Wrestling with doubt, silence, and spiritual vertigo
Disorientation: Part 2 of 4
If the first blog was about gentle unraveling, then this one is about what happens when the unraveling gives way to silence.
Last time, we stepped out of the familiar. We said goodbye to what once felt rooted. We acknowledged the loss of identity that came when the scaffolding of life fell apart. But what comes next isn't clarity—it’s the fog.
And let me tell you, the fog doesn’t play by the same rules. This is the season where the old compass spins. Where prayers echo and answers evaporate. Where you wonder if you’re wandering...or being led.
When the Words Go Quiet
After I wrote The God of Darkness and wrapped up my study on John 4, the words stopped. Not just creatively—but spiritually. I had blogged for years. Journaled endlessly. Taught from Scripture. I always had something to say.
But now? Silence.
Not a hollowness—more like an emptying.
I could still go through the motions. I sat in church. Listened to sermons. Read my Bible. Showed up. But it felt like I was watching myself do it from the outside. Like my soul had entered some kind of spiritual slow motion. I wasn’t angry. I wasn’t rebelling. I was just…undone.
And strangely, I knew I couldn’t hurry through it as desperately as I wanted to. As someone who’s naturally intense and efficient, that was disorienting in itself. But this season wasn’t one I could “fix.” It was one I had to live.
Sifting and Sorting
My confessional community group, entrenched loved ones, and counselor helped me frame it differently—not as a crisis, but as a sifting and sorting. That became a powerful image.
I wasn’t trying to discard my faith. I was trying to examine it. To look at what I had been carrying and ask honest questions:
Was this formed by Christ or culture?
Was it fear disguised as doctrine?
Was this a rhythm of life or just a habit of performance?
The process was slow. And humbling. It required me to admit I didn’t have answers anymore—at least not the kind I used to rattle off with confidence. I had to let things sit. Let them be unsettled.
I began to see how much of my spiritual formation had centered on knowing—on being certain. But I hadn’t learned how to be silent. I hadn’t learned how to be held in the not-knowing.
When Certainty Becomes a Cage
Much of the evangelical teaching I had received—especially in American church spaces—was deeply rooted in orientation. It valued theological clarity, definitive declarations, and the kind of faith that said, “This is what God’s Word says.”
There wasn’t much room for wandering. Or for waiting. Or for the sacredness of not knowing.
And underneath it all, there was a deeper tension forming. Not just about what I believed…but about the kind of gospel I had inherited.
The Gospel of the Right and the Left
Dallas Willard names this holy divide well. He calls it the tension between the “gospel of the right” and the “gospel of the left.” On the right, we speak of personal holiness and sin—that Christ came to deal with our rebellion and make us righteous before God. On the left, we emphasize justice and societal restoration—that Jesus came to bring good news to the poor and set the oppressed free.
Both “sides” hold truths. But I began to wonder: Why had I been asked to choose?
Willard wrote in The Divine Conspiracy:
“The gospel is less about how to get into the Kingdom of Heaven after you die and more about how to live in the Kingdom of Heaven before you die.”
That single sentence helped me reckon with the here and now.
I had been taught how to confess sin. How to uphold the Bible and prioritize “quiet time.” But not how to co-create beauty. Not how to walk with Christ into broken systems and hurting communities and be a holy salve to the souls of others. Not how to live in the now of the Kingdom.
At the same time, I couldn’t ignore what Willard says in The Great Omission:
“Most problems in contemporary churches can be explained by the fact that members have not yet decided to follow Christ.”
Was I truly apprenticing my life to Jesus? Or just participating in religious culture?
It felt like I was holding two ends of a rope, pulling in opposite directions.
Holiness and justice.
Sin and restoration.
Heaven then and Heaven now.
And in the middle, me—straining, sweating, confused. Wrestling with it all.
Like Jacob at Peniel, I didn’t come away from that season with answers. I came away with a limp.
The Psalms Knew This Path
And yet, the Psalms met me right there.
Theologian Walter Brueggemann (who recently passed away) writes, “The Psalms provide a speech for every human experience. They are not simply about God, but are addressed to God, giving us permission to speak boldly, honestly, and even painfully.”
He describes the Psalms as moving through three phases: orientation, disorientation, and reorientation.
I had lived most of my life in orientation—the settled place where God’s goodness made sense and the world seemed ordered (as long as you were “doing it right”). These were the Psalms I knew:
Psalm 1: The way of the righteous and the wicked
Psalm 8: What is man that You are mindful of him?
Psalm 19: The heavens declare the glory of God
But as the old answers came into question, I no longer had language for that kind of confidence.
That’s when I began to study the Psalms of disorientation. These were not composed in clarity. They were cried in the dark:
Psalm 13: “How long, O Lord? Will You forget me forever?”
Psalm 22: “My God, why have You forsaken me?”
Psalm 42: “Why are you downcast, O my soul?”
Psalm 88: The one psalm that ends without light—only lament
These weren’t pretty. But they were true. They helped me name my ache without fear of being faithless. Because maybe true faith isn’t tidy. Maybe it limps.
Eventually, glimmers of reorientation emerged—songs of renewal that remembered the darkness but testified to God’s surprising grace:
Psalm 30: “You turned my mourning into dancing.”
Psalm 40: “He lifted me out of the pit…”
Psalm 103: “He crowns you with steadfast love.”
Psalm 126: “Those who sow with tears will reap with joy.”
I’ll talk more about reorientation in later postings, but I wanted to provide this framework as it helped me recalibrate and metabolize what was happening in this faith walk that felt more like an army crawl in the dirt of darkness than it did walking through a valley.
When God Is Not Absent—Just Quiet
I remember sitting in my confessional community—this little circle of believers who weren’t there to fix me, but to be with me. My eyes brimmed with tears as I admitted, “I don’t even know where I am anymore.” And no one panicked. No one rushed in with verses or spiritual pep talks or ego-centric stories about their own time they felt like this. They just held the space.
And that holding? It became holy.
It taught me something that my striving couldn’t:
God wasn’t panicking.
So maybe I didn’t need to either.
This was liminal space—a word that comes from the Latin limen, meaning “threshold.” It’s the place between what was and what will be. It’s the hallway between rooms, the wilderness between Egypt and the Promised Land, the Holy Saturday between crucifixion and resurrection.
Liminal space is rarely comfortable. It’s where certainty slips, identity shakes, and old language doesn’t quite fit. But it’s also where transformation begins.
And my community, entrenched loved ones, and counselor…they didn’t drag me across the threshold or tell me I was “pulling away” and push me to “return.” They just stood at the doorway with me—praying, weeping, hoping. They gave me time to sit in the sacred middle without rushing to a spiritual conclusion or asking me to clarify myself.
They were living reminders that God is still present in the pause. That transformation doesn’t require speed, only surrender.
The liminal space wasn’t punishment. It was an invitation.
An invitation to let God meet me without the scaffolding. Without the performance. Without the need to be impressive or sure.
He was there. Not always loud. Not always clear. But present.
Like the Shepherd in Psalm 23, He was walking with me through the valley—not airlifting me out of it. And, friends, there is no question that I experienced more than the verses of Psalms 23; I met the Good Shepherd in the darkest night of my soul.
✢ A Blessing for the In-Between ✢
May you have people who do not rush your process.
Who sit beside you in the silence,
and light a candle when you cannot pray.May they ask real questions
and hold back the need to answer them.May you feel the gentle presence of Christ
not in resolution,
but in the company of those who stay.And may you come to trust
that the threshold is not a dead end—
but a doorway.
Hope, the Co-Creation
I was taught that hope is the absolute expectation of coming good.
And it certainly is.
But in this season, I learned that hope is also something else.
It’s fragile.
It’s formed.
It’s not always loud or certain or triumphant.
Sometimes, hope looks like choosing to stay in the story when you’d rather walk away.
Sometimes, it’s the decision to get up, pour the coffee, and whisper, “I’m still here.”
Hope is not just the expectation of coming good—
it’s the co-creation of it, with Christ.
It's what happens when you take one trembling step toward light; not because you feel it, but because you trust it.
It’s not a mood. It’s a movement.
It’s the Spirit sighing through you when you have no words. It’s the presence of God holding shape in the dark.
And here’s what surprised me most:
Hope doesn’t erase the ache.
It makes room inside it.
It stretches your soul to believe that even this—not-yet, not-pretty, not-finished place—is holy ground. That God doesn’t just meet you at the end of the tunnel. He walks the length of it beside you.
So no, hope didn’t arrive like I expected.
It came quietly. Daily. Monthly, In pieces.
But it came.
And it’s still coming.
And maybe, that’s where the reflection begins—not with answers, but with a willingness to pause.
To name where you are.
To hold space for what might be forming, even now.
Reflection: Companions for the Fog
You don’t need answers today. Just honesty.
Let these questions be companions, not solutions:
What beliefs are you currently sifting and sorting?
What part of your theology was inherited but never interrogated?
Which Psalm best mirrors your season—orientation, disorientation, or reorientation?
How is silence shaping you right now?
Are you afraid to tell the truth about where you are?
Who offers you space to question without fear of losing love?
In Part 3, The Return, we’ll talk about what it means to name grief, reclaim spiritual practices, and take first steps into a new kind of rootedness. But for now, don’t rush past the fog.
Stay here.
Let it sift you.
Let it reshape you.
God is not lost in this place.
And neither are you.