Finding Your Way Home
“There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there. The other is to walk round the whole world till we come back to the same place,” ~G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
Many people spend some portion of their adult lives trying to get back home spiritually. We sense we’ve lost our way or God seems distant or perhaps we even lose our faith altogether.
My own faith came to an abrupt flatline on July 20, 2007, when a baby my family had prayed for and rejoiced over died. Her mother, my sister, had picked out the name Zoey (which means life) months before she died as a result of a cord entanglement at 36 weeks’ gestation. My sister’s trauma—and by extension, our family’s—was too monumental for me to process. My heart shut down.
Loss, trauma, betrayal, and other forms of grief usually bring with them a sense of isolation. As a culture, we seem to be stymied at how to effectively minister to those who are grieving. As the one grieving, we wonder how the world keeps going when our own life has imploded. We feel isolated in a world now totally colored by grief. Often what we experience in the physical bleeds over to the spiritual, so grief can cause us to lose our way spiritually.
Losing faith can itself be an additional source of grief if your faith is part of your core identity. A faith that had rescued me in the midst of family upheaval in my teens had now seemingly abandoned me as I processed Zoey’s death. Glaring, blinding questions emerged. Why would God allow this tragedy in my life? Why didn’t God step in? What is God doing? The God I thought I knew, understood and trusted now seemed strange, contradictory, and untrustworthy.
Questions about God are not the only thing that can haunt us; so can questions about ourselves. What kind of Christian am I really to be derailed so suddenly and profoundly? Was my faith shallow or maybe never true at all? As the questions churn, our grief spirals, turns inward, and compounds upon itself, one layer after another.
Perhaps you find yourself wanting to return to who you were before losing your faith. In the midst of my spiritual crisis, I longed for the comfort of my faith to return, for spiritual stability, for my now-severed tether to the divine to buoy me as I grieved and tried to piece my heart back together. But as anyone who has faced significant loss can attest, you simply can’t go back. You can’t unknow what you’ve learned, which is its own kind of grief. It is as if you’re knocking furiously on the door of a house from which you’ve been evicted. You can still see the warmth of light flooding out of the windows, but you’re out in the cold for good.
While grief forever changes the landscape of your soul, you can begin to find your way home. You can stay ‘there,’ as Chesterton suggests, in the church, as a part of the body, seeking God’s heart as you process denial, anger, depression, and even acceptance. You may start to realize that if we are to have faith, we must also be comfortable with mystery, with not fully knowing or understanding, with not having the full picture in view.
In those moments, when grief begins to wash away your faith away like the tide, think of the desperate father in Mark 9 who pleads for the healing of his beloved son. In this moment, Jesus reminds him of the simple power of belief. Scripture tells us that the father’s response was immediate: “Lord, I believe! Help my unbelief.” This father’s simple plea reminds us to ask God to do what we cannot. If you cannot will yourself to feel again, believe again, or trust again, ask God to gift you with what you lack.
You may walk a thousand miles trying to understand who you are now in light of the losses that have marked you. Jesus’ parable in Luke 5 reminds the Pharisees that you can’t pour new wine into old wineskins because the new wine causes the old skins to burst. Though Jesus is making a theological contrast between the old religious way and his new way, this analogy brings life for us, too. If you keep trying to become who you were before, to inhabit your old skin, you may never find your way back to God. Instead, you must fully embrace your new skin and let God dwell with you there.
Twelve years have passed since we buried our dark-haired baby girl. As seasons of life have ebbed and flowed, I have both stayed in the Father’s house and walked around the world to regain my spiritual footing. While I do not have everything perfectly sorted out, I found my way home by coming to understand that in her death, Zoey birthed new life into our family in that paradoxical way that only grace can. If we had written the story, surely we would have kept her here. But in the absence of that, we press into her story to see Jesus, to be filled with grace, and to love more earnestly.
Maybe you feel as though you’ve lost hold of your faith. Perhaps you’re on the verge of giving up completely or you’re exhausted from walking around the world to regain what you’ve lost. Wherever you are, stay close to others who speak life to your spirit, be authentic in your grief and questions, and be patient with what can sometimes be a long and winding journey home. And always know that you are not alone.
is a writer and teacher who lives with her family in South Carolina. When she’s not pondering words, she enjoys hiking, learning about natural health, and drinking the perfect latte. Allison loves to connect with others about family, special needs parenting, mental health, grief, and faith. Her writing has been featured on The Mighty and Her View from Home, and you can find more of it on her blog Writing Is Cheaper Than Therapy.
Photograph © Annie Spratt, used with permission
