A Story of Freedom: Jelani Akil

I agreed to do Exodus for the first time because my family needed it. I just started to see that I could go deeper with my prayer life and with personal sacrifice. I never really intentionally sacrificed before Exodus. There's

Before I did Exodus, I wasn’t living my faith how I knew I should be living my faith. I first heard about Exodus from a really good friend and an old college teammate. He said, “hey, I heard about this thing . . .” And he sent me a list of the disciplines. He said, “I’m going to try this. Would you be interested? I’ve been asking around and nobody seems interested in doing this with me”. And I said,  “Oh yeah, that sounds perfect, I’d love to do that!” At the time I thought it would be easy. I soon found out it wasn’t.  

I agreed to do Exodus for the first time because my family needed it. I just started to see that I could go deeper with my prayer life and with personal sacrifice. I never really intentionally sacrificed before Exodus. There’s natural sacrifice that comes with being married and raising children, but to willingly embrace aesthetic disciplines . . . I’d never done that. 

The graces really started to pour into my life; I felt like I was doing something right for the first time. I don’t even know how to describe it – there was an order that started to enter my home. My six year old daughter started saying, “Daddy, I want to take a cold shower!” She was starting to jump in and we all started to take up this mentality of “offer it up”, how can you serve?

It just really settled me as a man and who I needed to be for my family to love them better.  My relationships changed. They all grew stronger. My wife started to really dive into her faith more and we just took another step forward. We started to experience what it meant to be a Catholic family that loves Jesus and is really trying to be saints. 

 If you’re on the fence about Exodus, just try it.  It just takes a little bit of courage. Watch the grace. Watch how God pours down into your life. 

It doesn’t take much . . . just a little bit of courage. 


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