The Quiet Way Back to God

An essay about trauma, wandering, faith, and the hope of being welcomed home

losing faith quietly

Faith is a strange thing to lose. It rarely disappears all at once. It unravels slowly, thread by thread, until one day you realize the warmth you once carried has slipped away. I used to believe faith was permanent if you were disciplined enough, devoted enough, humble enough. I used to think that people only lost God when they rebelled.

I do not believe that anymore.

If someone asked why I am only now reaching for God again after so many years away, I would not know how to answer. It might be grief. It might be trauma. It might be the loneliness of a human soul that has been wandering without a home. Or perhaps it is because darkness has been unmistakably real. Evil leaves fingerprints, tears, scars, and funerals. If evil is that tangible, then Good must be real too. Something inside me still refuses to believe that suffering tells the whole story.

Working in 911 changed me in ways I did not expect. People imagine it is simply answering phones and sending help. They picture professionals in headsets with calm voices and steady hands. What they do not see are the moments when help is too far away. They do not hear the last breaths of strangers or the shattering sound of grief on the other end of the call. They do not understand that every scream sinks into the skin and stays there.

You become the silent witness to a thousand private tragedies. Then you are expected to return to normal life as if none of it lives in your memory. Trauma does not wash away. It settles, deep and quiet, in places you cannot reach. For me, it changed the way I saw prayer. I did not stop believing in God. I stopped believing that God could see me through the noise of all this suffering.

I never lost faith. I lost the feeling of being seen.

poetry as prayer

Maybe that is what led me back to poetry. When I had no place to bring my grief, I brought it to the page. I wrote about heaven, sorrow, loss, and forgiveness. I wrote about redemption, not because I felt worthy of it, but because hope had not completely died. Even when buried under fear, hope will try to rise. Poems became my secret prayers, my way of telling a silent heaven that I still wanted to be heard.

There is one poem that has been a companion through many years of wandering. I did not understand it fully when I wrote it. Now I see that it was about me all along. It was a longing for a God who had not slammed the door, even when I felt unworthy to knock.

if i should die and wake, 09.09.23

If I should die to wake at Heaven’s gate
And in the brilliance of your sapphire light
approach the seat to gaze upon Your face
I’ll bow before the Maker of the night
and sing the poems I couldn’t write in life.
Angels will dance as Heaven’s golden shroud
to radiate the sky in brilliant light.
I’ll sing my written words among the crowd.

Your children banished me for lack of faith
to the edge of camp in a broken time
My hunger grew among the scraps for grace
and turned me from the holy worship place
I wasn’t strong enough to bear the weight
of the flock meant to sing the sacred sound
to write my hymns and sing alone of grace
I’ll sing my written words among the crowd.

If I should die to wake at Heaven’s gate
my spirit’s sadness quenched in holy sight
my debt of sin You will adjudicate
of my ten thousand lonely nights alive.
At first, my knees will weaken in the light
my voice will rise to read the poems aloud
and share the words with others in the sound.
I’ll sing my written words among the crowd.

You’ll wash my faded robes to sacred white
I’ll offer up my sweetly taken crowns.
And in the brilliance of your sapphire light
I’ll sing my written words among the crowd.

exiled from the people of god

That poem is not about confidence. It is about hunger. It is about the desire to be welcomed after feeling unwelcomed for so long. It is about the aching hope that there is a place where tired hearts are finally understood.

The truth is painful, but it is honest. I was not exiled from God. I was exiled from His people.

Christians will sometimes rush to defend themselves with the words “not all of us.” That may be true, but it was enough of them. It only takes one rejection to convince a wounded heart that it is no longer safe to stay. It only takes one moment of condemnation to create a lifetime of hesitation. When I came out as transgender, I became someone people preferred to discuss rather than embrace. They told me God could still love me, but only if I stopped being who I am. It was as if they believed God makes errors in human form. It was as if my existence needed correcting before it could become holy.

So I left quietly. No dramatic exit. No loud anger. Just silence. The kind of silence that forms when someone realizes they are no longer wanted at the table.

I lived outside that camp for a long time. I learned what spiritual hunger feels like. It feels like praying without expecting an answer. It feels like watching other people find belonging while you sit in the shadows and press your hand against an invisible barrier. It feels like believing in God, yet believing you are no longer invited home.

I sometimes wonder how many others are out there in the unlit spaces beyond the church doors. The divorced. The queer. The traumatized. The ones who doubt. The ones who tried to return but met rejection. The ones who speak softly because they are tired of being corrected. The ones who would approach faith again if they believed someone cared enough to stay.

a pulse, not a switch

For a long time I thought faith was all or nothing. You had it or you did not. You were holy or you were lost. Life does not fit that shape. Belief is not a switch. Belief is a pulse. Sometimes it beats loudly. Sometimes it grows faint. Sometimes it is barely there, but still alive. I no longer measure faith by certainty. I measure it by reach. If you are still reaching, even with trembling hands, there is faith.

That is the place I wrote from when I created the next poem. It is a small, simple piece. It does not try to solve anything. It only tries to speak to the questions we are all afraid to ask.

the question answered me, 09.04.23

i asked the Question, “what is life?”
the Question answered me…
life is birth and smiles, and liberty
and joys between the unread lines.
life is sadness, tears, and work –
that keeps you from your life.
life is a kind of anger – i must construe
at things beyond control
it is the Question, “what is mortality?”
that makes us feel so small.
life is the yearning through the years
to never feel alone
it ends with all life ending
and a final home.
life is an empty sky,
and flowers on the ground
i asked the question, “what is life?”
the Question answered me.

life in the shadows

The older I get, the more I understand that control is an illusion. Life brings joy, but it also brings grief that does not ask permission. It brings laughter and funerals. It brings children and heartbreak. It brings first kisses and final breaths. It brings answers and silence. It brings moments that make you feel invincible and moments that make you feel small enough to disappear.

For me, life became a long night scattered with sirens and empty streets. I worked while the world slept. I heard the worst moments of strangers’ lives and then tried to sleep with those voices echoing behind my eyelids. People often say that 911 workers must be incredibly strong. Sometimes strength has nothing to do with it. Sometimes survival is the only thing left to do. You survive because you cannot afford to fall apart. You dissociate because feeling it all is impossible.

Eventually the darkness feels familiar. It becomes a place you know too well. In that darkness, faith felt like a foreign language. It was still inside me, but I could not speak it. I was afraid to reach for God because I was afraid the silence would confirm my worst fear. I was afraid that God saw me and turned away.

But even that fear did not erase the hunger for connection. Even people who lose faith still crave belonging. Loneliness becomes its own kind of wound. After a while, the idea of community begins to look like salvation. Not salvation in a doctrinal sense. Salvation in a human sense. The salvation of not crying alone. The salvation of being held by someone who means it. The salvation of laughing in the presence of people who do not want to fix you, only to love you.

After all, church isn’t a building. It’s the people who sit in a building who make up the bride of Christ.

if she returns, it has to be different

That is why I have begun thinking about church again. Not the church of my past. Not the building where I learned to hide myself. Something new. Something alive. Something human. If I ever return, it must be a place that sees me. Not tolerates me. Sees me. A place that believes God does not make mistakes. A place that lets me breathe without fear that someone will ask me to shrink for their comfort.

I do not need perfection. I need kindness. I need honesty. I need room to heal. If there is a community where doubters and wanderers are welcomed, I want to find it. But the truth is painful, even now. I am afraid. I am afraid to walk in and feel eyes scanning me, deciding if I count as a person. I am afraid someone will offer friendship only to disappear after a year or two, just like so many others have done. I am afraid I will sit in the back, week after week, waiting for someone to care enough to speak.

Yet I still want it. I want community. I want connection. I want to stop being the person who feels invisible inside a crowded world. Something in me still believes there is goodness left in people, even if I have not seen it in a long time.

the poem that offers permission

This brings me to the final poem. It is the gentlest thing I have written. It does not demand anything. It does not accuse. It does not shout. It speaks softly, the way a tired heart needs to be spoken to. It offers permission to come back slowly, with uncertainty, with trembling, with honesty.

the quiet way back, 11.07.25

you don’t have to run toward god.
you don’t have to shout,
or kneel,
or know what you believe.

you can just sit here,
in the small hours of the night,
and let your heart breathe
for the first time in a long time.

maybe faith isn’t lightning,
or certainty,
or the loud kind of worship
they taught you as a child.

maybe faith is quieter than that.

maybe it’s
a tired woman,
on a dark night,
and a phone full of ghosts,
whispering,

“i want to believe there is good.”

maybe god hears that
like a hymn.

you are not too lost.
you are not too shattered.
you don’t have to clean up your heart
before you speak.

if there is a god,
he already knows your grief,
knows your shaking hands,
knows the nightmares you carry,
knows the way loneliness
has become a second skin.

and if there is love,
it isn’t waiting for you
to come back perfect—
just present.

so sit here,
breathe,
cry if you need to.

you don’t have to believe fully.
you don’t have to decide tonight.

just know:

if there is a god,
he doesn’t need you to run.

a single step,
a single whisper,
a single moment of wanting
is enough.

and if you never run again—
if you only ever walk,
slow and unsure—

love can still find you.

for the ones who left

The reason I am writing this at all is because I know I am not the only one. There are people reading this who have lost their faith and pretend they have not. There are people who feel exiled from the communities that once claimed to love them. There are people who pray silently because they do not know if God is listening. There are people who believe in God, yet feel unworthy of His attention.

Spiritual exhaustion is real. Religious grief is real. It is painful to lose your faith, even if you lost it for good reasons. It is painful to walk away from the place that once held your entire identity. It is painful to wonder if you will ever feel at home again.

If God is real, I do not believe He waits with disappointment. I do not believe He scolds the wounded for limping. I believe He is patient. I believe He understands fear. I believe He knows how hard it is to return after carrying so much sorrow. I believe He knows that some of us walk cautiously, not because we lack faith, but because we have been hurt too deeply.

You do not need to come running. You do not need to arrive with certainty. You do not need to have the answers. You can arrive quietly. You can arrive uncertain. You can arrive crying. You can arrive the way a child returns home, unsure if the door will still open, but hoping it does.

If you are someone who has been wandering, know this: you are not alone. There are many of us walking the long way back, step by step, with hearts that still hope to be held. I do not know where this journey leads. I do not know what I will believe a year from now. But I know I am reaching. And reaching, as small as it feels, is the beginning of faith.

Maybe the way back to God is not a road. Maybe it is a whisper. Maybe it is a poem. Maybe it is a tear. Maybe it is a tired woman sitting in the dark, breathing quietly, and daring to hope that God’s love is still searching for her.

And maybe it is.

…

a final word to anyone who needed this

she did not write this for religious people. she wrote it for the ones who left.

this essay is for those who have lived in the shadows of faith, who lost their connection to God because life hit too hard, or because His children slammed the door. it is for those who want to believe again, but do not know how. if you have been wandering, hurting, or afraid to reach out, she hopes this gives you a place to breathe.

the poems included are hers. the story is hers. the longing is hers. if it speaks to you, then maybe you are not as alone as you feel.

if you are reading this and something in your chest feels heavy or understood, she wants you to know that you are invited into this space with softness. you do not need to come with certainty or confidence. you do not need to know what you believe today. you are allowed to simply exist here, with your questions, your exhaustion, and your hope that refuses to die. she wrote these words because she needed someone to say them to her, and maybe you needed someone to say them to you.

if you have been wandering, you are welcome to wander here. if you are searching, you are welcome to search here. and if you ever find the courage to pray again, even in a whisper, even in the smallest of ways, then you are walking the same road, side by side, and neither of us is alone.