The Question That Changed My Faith
For forty years, I served as a hospice chaplain. I sat with people in their final days, their final hours, their final moments. I held hands. I prayed. I listened to confessions and fears and hopes and regrets.
And through all of it, I believed I knew what faith was. It was certainty. It was conviction. It was the unshakable knowledge that God was real, that heaven awaited, that there was a plan larger than our comprehension.
Then I retired. And for the first time in decades, I had time to think. Time to question. Time to wonder if maybe, just maybe, I'd been wrong about something.
The Crisis
It started with a book. A memoir by a former pastor who had lost his faith. I picked it up expecting to feel superior, to pity this man who had clearly lost his way.
Instead, I found myself nodding along. His questions were my questions. His doubts were my doubts. His fear that he'd been fooling himself was familiar in a way that startled me.
I began to wonder: had I been certain because I truly believed? Or because certainty was part of the job?
Had I ever actually questioned my faith? Or had I simply accepted what I'd been taught and built a career on top of it?
The questions terrified me. Forty years of my life, built on a foundation I was suddenly unsure about.
What Happened Next
I didn't lose my faith. But I did lose my certainty. And in losing it, I found something better: a faith that could accommodate questions.
I started attending an interfaith study group at the local university. Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, atheists. All of us reading the same texts, asking the same questions, sitting with the same mysteries.
I learned that doubt isn't the opposite of faith. Certainty isn't the goal. The goal is honesty. The goal is showing up, questions and all, and being willing to sit with mystery.
I learned that different traditions answer the same human questions in different ways, and that none of us have a monopoly on truth.
I learned that the people I'd sat with in their final moments, of all different faiths and none, had all been seeking the same thing: meaning, connection, peace.
What I Believe Now
I'm 70 years old, and I finally understand: faith isn't about having answers. It's about being willing to live the questions.
It's about showing up for other people, even when you're not sure what you believe. It's about practicing kindness, even when you're not sure why. It's about finding community, even when that community includes people who disagree with you.
My faith is smaller now, in some ways. I don't claim to know as much as I used to. But it's also deeper. More honest. More capable of accommodating the complexity of actual human experience.
Researchers who study aging and well-being have found that a sense of meaning and spiritual connection, whatever form that takes, is one of the strongest predictors of life satisfaction in our later years. That resonates deeply with what I witnessed for four decades at the bedside.
If you're questioning your faith, know this: you're not losing something. You're growing it. You're making room for a belief system that can handle doubt, that can accommodate uncertainty, that can be honest about what we don't know.
That's not weakness. That's wisdom.
And it's never too late to find it.
