Faith on Trial: Questioning the Narratives That Bind Us

This post is written from my experience with Christianity, but the pressure I’m speaking about exists in many belief systems.

It’s like being in a toxic relationship. You’re doing all the right things, trying to make it work, and the other person picks and chooses when they want to "show up." 

Somehow, it’s still your fault when things don’t work. That’s what the version of faith I was taught started to feel like. The pattern was all too familiar. 

We’re told to accept things in our spiritual lives that we’d never accept in a real one: silence, waiting, feeling ignored, being told to try harder when it already feels like you’re giving everything you have. Somehow, we call that “faith.” No. No one really has the answers, but this is where we are.

Are we truly being faithful, or are we just "brainwashed," and too afraid to question it because we’ve been told that’s what obedience looks like? These are thoughts I have sometimes. It has nothing to do with "The enemy" infiltrating my mind. It's called being pragmatic.

For me, healing started when I stopped blindly accepting what I was taught and started actually thinking about it. The way I was taught to engage with faith, all the pleading, the pressure to “hold on and just pray more,” started to feel less like a connection and more like an obligation. Honestly, it started to feel like begging. Who wants to feel like that? That didn’t sit right with me. Something was off and naming that was the beginning of seeing things clearly. 

I kept hearing that “faith without works is dead,” but what I experienced was mostly about waiting, trusting, and praying, rarely about taking real action or caring for myself. That silence around what self-care looks like kept me stuck. It wasn’t a lack of faith holding me back, but a limited idea of faith that left no space for protecting or moving my spirit forward.

Sometimes, faith feels like a tightrope, told to trust fully, but also expected to do more, without clear guidance. That confusion wore me down, making it hard to know what to do next.

Healing meant seeing that faith or religion should never feel like a burden or a trap. It should never ask me to suffer in silence or feel alone in my struggle. For me, healing meant reclaiming my right to question, to speak my truth, and to protect my spirit even when it’s uncomfortable.

When people get defensive about my awareness, it’s because my clarity threatens their comfort. But healing isn’t always quiet or polite. Sometimes it’s loud. Sometimes it’s uncomfortable. Oh well.

I’m not rejecting belief or faith. People interpret it differently, yes, but I do believe there is a logical way to approach it. The problem is that no one is going to agree on what that looks like. The world wasn’t formed like that. At least now it's not. Still, I won’t allow anyone to impose their version of belief onto me. That’s not how faith should work. While I’ve never been the person to tell people what they should or shouldn’t believe, I will speak on the reality of what I see because I truly believe I see it for what it is. Call it discernment. Call it clarity. Either way, I’m going to name it. I pay close attention to patterns and behaviors, analyzing how people respond to certain situations and what that reveals about the beliefs driving their actions.