Deconstruction: Part 1 of 4

This post is part of a four-part series exploring my deeply personal (yet, community-oriented) journey of spiritual transformation—through deconstruction, disorientation, and reorientation. Each post is a window into a different season of the path: the unraveling, the wandering, the returning, and the re-forming. My hope is that, as you read, you’ll feel less alone in your questions and more aware of the God who walks with us through every chapter.

Here’s what’s coming:

A Kind Undoing – The gentle, unraveling of deconstruction.
The Fog of Disorientation – Wrestling with doubt, silence, and spiritual vertigo.
The Return – Naming grief, reclaiming practices, and seeking rootedness again.
Beholding and Becoming – A renewed vision of discipleship and life with God.

Let’s begin at the beginning—where things quietly came undone.

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If you had watched my life from the outside five years ago, it probably would’ve looked steady—rooted. I had been at the same company for nearly two decades, deeply invested in work I believed in. My husband and I were raising our four boys in a community we loved, surrounded by rhythms that felt familiar and faithful.

But slowly, quietly, the ground beneath us began to shift. Not all at once. It was more like a gentle loosening—thread by thread, invitation by invitation. I left the company that had shaped so much of my identity. We moved two times in two years. For a season, there were seven children in our home—one of whom we would later adopt. We said goodbye to a school where we had labored and belonged for over a decade. And we lost my grandma: my steady advocate, my life-long friend, and the heartbeat of so many formative memories.

Eventually, we left the church we had known for fifteen years. It had been home. A place where we raised our family, built friendships, served, sang, and sacrificed. Leaving wasn’t dramatic—it was heartbreaking. But it was also faithful.

Everything familiar slowly slipped away. And yet somehow, it felt like we were being led, not lost.

We Went Through It Together

One of the most comforting gifts in that wilderness was walking through it with my husband. We didn’t always process at the same pace, but we stayed in the conversation—committed to listening, questioning, and holding space for what the other was discovering. Over two years, our journey was shaped by early-morning coffee chats, hours of podcasts and sermons, tearful prayers, and questions that rarely had clean answers. I spent time in therapy with a licensed Christ-centered counselor. I leaned on a couple friends who weren’t afraid to get messy and spent time weekly with my confessional community who held a safe space for my vulnerability. Together, these voices helped us find language for what we were feeling—the strange grief of losing what once felt so certain, and the slow forming of something truer.

We had to unlearn the idea that doubt was dangerous. That asking hard questions made us unfaithful. Instead, we learned to trust that God wasn’t threatened by our honesty.

The Bible Without the Presence

I used to think I really knew the Bible. I could quote it, teach from it (I mean, I’ve written entire Bible studies on this very site), and offer somewhat passable explanations of doctrine—though I was untrained and often unsure of what I was actually communicating. My spiritual life was shaped by deep engagement with Scripture, but over time, I began to realize something was off.

I had a relationship with the Bible, but not necessarily with the God of the Bible. Or maybe more accurately—I had a relationship with my Bible, my journal, and myself. I knew how to think about God, write about Him, teach about Him. But I wasn’t truly communing with the Father, Son, and Spirit.

So much of my faith had been formed in sermon-centric spaces—places where knowledge was king and the goal was understanding, not necessarily transformation. I learned to absorb information, to dig for meaning, to interpret and apply. But communion? Silence? Presence? That was more difficult to come by. I was taught to study God, not to sit with Him.

It Was Safer Not to Feel

I’m an Enneagram 8, which means I often meet the world with strength, energy, and a low tolerance for anything that smells like manipulation. Vulnerability doesn’t come naturally. It feels like exposure—like an invitation to lose control. And for most of my life, strength felt safer than softness.

But it wasn’t just my personality that shaped that response. It was also what I observed, what I absorbed—what was modeled for me in the world I grew up in. Especially within the American church, emotion was often edited out in favor of clarity, certainty, and composure. The Christian life was presented as a path of victory and virtue, not lament and longing.

I could cry for others, but not for myself. I was deeply empathetic and wildly disconnected from my own ache. Because if I let myself feel too much, I might lose control—and control was the only way I knew how to survive a world that kept shifting beneath my feet.

But no amount of grit could hold back the ache. Eventually, it caught up with me. I started waking up with tears already in my eyes. I wasn’t angry; I was exhausted. Weary from holding everything together. Weary from trying to make sense of who I was when all the scaffolding had fallen.

The world I had built—a faithful one, a responsible one—no longer fit. And I didn’t know who I was without it.

When No One Noticed

One of the quietest griefs of that season was realizing how few people saw what was really happening inside me. People noticed the surface changes—our moves, job transitions, family shifts. From the outside, it probably looked like a busy season of logistics and life decisions.

But no one asked about the deeper unraveling. The disorientation. The questions I was carrying. The ache behind my eyes.

It wasn’t that I walked away in anger or made some loud announcement. It was more of a soul-level fade—subtle, internal, aching. And somehow, very few chose to reach in. Few asked the kind of questions that would’ve opened a door.

To be fair, I don’t open up easily. It takes time. Trust. Work. And not everyone knew how to navigate that terrain—or even knew it existed. I don’t carry resentment, just a tender pull for someone willing to get messy with my mess. A willingness to go deeper than polite check-ins.

Again, there were a sacred few who did—and I’ll share more about them later. Their presence was holy. But I was hurt by how many didn’t. It left me wondering: Am I only known by what I do? What I produce? What I uphold?

And deeper still: Would anyone even come find me if I stopped holding it all together?

But the Lord did come.

Like the father in Luke 15, He saw me from a distance. And He ran. Not with punishment, but with welcome. He wasn’t content to let me unravel unnoticed. He chased me down—not with shame, but with embrace.

And like the Shepherd in Psalm 23, He restored my soul.

He led me beside still waters and into dark valleys, too—not to abandon me there, but to be with me in them. To prepare a table when I felt surrounded. To anoint me with presence when I felt forgotten.

He was never content with surface connection. He always wanted my heart.

Below are some reflection questions—not a checklist to conquer, but a few open doors for your heart to walk through. As you sit with these questions, know that they are not meant to tie a bow on anything. This is not the end of the story—just the beginning. In the next post, we’ll step into the foggier terrain: the season of disorientation. Where old answers no longer hold, spiritual certainty slips through your fingers, and the voice of God feels quiet. But even there—even in the unknown—He is not absent.

I hope you’ll come with me into that next stretch of the journey and encourages others to come along, too.

Reflect: A Gentle Invitation

Remember: this is not a checklist to conquer, but a few open doors for your heart to walk through. You’re not meant to answer them all. Maybe just one or two stand out to you as you skim them. That’s enough. Let them be a pause in your day.

You might write your thoughts in a journal. Or you could simply ask one of these questions out loud and sit with it, with the Lord. There's no right way to reflect—only honest ways.

It could be as simple as:

“God, why does that question make my chest tighten?”

“Jesus, is there something You want me to see in this?”

Let the questions stir something, and trust that the Holy Spirit is gentle and kind in how He reveals things.

**Reflection Questions**

When life feels uncertain, what part of your identity do you cling to most tightly? Why?
Are there emotions you’ve learned to suppress in the name of strength? What might it look like to allow those feelings to surface with God?
How does your personality type protect you—and how might it sometimes keep you from receiving love or care?
Has there been a season in your life where God felt more like a disrupter than a comforter? What was He clearing space for?
Is there something unraveling in your life right now that might actually be an invitation to deeper intimacy?
Who in your life has reached out to you when you began to pull away? Who have you not reached for that maybe you should?
Can you name a moment in your life when the “closed doors” were actually forms of divine protection or redirection?
What paths might God be gently hedging up in your life—not to frustrate you, but to call you back to Him?