The first step in Your Summer with God is God Encounters. It deserves a closer look, because everything else in the journey depends on it. An encounter with God is not the same as information about Him. Rather, it’s the moment a person stops merely knowing facts about God and starts knowing Him. Therefore, before we explore how to hear His voice or build a daily gratitude practice, we need to understand why encounter comes first. We introduced this three-step journey in full in our post on Your Summer with God: A Journey That Meets You Wherever You Are. In this post, we slow down on the step everything else grows from.
If you’d rather start the journey now and come back to this later, you can begin right here: Begin Your Summer with God → Start with God Encounters, FREE mini course. For everyone else, here is why this is where we always begin.
Why an Encounter With God Changes What Information Cannot
Most of us have collected information about God for years. The doctrines are familiar, the stories easy enough to recite, and the sermons we have heard more times than we can count. However, information alone rarely produces transformation. Job said it plainly after his suffering — “My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you” (Job 42:5). Notice the shift, from hearing about God to seeing Him. That shift is exactly what an encounter with God provides, and it is something secondhand information simply cannot replicate.
What Encounter Actually Looks Like
We sometimes imagine an encounter with God as something dramatic — a vision, a voice from heaven, an unmistakable sign. However, in our post on When God’s Voice Sounds Different Than You Expected, we explored how God speaks through whispers, impressions, circumstances, and community as often as through anything dramatic. Similarly, meeting Him can be quiet. It can be a moment of unexpected peace, a sudden awareness of being known, or a circumstance that could only have been orchestrated by Him.
What makes something an encounter with God, rather than simply a coincidence or emotion, is this — it leaves you different than it found you. Paul’s meeting with Jesus on the road to Damascus is the most dramatic example in Scripture. He was not searching for Jesus. He was actively working against everything Jesus represented, persecuting the very people who followed Him. None of that disqualified him. A blinding light and a voice confronted him on that road, and he rose from it a changed man (Acts 9:3-6).
Most encounters are far less dramatic and no less real. Consequently, the question is never “was it dramatic enough?” or “was I open enough?” Rather, the question is “did it leave me different?” An encounter with God does not wait for you to be ready. What openness changes is not whether He can meet you, but how quickly you recognize it once He does.
Still wondering whether God could really meet you, even if you feel as far from Him as Paul once was? Start our free course, Breakthrough to Hearing God’s Voice, and discover what it looks like to recognize Him for yourself. It’s free. It’s short. And it could be the start of your own story.
Franklyn’s Encounter With God — and Why We Lead With Story
Step One of Your Summer with God does not hand you a list of principles. Instead, you hear Franklyn’s own story — raw, honest, and unexpectedly funny — of encountering the living God for himself. Testimony opens a door that teaching alone cannot.
This is exactly what happened to Franklyn. At sixteen, God began giving him visions, at a time when Franklyn did not even believe God spoke to people at all. He was not seeking the experience, and nothing had prepared him for it. Yet God met him anyway, before belief had caught up to what was happening. That moment marked the start of an ongoing transformation, not a single memory to look back on. Franklyn did not simply gain a new fact about God. He began the lifelong move from knowing about God to knowing Him, a process he is still living out today.
Consider the woman at the well in John 4. After her own encounter, she did not return to her town with a theological argument. Rather, she simply said, “come and see.” Her testimony, not a doctrine, was what moved an entire town to go meet Him for themselves. Many believed because of it (John 4:39). Franklyn’s story works the same way. It says: Come and see that God is real, personal, and pursuing you, just as He pursued Franklyn long before he believed it was possible.
Someone else’s encounter has a way of making faith feel possible again. If God could meet a sixteen-year-old who didn’t think God communicated to people nowadays, He can meet you too. The testimony doesn’t ask you to believe first — it shows you that belief usually follows an encounter, not the other way around.
Your Encounter With God Does Not Have to Look Like Anyone Else’s
Here is something worth holding onto as you move through Step One. Your meeting with God does not need to resemble Franklyn’s, or Paul’s, or the woman at the well’s. Paul himself wrote that “the gospel I preached is not of human origin… I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ.” His encounter was uniquely his own, fitting exactly what he needed to hear.
Likewise, as we explored in our post on Heaven Is Always Open — Are You Positioned to Receive, heaven’s openness above you is constant even when your experience of it varies. Some weeks an encounter with God will feel unmistakable. Other weeks it will feel like little more than a quiet thought you almost dismissed. Both are real. Therefore, do not measure your experience against someone else’s story. Measure it instead by whether it draws you closer to Him.
Those discovering the gift of prophecy or exploring spiritual impartation often describe their first meeting with God in strikingly different terms. Some are sudden and overwhelming. Others are gradual and quiet. What they share in common is not the shape of the encounter, but the fact that it was unmistakably personal. Similarly, prophetic intercession teaches us that partnering with God flows out of having first been met by Him. The encounter often precedes the partnership.
From Encounter to Everything Else
Step One exists because everything else in Your Summer with God depends on it. You cannot sustain a practice of hearing God’s voice, as Step Two invites, without first believing He is real, personal, and speaking. You cannot build a daily foundation of gratitude, as Step Three invites, without first encountering a God genuinely worth thanking. Therefore, an encounter with God is not simply the first item on a checklist. Step Two and Step Three build on this foundation.
This is the same transformational journey Franklyn experienced, simply extended across an entire summer. Encounter begins the shift from knowing about God to knowing Him. Hearing His voice in Step Two deepens that relationship. Building a daily foundation of gratitude in Step Three sustains the intimacy that relationship grows into. None of the three steps produces transformation on its own. Together, they carry someone forward in three movements.
An isolated encounter grows into an ongoing relationship with Jesus. That relationship deepens into genuine intimacy with Him. And intimacy, lived out daily, becomes what it actually means to live in His kingdom rather than simply visit it on occasion.
Begin With Step One
Wherever you are this summer, Step One meets you there — confident in your faith or quietly unsure, deeply familiar with God or meeting Him again for what feels like the first time. An encounter with God does not belong only to the dramatic, the spiritually elite, or the people whose stories make it into books. It does not even require you to believe it’s possible — only to recognize it once it happens.
Ready to begin? We’ve put together Your Summer with God, three free on-demand mini-courses designed to keep you moving with God through the summer months — no schedule, no pressure.
Step 1 — God Encounters: Listen to Franklyn’s story, and let it be the doorway into everything this summer holds.
Step 2 — Breakthrough to Hearing God’s Voice: Learn to hear God’s voice for yourself.
Step 3 — Maximize Your Gratitude: Build the daily foundation that sustains it all.
Start wherever you are. Listen to Franklyn’s story in God Encounters, and let it be the doorway into everything this summer holds.
