The God I Talk To
What faith looks like in my life, the God I believe in, and how I try to choose love in a world that gives us plenty of reasons not to.
This article is featured on Substack, Medium, and my Hellbloom Haven blog
Today my son and I took a long drive together. As we cruised down the highway, I found myself looking out the window and thinking about how many times I’ve traveled that same road in completely different versions of my life. I used to drive it when my kids were little, and today my son was the one behind the wheel driving me. We passed the little diner just outside of town, and I thought about all the times I’ve stopped there over the years, all the ordinary moments that didn’t seem particularly significant when I was living them but somehow feel sacred looking back.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what comes next for me, but somewhere along that drive I realized how deeply grateful I am for what is right now. My kids. My cats. The people I love. New connections I never could have predicted. The ability to move my body, go to work, take a drive, laugh, make plans, and imagine a future again. I thought about everything I’ve survived and all the versions of myself who have traveled that road before me, some of whom had absolutely no idea how they were going to make it to the next chapter.
There is something incredibly humbling about realizing that after everything, I have fallen completely in love with the simplest parts of being alive. A drive with my son, a familiar road, an old diner, people to love, and a body that carries me places again. I am so grateful for another ordinary day that I get to be here for.
Somewhere in all of that gratitude, I started thinking about the one thing that has quietly traveled every one of those roads with me: my faith, and I realized I wanted to write about what that actually means to me.
What Faith Looks Like for Me
If you’ve ever seen The Shack, you already have a pretty good picture of how I have understood God for most of my life. Not necessarily the theology of every scene or every word spoken in the movie, but the feeling of it. I have always believed in an all-loving God. I think of Him much like a loving parent, not someone sitting above us keeping score of every mistake, but someone who knows us completely and loves us anyway. That doesn’t mean He simply tolerates all of our nonsense. Love doesn’t mean there are no consequences, no lessons, and no accountability. But I believe He loves us enough to give us the freedom to choose. To take the wrong road. To make mistakes. To fall flat on our faces and discover for ourselves what we sometimes could never have learned by being told.
I don’t picture God standing over us saying, “I told you so,” when we finally hit the ground. I picture Him waiting for us to reach for Him, helping us back onto our feet, loving us through what we’ve done while still asking us to grow from it. There is something incredibly comforting to me about believing that I can disappoint God without ever becoming unlovable to Him. I can be angry with Him. I can question Him. I can wander away. I can come back carrying an absolute mess of my own making, and the relationship is still there.
That is the God I talk to. Someone close. Someone I can bring my grief, anger, questions, mistakes, gratitude, fear, and all the things I don’t understand to. I don’t believe He promises to keep me from every painful part of being human. I believe He promises that I never have to be human alone. That is what faith has always been for me.
I don’t talk about my faith very much as its deeply personal to me. I don’t post every time I pray. Most people who spend time with me probably have no idea how often I’m actually talking to God because almost all of it happens silently in my head. But I pray all the time. When I’m scared, when I don’t know what I’m going to do, when I’m angry, when someone hurts me, when I see somebody hurting, when I’m standing in front of another person and don’t know what they need from me.
Faith has carried me through some of the hardest things I have ever experienced. Not because believing in God made those things disappear. It didn’t of course. I’ve prayed through situations that still broke my heart. I’ve prayed while things were falling apart. I’ve prayed when I couldn’t understand why something was happening at all. My faith isn’t a belief that nothing bad will happen to me. It’s knowing I don’t have to carry everything that happens to me alone.
There is so much in this life that we cannot control. Other people’s choices. What they think about us. What they say about us. Whether they understand us. Loss. Change. Money. Relationships. Tomorrow. That is an impossible amount of weight for one human being to carry, so I give some of it back to God. Sometimes my prayer is essentially, I don’t know what to do with this, so I’m giving it to You. Strangely enough, that doesn’t always change the situation, but it brings me peace. It changes what I have to carry into the situation.
When I meet people, I try to look at them through God’s eyes. Beyond the attitude, the defenses, and whatever version of themselves they’ve learned to present to the world. I try to see the human being underneath it all. Sometimes I imagine the child they once were, the little person who wanted to be loved, protected, accepted, understood, and safe before life taught them all the ways they needed to protect themselves.
That doesn’t mean I excuse harmful behavior. I have learned the hard way over and over that compassion and access are two very different things. I can understand that someone is hurting and still decide they don’t get to hurt me anymore. That doesn’t mean I excuse harmful behavior.
I have learned the hard way over and over that compassion and access are two very different things. I can understand that someone is hurting and still decide they don’t get to hurt me. I can love people to my core and still let them go, because sometimes loving someone doesn’t mean holding on. Sometimes love means recognizing when letting go is better for us both. I can forgive without reopening the door. Sometimes the most loving thing I can do is step away and pray for them from somewhere they can no longer reach me.
I’ve had people make me angry. I’ve had people try to embarrass me, misunderstand me, project their own pain onto me, or treat me in ways I didn’t deserve. I’m human. Sometimes I react. But I’m getting better at asking myself something different: Who do I want to be in this moment? Because I can’t control who they choose to be or what they do. I can control who I choose to be and how I will behave.
Sometimes I remove my presence, remove their access to me, and pray. Not that something terrible happens to them. Not that they finally realize I was right, or that God teaches them a lesson. I pray that they heal, I pray that whatever is hurting inside of them becomes lighter, I pray that they find peace, I pray that they find happiness, and I pray that they have the strength they need to navigate whatever journey belongs to them.
I try not to judge people for where they are in their lives. I don’t know everything they’ve survived, what they were taught, what they’re carrying, or what battles they’re fighting quietly behind closed doors. Their journey isn’t mine to understand or measure. When I see someone struggling or making choices I wouldn’t make, I try to replace judgment with gratitude for the lessons that aren’t mine to learn and prayer that they find whatever healing, strength, or peace they need to navigate their own path.
When someone comes to me angry, frustrated, or having a terrible day, I often quietly ask God to work through me. Help me not make this heavier. Help me respond with love. Help me make them smile. Help them leave this interaction feeling a little better than they did when they found me. That’s one of the biggest ways I experience my faith.
I don’t need people to know God because I told them what they should believe. I’d rather they encounter something loving in me. Let kindness be the evidence. Let patience be the evidence. Let it show in the way I treat someone who can do absolutely nothing for me, and in the grace I try to offer even when someone isn’t particularly kind to me.
I don’t always get it right. Good Lord, I don’t. I’m not perfect by any means. I make mistakes. I lose my patience, I get irritated, I swear, and sometimes I have thoughts that are probably best left between God and me. I’ve hurt people too. It’s never because I meant to hurt someone, but good intentions don’t erase the impact we can have on another person. There have been times when I’ve had to look at myself honestly, apologize, take responsibility, and accept that I could have handled something differently.
Faith doesn’t make me immune to being human, and it certainly doesn’t make me better than anyone else. Sometimes the prayer comes before I react, and sometimes it comes after I’ve already made a mess of things. Sometimes I recognize the lesson immediately, and sometimes God probably has to put the same lesson in front of me several times before I finally understand it.
Faith hasn’t made me perfect. It has given me somewhere to return. A place to be honest about where I fell short without believing that my mistakes are all that I am. A place to ask for forgiveness, to learn, to make things right when I can, and to try again. For me, faith isn’t about never getting it wrong. It’s about continuing to come back to love when I do.
It gives me somewhere to put my fear when fear becomes too heavy. Somewhere to put tomorrow when I can’t control or face tomorrow. Somewhere to put people I cannot fix. Somewhere to put situations I just can’t change. Somewhere to return when I don’t particularly like the version of myself who showed up that day.
I don’t believe faith means trusting that everything will magically work out exactly the way I want it to. I’ve lived too much life to know better than that. For me, faith is about trusting that whatever comes, I won’t have to walk through it alone. It means I can ask for strength when mine runs out, that I can ask for wisdom when I don’t know what to do, or ask for softness when the world gives me every reason to become hard, and that I can finally put down what was never mine to control or hold onto in the first place.
Maybe the miracle isn’t always that God changes what is happening around us. Maybe sometimes the miracle is that, somehow, we keep becoming someone we’re proud to be while walking through it. When life gets unbearably heavy, I think that’s what my faith gives me more than anything else. I don’t have to know exactly how everything is going to be okay.
I just have to know where to put it when I can’t carry it anymore.
Here I Am
Today, sitting beside my son while he drove a road I once drove with him as a little boy, I think I understood some of this more clearly than I ever have before. There have been so many versions of me on that road. Versions who were scared, grieving, struggling, starting over, holding on, letting go, and simply trying to make it through whatever came next. None of them knew exactly where life was taking us.
Yet here I am.
My life isn’t perfect. Not every prayer has been answered the way I hoped it would be, every wound healed, or every question resolved. There are still things I’m figuring out and roads ahead of me I just can’t see yet, but today I sat beside my grown son, watched the familiar world pass by the window, and felt overwhelmingly grateful just to be here for it.
Maybe that’s another thing faith has taught me. We spend so much of our lives asking God to show us what comes next that we can miss the quiet holiness of where we already are.
So today, I’m grateful for this version of my life, for my children, for the people I love, and the new people finding their way into my world. I am grateful for my cats waiting at home, for a body that lets me move and work again, for familiar roads, wonderful friends, little diners, ordinary afternoons, laughter, second chances, and all the small things I once took for granted or might have passed without noticing.
I don’t know where this road goes next.
But I know I’m not traveling it alone, and for today, that is enough.
Thank you for taking the time to read this and for allowing me to share something so personal to me. I know faith looks different for everyone, and I have so much respect for that. You may believe differently than I do, understand God differently, follow another faith entirely, or not believe at all, and that’s completely okay. This isn’t meant to tell anyone what they should believe. It’s simply a little piece of what has carried me through my own life and helped shape the person I continue to become.
I’m incredibly grateful for your presence here and for the time you choose to spend reading my words. I wish you so much love, peace, and strength for whatever road you’re walking. You can find more of my writing, resources, and work at Hellbloom Haven.
Thank you for being here.
