Rebuilding a Faith of My Own: The Practices I’ve Kept, Lost, and Reimagined

I grew up in a world where it felt like faith was defined by formulas. You prayed specific prayers, believed in a specific way, went to church every Sunday and Wednesday, and tried your hardest not to break the rules. Faith wasn’t something you cultivated so much as something you performed to avoid hell - a checklist to keep God pleased and your reputation intact.

For years, I excelled at that performance. I knew when to raise my hands in worship, when to bow my head, when to cry at the altar. But eventually, the script I was handed started to crumble under the weight of real life. My divorce, my doubts, my chronic exhaustion from trying to earn a love that was already mine - it all made the formulas ring hollow. The certainty I once clung to slipped through my fingers.

And here I am, on the other side: still a person of faith, but a faith I barely recognize from my childhood. A faith stripped down, reassembled, and gentler in its edges. Today, it doesn’t look like what the church of my youth taught me, but it feels truer to who God is.

Here’s what I’ve lost, what I’ve kept, and what I’ve reimagined.