Eli Brackenbury on Finding God at 50

The Ordinary Moment That Changed Everything: Eli Brackenbury on Finding God at 50, Surrendering Control, and Why Faith Does Not Have to Look the Way You Think

He was not expecting it. He was not even looking for it.

Eli Brackenbury was standing at his kitchen window on the morning after his second divorce was finalised, watching a cup of coffee brew in his Keurig, wondering what he was going to do now, when he felt a peace he could not explain and had not prepared for.

Not a hand on his shoulder. Not a voice from the sky. Just a stillness that arrived in the middle of what should have been a storm, and a sense of presence that communicated something he had been waiting fifty years to hear.

You are not in this alone.

That moment, ordinary in its setting and extraordinary in its impact, became the beginning of Finding God at 50, Eli’s debut book and the first in a planned series exploring spiritual transformation at every stage of life. It also became the beginning of a new identity, a new marriage, a new community, and a life he says he could not have built if he had kept trying to build it himself.

The night before the moment

To understand what happened at the kitchen window, it helps to understand the night before.

Eli’s second divorce had just been finalised. His ex-wife had moved out. He was alone in a house he was now solely responsible for, on one income, facing a list of practical realities he had not fully prepared for. He cleaned the house from top to bottom, moving furniture, mopping floors, washing sheets, working through the hours in the physical way men sometimes do when they are not ready to feel what they are feeling.

Then he reached for his phone. He went to TikTok looking for something lighthearted. He had set the algorithm to funny content, things that were gentle and distracting.

What came up was Psalm 46:10. Be still and know that I am the Lord your God.

He liked the video. The very next one that appeared was Exodus 14:14: I the Lord your God will fight your battles for you. All you need to do is be still.

He put his phone down. He was, as he puts it, freaking out. Not in a frightened way. In the way that happens when something arrives that you recognise as true before you have had time to argue with it.

The following morning, coffee brewing, window in front of him, a life of uncertainty behind him, the peace came.

What surrender actually looks like

Eli is careful and precise about what he means when he talks about surrendering to God, because he knows it can sound like giving up.

He uses a visual that is simple and stays with you. Imagine holding a collection of playground balls of different sizes. They are yours. You are holding onto them because they are yours. But if you let go of them, your hands are free to receive what God has for you instead.

Surrendering, in his experience, is not waving a white flag. It is not lying down and doing nothing. It is getting out of your own way. It is the decision to stop trying to manage the outcome and to trust that someone with a better view of the terrain is available to lead, if you will step aside.

For Eli, that was the hardest and ultimately the most transformative thing he had ever done. He had spent most of his life as a man who put his hand up and said he had it. Who managed everything. Who handled things. And who, by his own honest reckoning, had not been particularly well served by any of that.

At fifty, he decided to try something different. He had no great expectations. His assessment of the risk was simple: the worst thing that can happen is I am right back where I was. Let’s give it a shot.

What happened instead was that almost everything changed.

Relationship over religion

Eli grew up Catholic. He speaks about that upbringing with genuine warmth and gratitude, particularly for his father who gave him and his brother a foundation in who Jesus was. But he also speaks honestly about what did not fit.

The sense of having to perform to earn grace. The intermediary between him and God that made him feel he was not deserving enough to bring his prayers directly. The pomp and circumstance of the tradition that, however meaningful to others, never quite landed for him.

What he found, in the stillness after his second divorce, was something different. Not a religion to perform but a relationship to enter. Not a set of rules to follow but an invitation to simply follow.

He is not critical of the paths others take. He was that person too, he says, and he understands completely why people stay where they feel known. What he offers is not an argument. It is a story. One that says: if you have ever felt spiritually dry, if you have ever felt like the faith you grew up with no longer fits, if you are a sceptic or a searcher or someone who wants something real and non-preachy and honest, this is not for you to perform your way into. It is simply for you to consider.

The theme that runs through all of his work is relationship over religion. Faith is not about rules. Jesus, he says, did not ask the people he healed whether they had tithed first. He simply loved them.

Finding God at 50 and the books that followed

Eli began outlining Finding God at 50 after his faith walk started shifting things in his life. He showed early chapters to his then-fiancee and asked whether it was anything. She read it and told him it was not done yet. He went from chapter eight to twenty-two in two weeks after that, feeling, as he describes it, like he had removed himself from the writing and let the words become something other than his own.

The second book, Unscripted, came from a conversation with his twenty-one-year-old daughter. She was struggling and said to him: how can I believe in something I cannot see? That question became the book. It is written for millennials navigating a world of social comparison and quietly wondering if there is more.

Becoming Equally Yoked came from his own experience of two marriages and the understanding, hard won, that when God is the third strand in a relationship, the dynamic is entirely different. His current wife is someone he first met when they were thirteen years old. They lost touch, went their separate ways, and she came back into his life in June 2024.

Her ex-husband wrote the foreword for his next book, The Restoration of Man, which is about healing the wounds men carry and pass on without realising it. The three of them now sit together and talk about how God has shaped their lives. He describes the dynamic as insane, in the best possible way, and entirely God given.

Before his feet hit the floor

When asked whether he does anything different or quirky for his mental health and wellbeing, Eli’s answer is quiet and immediate.

Before his feet touch the floor in the morning, he says a simple thank you. God, thank you for waking me up. Give me the opportunity to do your will today, whatever that looks like. I am open to it.

That is it. No complicated ritual. No long practice. Just a first moment of gratitude before the day begins, rooted in the recognition that waking up is not a given, and that if breath is still in the lungs, the story is not done.

He shared this with his twenty-one-year-old son, who had been venting about the stresses of his job. Eli let him vent. Then he offered the reframe: you woke up this morning. You have a job that pays your rent and your groceries. Start there.

Make your mark

Eli’s mother went into open heart surgery in 2016 and never woke up. Before she went in, he kissed her hand and told her he would see her after.

She looked him in the eyes and said: make your mark.

He did not know what she meant. He spent the years that followed going back to school, earning a bachelor’s degree and three master’s degrees, thinking that was what she had been pointing him toward. It was not until Finding God at 50 that the meaning of those three words finally came clear.

He is making his mark. Not in a polo and khakis knocking on doors. Not on a sandwich board in the town square. But by telling the truth of what happened to him, as plainly and as honestly as he can, and trusting that the seed lands where it is meant to land.

He cares more about the message, he says, than the marketplace. He has given away more books than he has sold. He does not mind.