One of the hardest parts of adulthood for me has been making sense of faith.
When I was younger, faith felt simple.
There was God. He created the world. Jesus was His son.
I accepted those truths with the kind of confidence only children seem to possess.
As I’ve gotten older, certainty has become harder to hold onto.
I’ve spent years trying to understand where my doubts live.
Are they in the story of the virgin birth?
In the books that never made it into the Bible?
In the countless translations and interpretations?
In the questions theologians and scholars have wrestled with for centuries?
Maybe.
But if I’m being honest, I don’t think that’s where most of my struggle comes from.
My struggle isn’t with scripture as much as it’s with the world around me.
I see people unable to access healthcare.
I see wealth, status, and power valued above compassion.
I see war, famine, poverty, and suffering on a scale that feels impossible to understand.
And sometimes I wonder:
How does all of that fit alongside faith?
How do I reconcile belief in a loving God with a world that often seems so broken?
I don’t have an easy answer.
But I keep coming back to one thought:
If this is God’s world, then this cannot be the world God intended.
Because when I read the teachings of Jesus, I see something very different.
I see a man who led with love instead of power.
Who cared for the sick.
Who sat with the marginalized.
Who challenged systems that harmed people.
Who taught that greatness wasn’t found in status, but in service.
When I compare that vision to the world around me, the contrast is hard to ignore.
The values Jesus taught often feel like the opposite of the values our culture rewards.
Yet there’s something about His story that continues to draw me back.
Because the story of Jesus doesn’t begin with power.
It begins with vulnerability.
A baby born into uncertainty.
A family with nowhere else to go.
Shepherds, not kings, hearing the news first.
Hope entering a world that was already complicated, fractured, and hurting.
Maybe that’s why the story has endured.
Not because it eliminates every question.
Not because it resolves every doubt.
But because it suggests that God steps into brokenness rather than avoiding it.
These days, my faith looks different than it did when I was younger.
It contains more questions.
More wrestling.
More uncertainty.
But it also contains hope.
Hope that the world we see today is not the final word.
Hope that love is stronger than power.
Hope that compassion still matters.
Hope that peace is worth pursuing.
And maybe that’s what faith looks like for me right now.
Not the absence of doubt.
Not perfect certainty.
Just the willingness to keep believing that the teachings of Jesus point us toward something better than the world we’ve created for ourselves.
Maybe faith isn’t about having all the answers.
Maybe it’s about continuing to hope anyway.
Thanks for reading.
I don’t have all the answers, but I share these reflections in hopes that they help others feel a little less alone in their questions.
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