not ashamed to present as Christian — I'm actually proud to share it. I want what I make — my art, my life — to be true and beautiful, rooted in what heaven looks like, not just a reaction to the systems of this world around me. Because how does the world actually transform, if all we do is repeat what we already see?
It is normal to be the dwelling place. It is normal to be a place of belonging and welcome. Underneath all these changes is something even simpler: I live in Jesus, and Jesus lives in me. Just as Jesus lives in the Father, I live in the Father. I'm not the one making any of this happen. It's about abiding in Him, staying that close, and letting Him shine through, whatever that actually looks like. I am becoming a place of welcome and belonging, first for Jesus, the Father, and the Holy Spirit, and then for other people.
It is normal not to be alone. Or, as Christ puts it in the "I will" statements we commit to as members of Belonging House: I will stay in relationship with others who are passionate about Jesus. Staying in relationship with people isn't optional, but vital, for the transformation that has happened in me over the last ten years. Without the people around me — here or locally — I would have left God at some point in these last ten years, and not come back. So, although no community is perfect, we are going in the same direction, continually asking : Father, what do I do now?" — as we listen to the Lord and do what He tells us. I am not called to follow Jesus in isolation, and neither is any of us. Jesus is coming again soon, and together we are called to live a life of expectation and preparation for His second coming.
Closing
I prayed for a teacher who would teach me a craft. God gave me a teacher who taught me how to listen to the Lord and do what He tells me, how to trust God with my whole life, what is normal in the Kingdom, and how to stop being afraid.
I am a daughter of the King — beautiful, and terrifying to the enemy.
The vessels I once wanted to make with my own hands — chalices, patens, tabernacles — I am learning to be the vessel myself, as a disciple, and to make disciples too. And those vessels carry the most precious content there has ever been: Jesus.
Christ, thank you for letting me sit at your feet all these years — for letting me learn simply by watching how you live, how you pray, how you trust God even in hard seasons, and by how generously you share your words. Thank you for being part of my life.
Fear not. God can be trusted.
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