Somewhere in Between

Somewhere in between growing up in the church and becoming the woman I am today, I realized that the faith I inherited and the faith I experienced were not always the same thing.

Believing in God has never been the issue. I believe in God. I believe in miracles because I have witnessed things that defy explanation. I believe in healing because I have seen it happen. I believe in prophecy because life has presented me with moments too precise, too timely, and too meaningful for me to dismiss as coincidence.

Yet despite growing up immersed in Christianity, despite being surrounded by people whose lives revolved around ministry, I have never felt entirely at home within the boundaries of the faith tradition that raised me.

For years, I assumed the problem was me.

Maybe I wasn’t spiritual enough. Maybe I wasn’t faithful enough. Maybe everyone else understood something I didn’t. Maybe I was hell-bound. Because I believed so deeply that every sermon, every lesson, every warning seemed to carry the weight of eternity. I was constantly aware of all the ways I fell short, all the ways I questioned things I wasn’t supposed to question, all the ways I never seemed to fit the mold of what faith was supposed to look like.

I watched people speak in tongues and wondered why that experience never found me. I listened to testimonies filled with certainty while quietly carrying questions I rarely spoke aloud. As I got older, those questions still followed me. Not because my faith was weakening, but because my experiences kept refusing to fit neatly inside the explanations I had been given.

What surprised me most wasn’t discovering that I had questions. It was realizing how lonely those questions made me feel.

When everyone around you seems certain, uncertainty can feel like isolation.

Even now, my husband approaches faith through scripture, theology, and study. Members of my family have spent their lives teaching, preaching, and interpreting faith. Our youngest son is trying to determine where he belongs spiritually. Everyone around me seems to be searching for a home. Meanwhile, I often feel like I’ve been standing in the doorway, unable to fully embrace one room while unwilling to abandon the house altogether.

Part of that struggle comes from the fact that I have never been able to separate what I’ve been taught from what I’ve witnessed. The explanations don’t always satisfy me. When something good happens, people praise God. When something bad happens, they blame the devil. I’ve heard that reasoning my entire life, yet it has never sat comfortably with me. If God is truly sovereign, if God is truly the source of all things, then why are we so quick to assign responsibility elsewhere whenever suffering enters the conversation? Why do we embrace complexity when discussing blessings but reduce hardship to a cosmic scapegoat?

The older I get, the less interested I become in defending a position and the more interested I become in understanding reality. That search has led me to places that don’t fit neatly within the labels I was given. It has also forced me to admit something I spent years resisting: I don’t know what to call my faith anymore.

I’d like to tell you that admission feels less frightening than it once did. But that would be a lie. A bold-face lie.

The truth is, I still don’t know what to do with that realization.

I no longer feel compelled to force my experiences into a framework that doesn’t fully fit. I no longer feel obligated to pretend certainty where none exists. What I know is that I believe in God. I know that I have witnessed things I cannot explain. I know that truth matters to me more than belonging to a particular camp.

What I don’t know is whether the questions I’ve carried for years are evidence that my faith is growing or evidence that I’ve somehow gotten it wrong.

Some days, honesty feels liberating.

Other days, it feels terrifying.

Because no matter how many questions I have, there is still a little girl inside me who sat in church believing eternity hung in the balance. A little girl who learned that being wrong about God wasn’t just a mistake—it was a consequence.

Maybe that’s why these questions have stayed with me for so long.

Not because I’m trying to walk away from faith.

But because I’m still trying to understand it.