Broken Hearts and Lost Faith

An excerpt from Religious Rebels

My husband’s grandpa passed away this week and our time has been full of family and funeral things so I didn’t have the capacity to write a full Substack. Instead I’m sharing a portion of my book, Religious Rebels.

I’ve once again been pondering seasons of “lost faith” as I hear from people who are rethinking everything in their lives. Losing my faith has been one of the best things that ever happened to me as I shared in this original blog post.

“Becoming disillusioned with our faith—feeling like we are losing it—is the first step to finding the real God for ourselves. Because He is real. He’s just might not be who we thought He was.

Christy Lynne Wood — The Value of Losing Our Faith

That blog post went on to inspire portions of the chapter that I am going to share with you. This is something I write about all the time and talk about in almost every interview I give. I’m passionate about losing our faith. I hope you are encouraged by this excerpt.

Broken Hearts, Chapter 7 of Religious Rebels

““I’m using you as a safe space. I’m struggling in faith.” I opened Facebook one afternoon to find this message from my online friend Kenzie. She continued, “My ex-fundamental atheist friend makes sense. My heart is heavy.”

As I thought about how to respond, I was struck by how different my reply would have been a few years ago. I would have been much quicker to give advice and Bible verses. I would have felt panicked inside as I tried to convince Kenzie not to give up on her faith. But brokenness has a way of changing people. Going through our own times of garbage and mess tends to strip away our easy and automatic Christianese answers. It’s painful, but it’s ultimately a very good thing. So, this is what I wrote back:

”You can be an atheist if that is where you need to go. And if Jesus is real, He will find you again. Sometimes the god we think is real needs to die so that the real God can exist. It’s okay to wonder and question. It’s actually really healthy. If God exists, He is big enough and loving enough to handle it. Thank you for trusting me with this information. I love you and am praying.”

Have you ever had questions and doubts that you were terrified to admit? Maybe you did find the courage to admit them, only to be shut down or condemned. I know what it feels like to ask legitimate questions that need answers but are rejected instead. I know what it feels like to have people express their disappointment in you because they expected more from you as a Christian. It hurts. It’s disillusioning. It makes you feel like curling up in your shell and hiding or maybe running far away. There is a level of desperation and loneliness that is hard to explain. But guess what? That’s not the real Jesus.

The truth is that it’s okay to be broken. It’s okay to have questions and doubts. It’s okay to reevaluate your faith. It’s a good thing. In the last year I have had multiple friends come to me with some scarily honest confessions. They admitted things like I’m not even sure what I believe these days. I think I’m losing faith. I don’t even like going to church. I don’t know how to be a Christian anymore. While these can be frightening realizations to come to, I’ve also come to find them exciting.

I believe there is great value in losing our faith. There is significance in realizing that we don’t know everything. There is beauty in the mystery of unanswered questions. Rather than something we should be afraid of, I think it’s something to welcome. Too often religious Christianity delights in straight answers, cut-and-dried theology, and blind faith. There isn’t room for doubt or questions—that’s not healthy.

The real God is definitely big enough to handle our doubts, confusions, and questions. They do not scare Him. In fact, I think He loves them. Losing my faith, not once but multiple times, is one of the best things that’s ever happened to me because of what happened next.

The first time I lost faith, I was in my early twenties. Life had drastically changed in the last couple of years. I’d left home to work as a live-in nanny while pursuing my degree in elementary education. Mary Poppins made being a nanny look easy, and I’ll be the first to admit that my expectations for life were still rosy and naive. Reality was much harder. On top of my difficult nanny job, I was going through a year of intense personal change, both inside and out. I cut my waist-length hair and started wearing pants full time. While I was still attending a conservative Baptist church on Sundays and Wednesdays, on Thursdays I started going to a charismatic college group. They had wild worship music with drums and a smoke machine. Hanging out with normal people my age took some adjustment, but I loved it.

As nanny-hood lost its luster, I started looking for a new job. Somehow I got connected with a Christian group home for troubled boys. I started going there for prayer meetings and was fascinated. Having always loved working with broken kids, I was thrilled when a job opened up as a caregiver for the residents. Surely this was God giving me the desires of my heart and getting me out of my nanny job at the same time.

I applied and had an interview. It was amazing, and I was totally confident. God was so good to me. Then I didn’t get the job. Looking back I can obviously see the red flags over a young, clueless, sheltered homeschooled girl working as a caregiver for delinquent teenage boys. What could go wrong? It makes me laugh just thinking about it. But at the time, I was so sure it was God. And then it wasn’t.

About the same time, I got news that a young man I’d cared about for almost my entire life was continuing to make bad choices that would affect him forever. I had prayed for this guy for years and nothing ever happened. It seems like a little thing, but it was the straw that broke me.

I sat at the black metal desk in my little room and stared at my open journal. I was still a nanny and I didn’t want to be one anymore. I didn’t get the job my heart longed for. My old friend was still choosing brokenness. Was God even real? Were my prayers being heard? Did He care? Was He truly good?

This was the first time I would ask these questions, but it wouldn’t be the last. I’ve been at this place of lost faith more than once since then. Too often we think that struggle is a bad thing. But it’s not. Wrestling is good. What if we chose to lean into the struggle and be fully present in that scary place of doubt and lost faith? What if we could believe that it was okay? That we are accepted, loved, and welcomed even with our doubts and confusion?

Christians through the centuries have faced seasons of doubt and what felt like a loss of faith. We often hear the phrase a dark night of the soul to describe this journey. A dark night was felt by the apostle Paul, C. S. Lewis, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther, Charles Spurgeon, and many others. Doubt is real, but it doesn’t have the be the place where we stay.

Every season of doubt in my life has always led to increased faith and hope in a God that I can’t let go of because He won’t let go of me. The real God is bigger than our questions and doubts. He isn’t mad at us for experiencing these things. He isn’t disappointed. But God does want to redeem these places of brokenness. He wants to use them to shove our false gods off our god shelf. He wants to draw us to Himself.

It’s okay if you are disillusioned with Christianity and the church right now. It’s okay if you are questioning. Becoming disillusioned with our faith, feeling like we are losing it, is the first step to finding the real God for ourselves. Because He is real—He just might not be who we thought He was. The real God will never fit in the tiny places we want to keep Him. He is way too complex, enormous, and seemingly insane. I love that about Him. We will never understand Him. There will always be more of Him to experience and explore.

Unfortunately, there is a good chunk of modern Christianity that is empty tradition. It’s the way we’ve always done it. God gets neatly wrapped in a package, and we forget that He is not tame or containable. Our god becomes more of a concept than a real and powerful Being. We get caught up in doing Christianity and we forget it’s really about knowing and being. This is why I get excited when people tell me that they are losing faith. Because too often our faith is not actually in the real God; our faith is in the Christianese religion we were taught and the fake god we think we understand.

So let’s struggle and wrestle, question and doubt. Let’s go on a hunt for the real God. But as we journey, let’s remember one thing. In real life there are more than two options; this complicated world isn’t black and white. There are many answers to be discovered in the middle way. Truth is often found in tension, within two seemingly opposing realities. It’s not less of a truth just because we can’t totally wrap our minds around it. We are the creatures after all, and the Creator is the God of the universe.”

If you would like to read the rest of Chapter 7 or the entire book, you can order Religious Rebels on Amazon as an e-book or paperback. You can also read it on Amazon Unlimited. Or you can order an autographed copy directly from me.

I will be back next week with the September issue of Rethinking Faith. Thanks so much for being here, reading, and supporting me and each other. You are the best. :-)

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As always, I'd love to hear your thoughts, questions, or comments. You can find me on Threads, Instagram, Facebook, my website, and on my original podcast. I’d love to connect with you on any of these places!

My new podcast, Religious Rebels, can be found on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, and more. Episodes drop every other Sunday at noon on YouTube and 5pm on Substack and everywhere you listen to podcasts.

You can also order an autographed copy of my book, Religious Rebels: Finding Jesus in the Awkward Middle Way by clicking on the button below. Or you can find it on Amazon.