When David died, I stopped praying. Not because I forgot how. Because I was furious.
Forty-two years of marriage, and God took him with pancreatic cancer in eleven weeks. Eleven weeks. I didn't get to prepare. I didn't get to say half the things I needed to say. And when the hospital chaplain told me David was "in a better place," I wanted to scream.
So I stopped going to church. I stopped praying. I stopped believing that any of it meant anything at all.
The Long, Honest Silence
For almost two years, my faith was just... gone. My friends from Bible study called. I didn't answer. My pastor visited. I was polite but empty. I went through the motions of living without any of the meaning I'd built my life around.
I don't think there's anything wrong with that. Grief is honest work, and sometimes honesty means admitting you're angry at the God you built your life around. I've since learned that Scripture is full of people who did exactly that. Job, David in the Psalms, Elijah under the broom tree. Lament is woven into the fabric of Christian faith, not a departure from it.
I just didn't know that yet.
The Chapel in the Rain
What brought me back wasn't a sermon or a scripture verse. It was a Tuesday afternoon in November. I was driving home from the grocery store, and it started pouring. I pulled off the road near a small stone chapel I'd driven past a hundred times but never entered.
I sat in the back pew for twenty minutes, listening to the rain on the roof. Nobody else was there. No music, no pastor, no program. Just silence and stone and rain.
And in that silence, for the first time in two years, I felt something. Not an answer. Not peace, exactly. Just a presence. The faintest sense that I was not sitting there alone. That the God I was furious with had been patient enough to wait.
What Faith Looks Like Now
My faith at 70 doesn't look like my faith at 40. It's quieter. It asks harder questions. It doesn't need certainty the way it used to. I go to a different church now, a smaller Presbyterian congregation where the pastor talks about doubt as if it belongs in the sanctuary, because it does.
I read the Psalms differently now. All those verses about crying out in the darkness, I used to skim past them to get to the praise. Now they're the ones I underline.
I still talk to David sometimes. And I've started talking to God again too. Not with the polished confidence I used to have, but with the kind of raw honesty that comes from having nothing left to protect.
Researchers who study grief after losing a spouse have found that many people experience a profound shift in their spiritual lives, and that shift can go in either direction. Some people move closer to their faith. Others, like me, move away for a while before finding their way back. Both are more common than most of us realize, and neither one means you've done something wrong.
If you've lost your faith after loss, I want you to know: that's not failure. That's love, doing its painful, necessary work. And in my experience, God is big enough to hold it.
