When my mother took her final breath, I sat there watching — a rush of conflicting emotions flooding through me. Fear. Relief. Sorrow. Longing. It felt like the air in the room changed shape, like something heavy had finally been lifted, and yet something sacred had been lost at the same time.
Her death was a strange turning point. For so long I had carried fear — fear that she would hurt me again, fear that I would never be free of her shadow, fear that my body would always flinch at the sound of her voice. And then, suddenly, that fear was gone. I slept better. I could breathe again. My dreams quieted; my nights weren’t battles anymore.
I went almost ten years without nightmares, without having to push away the ghosts of my past. But this year, for reasons I can’t quite name, the darkness stirred again. Some say it’s because of a student whose story mirrors mine. Others call it part of healing — old wounds surfacing so they can finally close. Maybe it’s both.
Maybe it’s my student. Maybe it’s that my own children are reaching the ages when I first learned to be afraid. Maybe it’s realizing that I still long for something I will never have — a mother. A safe relationship. The kind of love I am trying so hard to give to my children, without having had an example to follow.
Whatever the reason, it’s like the past has knocked again — gently this time, but insistently. The fear is softer, but the ache is deeper. I see now that even when the nightmares fade, the story isn’t over. Healing keeps unfolding, layer by layer, often in the middle of ordinary life.
And in those moments, my faith is the only thing that holds steady — reminding me that grace does not depend on how healed I feel, but on the One who promises to make all things new, even the memories that still sting.
But what’s hardest this time is that I find myself questioning everything I once felt sure of — my faith, my understanding of who God is, what He wants, and even what the church on earth is meant to be.
For so long, the rope of grace held me — thin at times, but unbreakable. It pulled me through sleepless nights and silent prayers, through the fear that my past would swallow me whole. But lately, that rope feels like it’s unraveling. Each question I ask seems to loosen another thread.
And I don’t know what it will mean if I try to repair it. Will it still hold me the same way? Will I recognize the God I meet on the other side of doubt? Or will He be someone new — someone I have to learn to trust all over again?
People have asked me over the years, “How can you believe there is a God?” I never really understood that question until recently.
Of all the places I thought I would feel unwelcome, I never imagined it would be the church. For most of my life, church was where I clung to hope — where hymns steadied my breath and communion reminded me that I belonged to something bigger, something merciful. But now, I can’t even bring myself to walk through the doors.
I know in my mind that the pastor doesn’t make the church. But what do you do when the council and the congregation go along with whatever he says simply because he is the pastor? When leadership mistakes authority for truth, and silence for faithfulness?
It’s a strange kind of heartbreak — to lose your safe place inside the house of God. To feel the warmth of community fade into something colder. I sit with my Bible sometimes and wonder: Is God disappointed in me for stepping back? Or is He sitting beside me, whispering, “Rest for a while, My child”?
Because the God I once knew — the One who sat with me in the dark, who saw the scars and still called me beloved — He doesn’t seem to live in that building anymore. And maybe that’s the point. Maybe He’s been outside the whole time, waiting for me to stop confusing the structure with His Spirit.
I don’t know how people with mental health struggles or trauma don’t have faith issues, too. How could they not? When your story is filled with betrayal, abandonment, or pain, it seeps into how you see God — whether you mean for it to or not.
For me, the wounds of the past didn’t just damage my sense of safety; they damaged my ability to believe that love could stay. And if love couldn’t stay, how could God?
Over the years, I’ve seen what people — and whole congregations — do to those who struggle deeply with mental health. And most of it is negative. They say they’ll pray for you, but they also step back. They whisper, diagnose, or quietly decide you’re “too much.” They think a professional needs to deal with it, as if the presence of pain makes a person unfit for the community.
But faith isn’t supposed to be sanitized. The church was never meant to be a waiting room for the already healed. It’s supposed to be a refuge for the broken. And yet, so often, those who are hurting most are pushed toward the margins — the very people Jesus always drew close.
People talk about faith and therapy like they’re two different roads — one for the soul, one for the mind. But I don’t think they can be separated. When trauma fractures you, it doesn’t ask which part it’s allowed to break. Healing has to touch all of it — the brain that replays the memories, the heart that still flinches, and the spirit that keeps asking why.
I think repairing faith and repairing mental health are part of the same process — the slow work of learning to trust again. Trusting your thoughts. Trusting love. Trusting that maybe, just maybe, God was not the one who hurt you, but the One who wept with you when it happened.
But even knowing that, I struggle with both my faith and my mental health alone — and quietly.
It’s not that I don’t want to talk about it. It’s that most people don’t know what to do with that kind of honesty. The church doesn’t always have space for complicated believers — the ones who still show up but sit in the back, unsure if they belong. And the world doesn’t always understand how faith can still matter after everything. So I stay somewhere in between, whispering prayers I’m not sure I believe, asking for peace from a God I’m still learning to trust.
Some days, that feels like failure. Other days, it feels like faith in its truest form — not polished or certain, but persevering. Maybe that’s what grace really looks like: not the absence of struggle, but the courage to keep holding both doubt and hope in the same trembling hands.
I’m still questioning what to do — whether to stay in this church that feels so empty or to look for another one, a place where I can breathe again. I wonder if anyone would even notice if I left. That thought alone hurts more than I want to admit.
This struggle has brought me back to that old familiar place — a sense of loss and emptiness. The kind I thought I’d already healed from. It’s strange how the same emotions resurface, wearing different clothes. The loneliness of my childhood is now dressed up as spiritual displacement.
But maybe this, too, is part of the journey — the stripping away of what was comfortable so something truer can grow. Maybe God is not confined to the sanctuary I’m scared to enter. Maybe He’s in the quiet space of my questioning, sitting beside me as I wrestle with the emptiness, whispering, “You are not lost, even when you don’t know where you belong.”
A Prayer for When Faith Feels Fragile
Lord,
You who have seen every loss, every fear, every question that hides beneath my quiet—
hold me here, in this in-between.
When belief feels like sand slipping through my fingers,
Teach me to rest in the truth that You still hold me.
When Your church feels like a place I no longer fit,
remind me that Your presence cannot be contained by walls.
You know the parts of me that ache for answers
and the parts that only want peace.
Help me to stop pretending I’m okay,
and instead, let me be honest in Your light.
If my faith must be rebuilt,
let it be on the foundation of Your mercy,
not fear, not shame — but grace that does not give up on me.
Sit with me in the silence,
and let that be enough for now.
Amen.
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