Faith Before Words: Growing Up in the Same Church That Still Holds Us Today

 

Faith Before Words

“For by grace you have been saved through faith—and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God.”
— Ephesians 2:8

My first memory of faith is not of God.

It is not scripture or sermons or prayers spoken aloud. It is not belief, as adults understand belief. My first memory is of people, the church, and being there.

I remember the nursery.

I don’t remember lessons or songs, but I remember the adults who took care of us. The way they lifted us, watched us, tended to small needs with quiet consistency. At the time, I didn’t have language for what that meant. I only knew that for a little while, someone was paying attention. Someone was responsible for me. Someone noticed if I cried.

Looking back now, I see grace there—before I knew its name. Not dramatic or announced. Just steady care, freely given, without asking anything from me in return.

Most of those people are gone now. Some have died. Others left the church long ago. But they remain in my memory not because of what they taught, but because of how they showed up. Their care was ordinary and temporary—and yet it mattered more than theology ever could have at that age.

I also remember the pews.

I remember lying across them, small enough that the wood felt wide beneath my body. I would look up at the lights and the ceiling, tracing patterns I couldn’t name. I listened to the choir sing. I didn’t understand the words, but I felt the sound fill the room and move through me. It settled somewhere deep and unformed.

Church, in those early years, was not something I understood.
It was something I experienced.

Light.
Sound.
Stillness.
Being watched over.

My faith began before I had words for God. Before I knew what belief required or demanded. It began in fragments of safety—in moments where the world softened just enough for me to breathe. Grace arrived first, long before belief knew how to follow.

But even then, church was complicated.

Attending church with my mother—and sometimes my father—was confusing in ways I did not yet know how to name. I saw a version of my mother there that did not exist at home. I watched her speak kindly to others, laugh easily, offer care and concern. People trusted her. They saw her as gentle and warm.

And I sat beside her, holding two truths that did not fit together.

The mother others saw did not match the one I knew. I did not understand how both could exist in the same person. I didn’t have language for masks or image or charm. I only knew that something felt deeply wrong—and that no one else seemed to notice.

Church was one of the first places I learned that appearances could lie.
That people could be one thing in public and another in private.
That harm could hide behind kindness.

Grace did not erase that confusion. It did not rush to explain it away. Instead, it stayed with the child who sensed something was wrong and quietly trusted her awareness, even when no one affirmed it yet.

Around the age of eight or nine, something shifted.

I was old enough to listen—to the readings for that Sunday and the sermon that followed—and to begin wondering whether God might be more than atmosphere. I remember sitting there and thinking, Maybe God will help me. Because I believe in Him.

That thought landed with weight.

It wasn’t theological. It was desperate. I didn’t yet have words for what was wrong in my life, but I knew I needed help. And if believing in God meant help was possible, then I would believe with everything I had.

So I started praying.

Every day.
Sometimes two or three times a day.

They weren’t polished prayers. They were repetitive, earnest, almost bargaining in their hope. I prayed because I believed belief itself mattered—that if I did this correctly, if I was faithful enough, God might intervene. Might soften something. Might fix what I could not explain.

Prayer became my private lifeline. Something I could do that felt active instead of helpless. I prayed before school. I prayed at night. I prayed quietly in my head when the day felt too heavy.

I didn’t pray for miracles.
I prayed for relief.
For safety.
For things to change.

Only later did I realize that grace was already answering those prayers—not by fixing everything, but by keeping me alive, by giving me a place to turn, by holding me through what I could not yet escape.

For a long time, church and faith were the same thing in my mind.

As a child—and well into my early twenties—I did not know how to separate them. Church was where faith lived. Faith was filtered through people, systems, sermons, and expectations. What happened inside those walls shaped what I believed God was like.

So when church disappointed me, faith felt like the disappointment too.

When I felt unseen or misunderstood, it wasn’t just people who failed me—it felt like God had. When silence was expected, I assumed heaven echoed that silence. When obedience was praised over honesty, I learned to distrust my own voice not just with others, but with God.

Resentment crept in slowly.

I resented the way faith seemed tied to places where truth felt unsafe. I resented how easily people spoke of grace while I was still trying to survive. I resented how belief was presented as simple when my life was anything but.

And because I could not yet separate church from God, I resented them both.

For a long time, I misunderstood grace.

I thought grace was conditional—something given after repentance, after forgiveness, after I had proven myself worthy. I thought it was fragile. Something I could lose if I was angry, questioning, or broken for too long.

But grace was never asking me to earn it.

Grace is not deserved.
Grace is not negotiated.
Grace is not withdrawn when faith is messy.

Grace is God’s unmerited favor—moving first, staying longest, holding even when belief is confused. It does not belong to buildings or people or performance. It belongs to God alone.

Learning this did not erase the past—but it loosened its grip.

It meant God was not aligned with harm, even when harm happened in holy spaces. It meant my childhood prayers were not evaluated for correctness. It meant my resentment did not disqualify me, and my questions did not exile me.

Grace had been present all along—quiet, patient, waiting until I could recognize it for what it was.

And still—I remain.

I still attend the same church I did when I was a young child. The church where my parents were married. The church where I was baptized. The same building where I lay across the pews and stared at the lights.

It is also the church where I was married.
Where my children were baptized.
Where they are now growing up—walking the same aisles, sitting in the same pews, learning faith in the same space where mine began, fractured, and slowly re-formed.

This is not because the church has been perfect.
It has not.
Neither have the people within it.

But grace does not require perfection to remain.

This place has seen my whole story.

It has seen me as a child searching for safety.
As a teenager clinging to belief.
As a young adult resentful and tired.
As a woman learning to untangle God from harm.
As a mother bringing her children forward, trusting grace to meet them more gently than it met me.

My faith has grown here—not in a straight line, but in cycles. It has questioned here. Broken here. Rebuilt here. Grace did not rush any of it.

There is something sacred in that continuity.

Not because the building itself is holy—but because grace has been willing to meet me here again and again. The same walls that once held my earliest prayers now echo with my children’s voices. The same font that marked my beginning has marked theirs.

My faith did not outgrow this place.
It learned how to live more truthfully within it.

Reflection
Grace found me before I could name it, stayed when I resented it, and remained when I learned to trust it again. I promise to let my faith keep growing without forcing it into certainty—and to trust that grace is wide enough to hold my whole story, and my children’s too.

The Honor of Being There at the End

When a very close friend of mine recently lost her father, I watched her step into that sacred, disorienting space between grief and responsibility, planning a funeral, making decisions through tears, trying to steady herself while her world tilted. As she prepared for his final arrangements, something in me stirred. Her loss brought back the memories I keep tucked away, memories of the people whose final breaths I have witnessed, the rooms I have sat in, the silence I’ve felt settle after life slips quietly out of the body.

Watching her navigate those first days of grief made me look back on all the endings I’ve lived through…
All the hands I’ve sat beside.
All the breaths I’ve watched slow.
All the holy silences I’ve felt fill a room after a life comes to its close.

It made me realize that death has woven itself through my life in ways I never sought, never expected, and never fully understood — but ways that shaped me deeply.

I was fourteen years old when I sat beside my grandfather as he took his final breath. At that age, death was still a distant idea — something whispered about, something adults shielded children from, something that lived more in stories than in reality. I didn’t understand what it meant to be present in someone’s last moments. I didn’t recognize the sacredness of it, the heaviness, or the quiet honor that comes with being trusted to stand at the border between here and whatever comes next.

All I knew was that my grandfather — the man whose hands smelled like soil and whose laugh could shake the dust off the rafters — suddenly grew still. The room shifted. It wasn’t empty; it was full of a silence that felt almost holy. I didn’t understand it then, but with time, I’ve learned to recognize that feeling.

It is the moment heaven brushes against earth.

That was my first time witnessing death, but it would not be my last. Life, in its unpredictable way, would bring me again and again to the bedside of the dying. I didn’t ask for it, didn’t plan for it, and certainly didn’t expect it — but somehow, I always ended up being the one who stayed when others stepped away.

Before my mother’s death, before the long nights and the complicated grief, there was my father — a relationship woven with its own shadows and contradictions.

In the five years before he died, my father had changed. In 2000, he went blind, and something in him softened in the years that followed. The anger that once lived so close to the surface began to fade. The sharp edges of his temper mellowed. It was as if losing his sight forced him to see life differently — to slow down, to let go of some of the bitterness he carried, to reach for gentleness in ways he never had before. He wasn’t the same man I had grown up afraid of. Blindness reshaped him into someone more patient, more reflective, more human.

And then, in 2014, he died suddenly — a massive heart attack that shattered every illusion of time, preparation, or warning. There were no final hours, no whispered goodbyes, no hand to hold or chair to sit beside. One moment he was alive; the next he was gone. The shock was absolute.

Both my brother and I insisted on seeing his body, not out of morbid curiosity, but because we needed proof — something physical, something undeniable-to make the news real. Grief can make the mind argue with reality, and standing beside him was the only way we could convince ourselves that this was truly happening.

The impact of that moment lived in me long after the funeral ended. His death taught me how abrupt life can be, how fragile, how suddenly the world can tilt — and how sometimes it never tilts back.

A year later, my mother began her own slow decline, and the contrast between the two deaths weighed heavily on me. My father vanished in an instant. My mother faded over time. One death gave me no chance to say goodbye. The other gave me time I didn’t want, but couldn’t ignore.

Of all the losses I’ve lived through, none reshaped me more than the night my mother died.

For most of my life, I hated my mother. Not the kind of temporary teenage anger that fades with maturity, but a deep, bone-level hatred born from years of wounds carved into me long before I knew what the word “mother” was supposed to mean. She harmed me in ways that still echo through my adulthood. She fractured my childhood, twisted my sense of belonging, and reshaped how I understood love and safety.

That hatred became armor. It felt like protection. It felt like power — the only power I had left after surviving her. I convinced myself that hating her freed me from her.

But when she began dying, something unexpected stirred inside me — something quiet, instinctive, and impossible to name. She should not die alone.

Maybe my father’s sudden death had taught me that you don’t always get a chance to be there. Maybe I couldn’t bear the thought of another person leaving this world without anyone sitting witness. Or maybe, despite everything she had done, some small remnant of the child I once was still wanted to show up in the only way I knew how.

I didn’t go because she deserved it.
I didn’t go because forgiveness had suddenly bloomed in me.
I went because some stubborn part of my soul refused to let anyone cross that threshold alone.

At the same time, life was pulling me in another direction — one that had nothing to do with death and everything to do with protecting life. My youngest was very sick then, struggling with a lung infection that required breathing treatments every four hours, around the clock. We were exhausted. The days blurred together in alarms, nebulizers, worry, and very little sleep. I had left my mother’s side to go home, help give the next treatment, and rest for just a moment.

But I couldn’t stay away.

Something inside me — stronger than exhaustion, stronger than fear, stronger than the years of distance between us — pulled me back. I felt it like a tug in my chest, a knowing heavier than logic. I remember standing at home after the breathing treatment, watching my son finally drift into a fragile sleep, and realizing I needed to return to her bedside.

It didn’t make sense.
It didn’t feel comfortable.
But it felt necessary.

There is a strange kind of clarity that comes when you sit beside someone who once broke you. The anger didn’t magically disappear. The hurt didn’t resolve itself in some storybook ending. But in those final hours, the woman in that bed was no longer the force that had shaped my pain. She was just a human being — fragile, failing, and facing the same silence we will all one day face.

I could not bring myself to touch her, so I just sat next to her bedside — close enough to witness her final breaths, but not close enough to bridge the years of distance that lay between us.

I didn’t hold her hand.
I didn’t whisper forgiveness.
I didn’t pretend the past hadn’t happened.

I simply stayed.

And staying changed me.

Watching my mother die forced me to confront a truth I had avoided for years: hatred is not freedom. It binds you as tightly as love does. Sitting with her — without touching her, without offering a comfort I didn’t have — loosened a chain I had been dragging for most of my life. It didn’t break. It didn’t vanish. But it shifted, just enough for me to breathe differently.

Her final breath did not redeem her.
But it released me.

And that is its own kind of mercy.

Then, in 2019, came the loss that felt different from all the others — the loss of the woman who had been the closest thing I ever had to a mother.

My grandmother’s decline began after a fall. A simple, everyday moment that changed everything. The fall led to tests. The tests led to answers none of us were ready for: cancer. At ninety-four, she was too tired and too wise for the brutality of chemotherapy. She chose peace, not battle. She chose comfort, not suffering. I honored her choice.

So she came home on hospice.

I wanted to be by her side every second. I didn’t want to leave her room, her house, or even the sound of her breathing. I wanted to return every ounce of gentleness she had poured into me during my childhood — all the meals, all the quiet reassurances, all the love she gave without being asked.

But life wasn’t simple anymore.
I wasn’t just a granddaughter.
I was a mother — pulled between the woman who once protected me and the children I was now raising.

And those children loved her deeply, too.

She had been a big part of their lives — not just mine. She had held them, spoken to them, laughed with them, and prayed for them. She gave them the same steady, unconditional love she once gave me. What better way to honor that bond than by allowing them to be part of this process? To let them see that death, when met with love, is not something to hide from.

And they understood it in ways adults sometimes can’t.

My son — still so young, still full of softness and sincerity — would climb into bed beside her, curling against her as though his small warmth could somehow protect her. He would snuggle into her side and tell me, with a child’s pure faith, that he wanted to stay with Grandma until she went to heaven. He didn’t fear her frailty. He didn’t fear death. He saw only love.

My children gained so much from being around her in those final days. They learned compassion not from lessons, but from presence. They learned that goodbye is not something to run from, but something to honor. They learned that love doesn’t disappear when a body grows weak — it becomes more visible.

When her final moment came, I was there.

I sat beside her as she took her last breath, and once again I felt that holy silence settle into the room — the same sacred, unmistakable quiet I had felt with my grandfather so many years before. A peace that wrapped itself around us like a blanket.

After she passed, I helped dress her in clean clothes. It was the last act of care I could offer her — the last way to honor the woman who had clothed me in love my entire life. My hands shook, but my heart felt steady. Tenderness has its own strength.

I stayed with her until they came to collect her for cremation. I refused to let her be alone — not even for a moment. I stayed because she had stayed for me. I stayed because love deserved a witness. I stayed because letting her go was both the hardest and the holiest thing I have ever done.

Each death taught me something different.
Each goodbye carried its own truth.

Most people talk about death as if it is only darkness — fear and sorrow, and loss. But being there when someone leaves this world carries something else too, something quieter but far more powerful.

It is a privilege.
A duty.
A moment of profound meaning.

It is witnessing the final chapter of a life that mattered.
It is standing guard over the last breath someone will ever take.
It is offering presence when every other form of comfort has run out.

For me, death has become a teacher.
Not a cruel one — though grief can be cruel — but an honest one.

Death has taught me that love is not erased by pain.
Death has taught me that showing up is sometimes the most powerful thing we can do.
Death has taught me that even the most wounded hearts carry the capacity for mercy.
And death has taught me that being present — even silently, even with complicated feelings — is its own kind of grace.

I was fourteen when I first felt that thin, holy moment where life gives way to something beyond it. I didn’t understand it then. I barely understand it now. But I do know this:

Being there when someone leaves the world is an honor.
Even when the person hurt you.
Even when your heart is conflicted.
Even when the past sits between you like a wall.

Presence still matters.

And sometimes, being the one who stays is what finally allows you to let go.

When Healing and Faith Collide

 

Both of my parents died a year apart — my dad on May 2, 2014, one day after his sixty-fifth birthday, and my mom on May 12, 2015, just after turning sixty-six. I sometimes think of those dates not just as the days they left this world, but as the days my world shifted forever.

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.”

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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.