Faith Isn’t Having the Answers

It’s been a while since I’ve written here.

Not because I haven’t had anything to say, but because sometimes life is still teaching me the lesson, and I’m just not ready to write about them yet.

The last few months have held more than I expected. Some beautiful moments. Some hard ones. Plenty of questions. And somewhere in the middle of it all, I turned 45 and I made the decision to be baptized.

I was baptized as a child and have absolutely no memory of it. In fact, the stories Ive heard about my baptism were not the greatest. I was really sick as a baby so my mom wanted me baptized but my parents were divorced and so our church at the time wouldn’t baptize me. She had to jump through hoops to have it done. To say it left a bad taste in my mouth is an understatement.

This time, however, it felt different. I belong to a church that didn’t care whether or not my parents were married or divorced. They didn’t care if I had questions and in fact, they encouraged me to ask questions.

I’ve spent so much of my life believing that faith meant certainty. That if I trusted God enough, I wouldn’t wrestle with fear or questions or doubt anymore. But that’s never been my experience.

And, becoming a mother made those questions even bigger. There is nothing that keeps me awake at night more than the thought of something happening to my kids. Every tragic headline involving a child catches my breath. Every story of loss makes me want to pull my kids a little closer. I find myself wishing I could somehow protect them from every heartbreak, every accident, every piece of this broken world.

If you’re a parent, you probably know that feeling too. The hard truth is that I can’t. I never could. And that’s a frightening realization.

But somewhere along the way, I realized faith wasn’t asking me to stop being afraid. It was asking me where I would take those fears.

My baptism wasn’t a celebration of having reached some new level of faith. It was simply saying, “God, I still have questions. I still get scared. I still don’t know what tomorrow holds. But I want to keep trusting You anyway.”

That feels like a way more honest definition of faith than the one I’d been carrying around for years.

As parents, we spend so much of our lives trying to hold everything together. We carry the schedules, the worries, the what-ifs, the invisible weight of loving people so deeply that the thought of losing them feels unbearable. Maybe faith isn’t about finally letting go of those fears.

Maybe it’s about remembering that while our hands will never be strong enough to hold everything, God’s always have been. I still don’t know what tomorrow will bring. I still wish I could guarantee my children’s safety and happiness, that their friends would always be kind and that they too will be kind.

As a mom, I know that I will probably never stop worrying. But maybe I don’t have to carry every fear alone and neither do you.