What does prayer look like when your brain works differently? For Kat, an Interserve mission partner with autism and ADHD, this is not an abstract theological question but a daily practical one — and her answer is reshaping how she thinks about both her spiritual life and her ministry with asylum seekers and refugees.

Kat's essay, published by Interserve UK this week, is a quietly radical piece of writing. It begins with an honest account of how traditional forms of prayer — sitting still, focusing the mind, following a structured liturgy — have often felt inaccessible to her. Her neurodivergent brain does not work that way. Stillness can feel like agitation. Structured prayer can feel like performance. The expectation that everyone prays in the same way had, for years, left her feeling like a second-class Christian.

But Kat has discovered something liberating: that the history of Christian prayer is far more diverse than any single tradition suggests. Walking prayer. Creative prayer. Sensory prayer. Prayer through movement, through art, through the rhythms of physical work. She has found ways of communing with God that fit the way her mind actually operates — and in doing so, she has found that her prayer life has become richer, not poorer.

This matters for her ministry too. Working with asylum seekers — people who have often experienced profound trauma, displacement, and loss — requires a particular kind of attentiveness and presence. Kat's neurodiversity, she argues, has made her more attuned to the non-verbal, more patient with complexity, more willing to sit with what cannot be easily resolved.

Her essay is a gift to anyone who has ever felt that their mind or body made them somehow unsuited to the spiritual life. It is also a challenge to churches to create space for the full diversity of ways in which human beings can encounter God.