It’s disorienting when your theological framework—once solid, certain, and safe—no longer fits the reality you're living in.
The pandemic made a lot of us confront that. Suddenly, the black-and-white answers we’d been given about suffering, community, and morality crumbled under the weight of actual lived trauma and collective grief. What many of us discovered was that those “certainties” were never designed to withstand that level of pressure.
I remember feeling a kind of vertigo when I realized that the “faith system” I was clinging to didn’t actually have language for compassion at scale—or nuance in the face of ethical gray areas. Everything had been turned into a binary: saved or lost, holy or sinful, right or wrong. And when I looked closer, I realized that those binaries often had more to do with power and control than anything sacred.
And here's the kicker: I didn’t stop believing because I stopped caring. I stopped pretending to believe because I started caring more.
Caring about the vulnerable.
Caring about integrity.
Caring about what I was passing down—whether through music, teaching, or simple conversation.
The cost of certainty is often that you’re asked to deny your own experience in favor of maintaining a system that’s more interested in being “right” than being real. But once you've seen the cracks, you can’t unsee them. And pretending they’re not there? That’s exhausting.
What do you do when the system doesn’t support your soul anymore?
You get honest.
You deconstruct.
You grieve.
You give yourself space to heal.
And eventually… HOPEFULLY… you find the freedom explore again—this time without the guilt, shame, or fear of getting it wrong.
✦
📬 [Subscribe Here] or [Check Out the Blog Archive]
Part 4 drops next Friday.