Tearing Faith Apart*
a story of not understanding faith
In Blue Like Jazz, Donald Miller talks about his friend Laura’s struggle with faith and how she felt she had to believe because her family did. But never actually believing herself.
“There is this part of me that wants to believe,” she says, almost in tears, “ I wrote about it in my journal. My family believes, Don. I feel as though I need to believe. Like I am going to die if I don’t believe.”
My struggle with faith was very similar to Laura’s; I have said most of the things she said myself. It’s like someone read what I used to think and wrote it down in this book.
Faith and religion was always something I felt like I had to believe because my family did, and I was told to believe. You are a Christian, that’s what I was told growing up. And for years it didn’t bother me.
But then these thoughts started coming into my head. Just simple thoughts that maybe God wasn’t real. They started sometime around the age of 13, and they baffled me to say the least. I was living in a Christian house, I grew up believing in and loving God, it made no sense that I was doubting His existence. I didn’t know where they were coming from, everyone I knew was a Christian, they believed in God, so should I.
But no matter what I did, how no matter how much I listened in church and read verses in Sunday School and help around the church, these thoughts wouldn’t leave. I started to pay more attention to them, letting them talk a little more, explain the reasoning that they had.
And I listened.
Like I said, I don’t know why these thought started, or where they came from. I just know that they were there and they scared me to say the least. I thought I was going to die just by thinking them. This is when my faith really got shook to the core because then I started questioning everything. I wanted to understand it, all of it, completely. Because I couldn’t understand it I starting losing faith in Christianity and eventually my faith in God as well. But there are things and parts of Christianity that you just won’t be able to understand, I know that now. But back then, I wanted it to be explained to me, why did we believe this? How does it work if no one really knows for sure?
Miller touched on this for a moment, he said, “I don’t think you can explain how Christian Faith works either. It is a mystery. And I love this about Christian spirituality. It cannot be explained, and yet it is beautiful and true. It is something you feel, and it comes from the soul.”
I wish I had had someone who could’ve explained it to me like that, instead I had to figure that out for myself over the years that I ignored God. I thought that if something couldn’t be explained in detail then it must not be true. And that’s how I thought for years.
When I ‘gave up’ on faith, I didn’t know how much I was losing. The years following were dark for me. I was very alone, I had unknowingly isolated myself from the people I knew and my family. I refused to believe what they did, therefore, setting myself apart. I lost friends during this time. This gap between my family and I would only grow. (mostly without them even knowing as I never told them about my struggle with faith)Eventually it was like I was on an entirely different world. Completely alone.
I felt I had no one. Like an astronaut alone in space.
Patricia Briggs wrote that, “ Hope was so much harder than despair.” This means a great deal to me. Faith and hope are very close. When I gave up faith, I gave up hope and this lead to years where I felt a lot of pain. There were years where I felt almost nothing but this pain, not quite physical but pain nonetheless. At least I only remember that feeling. But it was so much easier to live in despair then to put my trust in faith and hope.
It was a dark few years where I felt very alone.
About halfway through my 17th year I would become more open to the idea of a faith based religion. I had met some people who were opening me up to the idea, but I was still weary. It took me almost another year and actually looking up the word faith to start thinking about it again. However, the thing that really made me realize that faith wasn’t crazy was me talking to a guy I was dating at the time.
It was last November and I had asked him his opinion on religion, specifically believing in God.
“I wouldn’t call myself religious.” He said, “Maybe one day I could believe in God. But for now it’s just, it’s hard for me to believe in something that I can’t see or feel. You know?” I remember him just looking at me, waiting for me to answer.
For a second I didn’t have one. But then I started talking, letting thoughts come out, “ I get that,” I said,“ I thought the same. But that’s what faith is in the simplest terms. Believing in something that you can’t see or feel, but you know it’s there. Something tells you it’s there.”
He just chuckled and grabbed my hand. “Yeah, maybe but for now, I don’t think I can believe it. Maybe someday.”
After that conversation I couldn’t get this description of faith out of my head.
For so long I had tried to tear apart faith to see it’s inner workings and exactly how it happened, what it did, when that’s just not how faith works. And it took me telling someone about it, not trying to tear it apart but just what it was in the simplest terms, for me to see. Without meaning to I had answered the question I had been asking myself for years.
Faith isn’t something that can be described in how it works. It can’t be broken down it steps or a how-to book. It just…is. It’s there and the entire point of it is to trust it and to believe that it is there. Faith is believing in something even if you aren’t entirely sure it’s there.
When I realized this I opened back up to God. Not entirely at first. Just opening the door a crack. I honestly don’t think I ever stopped believing in God. I had gave up on Christianity, yes, but not entirely on God. Even if I didn’t always say I was a Christian and I had left the church for years and went down a dark path, I knew I could go back to God. And I started to put my faith in Him once again. And maybe I can trust Christianity enough one day to put my faith back in it as well.
