On Losing Faith

I’m afraid my faith is slipping through my fingers. Once solid like a brick and now it feels like it’ll dissolve into water and flow right through my hands, no matter how tightly I try to hold it. Some days it’s a gradual losing, a fading, the old answers becoming less convincing one question at a time. Other days it abandons me in a rush so quick, so emptying, I struggle to breathe around the vacuum it leaves behind.

This beloved faith, worn thin with love and smelling like home, is ripping at the seams, full of holes I’ve tried to patch. Every time I try to put it on, it crumbles a little more in my hands.

This faith of mine has been so dear to me. I love its clarity, its certainty, the sense of belonging it gave me. This faith fit well for a long time and I will always be grateful. But it hasn't fit for a while now.

I need a faith sturdy enough to hold up when the cold lasts too long. A faith made for perpetual summertime, full of easy answers and breezy clichés, won’t last me through these winter seasons when I’m tempted to forget that there is life even here.

I need a faith welcoming and safe even when I’m tired, especially when I’m tired. A faith that allows me to admit that sometimes it’s too much and hope feels like a cruel joke and the only right answer is to lie down in the face of it all. A faith that will let me mourn with those who mourn because it is unfair and the pain is real and silence is better than bullshit.

I need a faith woven through with my questions and my doubts, so integral to the way I encounter God. I’m a wrestler, they say, and I need a faith that will let me examine it, stretch it, pull at it, take it apart to see how it works. I need a faith smarter, stronger, braver than I. I need a faith that doesn’t make me feel like I am a danger to it.

I need a faith that is unafraid of what will happen if we let people in on the news that grace is free and you couldn’t earn it even if you wanted to. I need a faith more concerned about people made in the image of God than about the rules, a faith where shame is banished and we are free.

I need a faith with room enough for the God I have faith in, more generous than I can imagine, compassionate on all He has made, beckoning the tired and spiritually bankrupt, closer than my breath.

I need a faith that isn’t worried about slipping through my fingers because it knows that I was never really holding on to it. It’s a faith in the God who has always been holding on to me.