i always felt uneasy in church.
not in a loud way. not in a way that made me want to run out the doors. it was quieter than that. i loved church. i loved the ritual, the music, the idea that there was something bigger than me that cared whether i made it home safely. church was impactful. it taught me how to sit still with my thoughts. it taught me reverence. it taught me hope.
but the deeper i went, the more i learned how to hold my breath.
even before i knew i was queer, my body seemed to understand something my mind had not yet named. there was a low level tension, like i was always one wrong sentence away from being exposed. the sermons preached love thy neighbor, but somehow that love always came with conditions. love unless you believed differently. love unless you lived differently. love unless you were different.
it is unsettling how much hate can exist inside a space that speaks so fluently about love.
i believe in a higher god. i still do. and strangely, being in the science field has only brought me closer to that belief. the more i learn about how life works, the less accidental it all feels. the precision of it. the balance. the way everything depends on everything else. studying life fills me with awe. the way the world was created, the way systems fold into one another, the fact that existence sustains itself at all, feels mind blowing.
science did not distance me from god. it gave me another language for reverence. it taught me that wonder does not disappear when you ask questions. it deepens. and maybe that is why my relationship with religion became so complicated. because the more i understood the world, the harder it became to accept a version of faith that asked me to stop thinking, to stop questioning, to stop being fully myself.
i carry guilt about that distance. the kind that settles quietly in my chest and whispers that i am doing something wrong. like i will be punished for not being in tune. like doubt is disobedience. like stepping back is the same as betrayal.
that is when i realized this did not just feel like a crisis of faith. it felt like a toxic relationship.
one where love is promised but belonging is conditional. where discomfort is reframed as your failure. where you remember the good so vividly that you excuse the harm. where you tell yourself it did not mean it like that, or that maybe you just need to try harder. where leaving feels worse than staying because staying at least keeps you chosen.
i am left in a limbo now.
i want my future family to know where i come from. i want them to learn about faith, about grounding, about believing in something larger than themselves. but i do not want to teach them that love requires shrinking. i do not want them to think demeaning people for how they exist or what they believe is righteousness. i do not want god to be something they fear rather than something that holds them.
so i hold both truths at once. that something sacred shaped me. and that something sacred also hurt me.
maybe faith is not blind loyalty. maybe it is discernment. maybe it is choosing what allows you to stay whole. and maybe limbo is not a failure of belief, but the most honest place i have ever stood
Leave a Reply