There are two analogies that have helped students I work with understand how God reorients someone’s life.
To start, God must become our first priority. Before we meet God, our priorities are all out of line. We live for money, travel, massive homes, and then our spouse and maybe our children fall in line later.
If we live primarily for something or someone other than God our god can (and will) be stripped away from us. If our spouse is our god, our god can die, or leave us. If our career is our god, we could lose our job and thus lose our god.