I want to talk about the version of faith nobody puts on a coffee mug.
Not the faith that moves mountains. Not the faith that shows up in testimonies where everything fell apart and then God did this incredible thing and now look how beautiful life is. I love those stories. I genuinely do. But they are not the only story, and for a long time I thought they were supposed to be my story, and when they weren’t I assumed something had gone wrong with me specifically.
Spoiler: it hadn’t. But we’ll get to that.
This post is for the people sitting in the middle of something that doesn’t resolve. The long middle. The season that should have ended by now according to every sermon you’ve ever half-listened to on a Sunday when you were tired and the pew was hard and you were nodding along hoping God would grade on a curve. I’m writing it because I have lived in that middle for longer stretches than I care to count, and I still believe, and those two things coexist in me in a way that is sometimes violent and sometimes quiet and almost never clean.
So let’s talk about it.
Nothing Is Fitting Together Right Now
When I say nothing fits together, I mean the specific kind of falling apart where you can’t point to a single disaster. There is no boss fight with a clear health bar. There’s no cutscene that explains the villain’s origin story. It’s just… everything feels slightly wrong, slightly off, slightly not what it was supposed to be, and you can’t explain that to someone who asks how you’re doing because it would take three hours and a whiteboard and you’d still end up crying in a Tim Hortons parking lot at 11pm not totally sure what you’re even crying about.
I know that feeling. I know the specific brand of exhaustion that comes not from one hard thing but from a thousand small things that refuse to add up to a coherent narrative. Chronic stuff piling on top of neurodivergent stuff piling on top of grief stuff piling on top of the day-to-day stuff of just trying to be a person in the world, and none of it is dramatic enough to justify how heavy it feels, and that makes it worse somehow.
And somewhere in the middle of all of that, you’re supposed to have faith.
Cool. Great. Super helpful. Thank you.
I’m not being glib about faith, I’m being glib about the pressure we put on it. The expectation that faith is supposed to function like a game cheat code. Enter the right sequence of belief and suffering, everything unlocks. Life renders correctly. Peace loads in properly. But that is not how it works, and deep down most of us know it isn’t how it works, and we feel guilty that we know it, because shouldn’t we believe more? Shouldn’t we trust more? Isn’t the problem that our faith isn’t strong enough?
I’m going to say something that took me a long time to say without flinching.
No. That is not the problem.
The Honest Version of Faith Is Messier Than the Brochure
I am autistic. I have chronic health stuff. I live with depression in waves that don’t always warn you before they come in. And I have genuine, real, bone-deep faith in God. Not performative faith, not social faith, not the kind you maintain because it would be awkward to stop. Real faith. The kind that has survived enough of my own worst moments to prove it’s actually load-bearing.
And I want to be very honest with you: faith has not cured my depression. It has not untangled the complicated parts of my neurology. It has not made the unanswered questions answer themselves. God has not showed up in a burning bush and given me a five-year plan with bullet points and a timeline.
I used to think that was a failure on my part. Like I was doing faith wrong and everyone else had the strategy guide and I’d missed some critical side quest that would have unlocked the peace of mind DLC.
What I think now, and what I’m still learning, is that faith was never supposed to be the thing that removes the pain. It’s the thing that’s present inside the pain. That’s different. That’s actually a completely different function and it changes everything about how you hold it.
The Psalms are full of people who are not okay. Genuinely not okay. Ugly crying at God, asking where are you, why have you forgotten me, how long is this going to last. These are not people who have lost their faith. These are people using their faith to be furious and frightened and honest and hold onto something in the dark at the same time. That’s the whole thing. That’s it right there.
You are allowed to be not okay and still believe. Those are not opposites.
Unanswered Questions Are Not a Faith Malfunction
Here’s the one that took me the longest.
I have questions that have not been answered. Not small questions. Not background-level curiosity. I have questions that live in my chest and press against my ribs when I’m trying to sleep. Questions about why certain things happened. Questions about what certain seasons of pain were actually for. Questions about people I’ve loved and things I’ve lost and whether any of it makes a shape I’ll ever be able to see.
And for a really long time, having those questions felt like a problem. Like evidence that I wasn’t trusting enough. Like I was a bad Christian because a good Christian would have peace about it by now. A good Christian would have received some revelation in quiet prayer time that explained it all. A good Christian’s faith would look like a tidy Pinterest graphic with a verse on it.
I’m over here looking like a dry erase board someone wiped in a hurry. Still got ghost marks of every question that didn’t get answered. Still a little smudged. Still trying to read what’s there.
But here’s what I’ve come to: the Bible is not a book about people who had it figured out. It is a book almost entirely populated by people who were deeply confused, frequently terrified, often actively arguing with God, and sometimes straight-up wrong about what was happening. And God worked with them anyway. Through them anyway. Despite them, sometimes.
The faith was never about having the answers. The faith was about who you were oriented toward while you didn’t have them.
I don’t have a lot of things figured out right now. My life is not a coherent narrative at the moment. The puzzle pieces are on the table and honestly some of them look like they came from a completely different box and I cannot figure out how the picture is supposed to look. But I know who I’m talking to in the dark. And that is not nothing. That is, I think, actually the whole thing.
Depression and Faith Living in the Same House
This part is important and I need you to stay with me.
Depression lies. That’s the fundamental fact of it. It is a liar that speaks in your own voice, which is what makes it so effective. It tells you that you’ve always felt this way. That you’ll always feel this way. That you’re alone, that the silence means absence, that the darkness means nothing is coming.
And depression will also lie about your faith. It will tell you that your inability to feel God right now means God isn’t there. That your numbness in prayer means prayer isn’t real. That the fact that you’re not experiencing peace is proof that you don’t actually believe, or that belief doesn’t actually do anything, or that you’re broken in a way that’s too fundamental for anything to reach.
I need you to hear this: that is the depression talking. Not reality. Not God.
I have been in seasons where I couldn’t feel anything spiritual. Where prayer felt like talking to a wall. Where church felt like watching a movie in a language I used to speak and suddenly couldn’t remember. And the temptation in those seasons is to conclude something has fundamentally changed. That faith is gone. That belief has been revoked.
But feelings are not facts, and the inability to feel faith in a depressive episode is a symptom of the depression, not a referendum on whether God is real or whether you are loved.
I know that’s easier to say than to feel. I’m not trying to dismiss how real that numbness is. It’s real. It’s awful. It’s one of the cruelest parts of the whole experience, actually, that the thing that might comfort you becomes harder to access precisely when you need it most. That’s not fair. I’m not going to tell you it’s fair.
But I will tell you that I have come back from those places with my faith not just intact but sometimes somehow more honest. Like the decorative parts got stripped off by the difficulty and what was left underneath was the load-bearing stuff. Less pretty. More real.
Get help for the depression. Please. Faith and therapy are not competing options. Faith and medication, if that’s what’s needed, are not competing options. God is not going to be less impressed with you because you used the resources available. That’s not how this works.
When You’re Angry at God (Congratulations, You’re in Good Company)
Can we just normalize this for a second.
I have been angry at God. Not vaguely annoyed. Not spiritual-crisis-in-a-journal-entry-I’ll-look-back-on-fondly. Furious. The kind of anger that sits in your chest and doesn’t have anywhere useful to go. Angry at things that didn’t make sense. Angry at things that hurt. Angry at the silence. Angry at the way certain prayers seemed to go nowhere while other people’s seemed to get answered immediately and you’re over here filling out the paperwork for the third time and nobody’s picking up the phone.
I used to feel guilty about that anger. Like it was evidence of bad faith. Like God would see the anger and decide we were done.
What I believe now is that the anger was itself a form of relationship. You cannot be furious at something you’ve written off. Indifference is the real sign that a relationship is over. Anger means you still care what the other person does. Anger means you still believe they have the capacity to affect you. Anger at God means you still believe in God enough to be mad at them, which is, if you squint at it, a form of faith.
I’m not theologizing my way around pain. I’m not saying anger is the goal. I’m saying it’s okay. It’s allowed. You’re not being struck by lightning for feeling it, and your faith is not automatically invalid because you feel it.
Tell God. Yell at the ceiling if you have to. Say the unpolished version. Say the version that doesn’t sound like a prayer, the one that sounds like a fight. See what happens when you stop performing okayness for an audience of one who already knows you’re not okay.
In my experience, that’s when things get real.
The Part Where I Don’t Tie It Up Neatly
Here’s what I’m not going to do. I’m not going to end this post with a turn. The part where I tell you that after all the struggle, here’s what I learned, and here’s the lesson, and here’s how God brought it together and now it all makes a beautiful shape. Because I’m not there. This season is not resolved. The puzzle is still on the table and the picture is still unclear and I am still, some days, genuinely struggling to hold all the pieces of my life at the same time.
And I still believe. Both of those things are true at the same time.
I believe in a God who is present in the confusion and not just on the other side of it. I believe that faith in the dark is not lesser faith, it is just faith stripped of the easy stuff, the nice feelings, the clear answers, the confirmatory moments. What’s left when all that’s gone is something you can’t fake. You either have it or you don’t. And I have it.
Not the polished kind. Not the kind that photographs well. The kind that’s been dragged through some things and still keeps showing up.
If you’re in the middle right now, I want you to know: you don’t have to have it figured out to have faith. You don’t have to feel okay to believe. You don’t have to understand the shape of what’s happening to trust the one you believe is holding it. Those are not requirements. They are not the price of admission.
The price of admission, as far as I can tell, is just showing up. Even when you’re a mess. Even when you’re angry. Even when you’re numb and confused and the pieces aren’t fitting and nothing makes sense and you’ve got more questions than you started with.
Just show up.
That’s enough. You’re enough. The middle is not the end.
The confusion matters. The questions matter. The anger matters. The faith that survives all three matters most of all.
Peace. Even the complicated kind.
