It’s easy to look at your life and think, “I am not happy with how this looks.”

Author and speaker Annie F. Downs understands this feeling well. In her new book, Remember God, she writes about what it took in some of the hardest moments of her own life to watch for God’s provision and continue believing in His goodness.

Recently Joy Summers from CJ & Joy had the chance to sit down with Annie and talk about practical ways to remember God’s goodness in your own life.

Here’s what Annie had to say:

“I try to fast the week before my birthday. Just to get like, ‘Hey, let’s reconnect.’ I find I’m not great at fasting, but I find it to be an incredibly powerful discipline.

If you can do a day, or a couple of days, you can use that time and that energy elsewhere than eating. So I was fasting. I was so hungry that I was reading where Jesus says, ‘Man cannot live on bread alone.’ Okay, I was like, ‘I get you Jesus.’ Right? Like, we’re one and the same.

I went back to Deuteronomy and read where that originally was. What it said about the Israelite people is that God fed them every day in a way that their parents had never known and they had never known before. That impacted me so much because there are so many ways that my life doesn’t look like my parents. I’m single in my late 30s and they were not. I am my own business owner and both of my parents are really smart business people, but my business looks really different than theirs.

There just were all these differences and I thought the Lord was like, ‘Look I’m taking care of you in a way you didn’t know that I would. When 20-year-old Annie felt and thought about 38-year-old Annie – it was nothing like this.’

I’ve started now really trying to say, ‘What’s the manna today? Where are you providing for me in a way I would have never thought you could have?’

When those are the glasses you wear, it kind of changes everything.

It makes me think about, Ann Voskamp and her One Thousand Gifts book. Where she says, ‘Count the thousand gifts God’s given you in a year.’ It’s almost like I used to think, ‘Oh God’s gonna do something. I believe it. He’s good.’ Then I’d cycle down to disappointment when it didn’t happen the way I thought it would. Then I’d climb myself back up that mountain and, at some point, it switched and I left with disappointment.

When those are my lens, that is how I see the world. I’m not trying to be Pollyanna, but when the lens is, ‘Is he providing anything for me today,’ you see it.’”

If this conversation strikes a nerve for you, watch and be encouraged by Annie and Joy’s full conversation about Remember God. You’re not alone in your questions and discouragement and you don’t have to stay there!

Watch Next: Annie F. Downs Recommends Her Favorite Things (Podcast, Music, Books, Food, and more!)