Before the Deconstruction

Every faith journey has a beginning, and mine began with a little girl who simply loved Jesus.

Some of my earliest memories of faith are incredibly simple. When I was around five years old, I came home from school and announced that I had talked to Jesus on the playground and that one day I was going to tell people about Him.

I obviously didn’t understand theology or denominations. I couldn’t have explained doctrine or defended a position from Scripture. I just knew Jesus in the uncomplicated way a child knows Him.

As I grew older, however, faith became much more complicated—as everything eventually always does. Sigh.

My childhood included both beautiful seasons and difficult ones. There were years filled with church, Bible camps, Wednesday-night programs, Scripture, and a family trying to live according to what we believed was right. My mother was raised church of christ, my dad was southern baptist, they did their best to navigate that and to worship as best as they could! There were also painful changes and circumstances that made the security I had once known feel far less certain.

Through all of it, I kept reaching for God.

By the time I was a teenager, I wasn’t merely looking for faith. I was looking for something solid. I wanted boundaries. I wanted certainty. I wanted to know exactly what was right and exactly what was wrong.

And legalism offered me that.

I became part of a church community that I still remember with genuine affection because there were people there who loved me tremendously. But somewhere along the way, I also began absorbing the idea that the more restrictions I placed on myself, the more righteous I was.

Rules felt safe.

If I could dress correctly, behave correctly, worship correctly, avoid the right things, say the right things, and believe the right things, perhaps I could guarantee that I would remain on the right path.

Eventually, though, I wasn’t measuring my faith by how closely I walked with Christ. I was measuring it by how well I followed rules.

That mindset followed me into a small Christian college, where my understanding of holiness became even more intertwined with expectations and restrictions. Eventually, I left.

But I didn’t leave my desire for certainty behind.

Looking for Somewhere to Belong

In my early adulthood, during one of the most difficult seasons of my life, while my parents were in active addiction and I felt totally lost and alone–Mormon missionaries came into my life.

At the time, what they offered seemed like everything I had been searching for: community, family, structure, certainty, no judgment for my parents struggles, family life. etc., and a clear answer for seemingly every spiritual question.

So I joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

I didn’t join because I didn’t love Jesus. Quite the opposite. I joined because I genuinely believed I was following Him. I threw myself into my new faith and met my husband shortly after . I studied. I prayed. I served. I attended the temple. I accepted callings. I defended what I believed.

Eventually, we began raising a family within the church. From the outside, I was doing exactly what I believed I was supposed to be doing.

Inside, though, questions were growing.

There were teachings I struggled to reconcile. There were things I couldn’t make fit comfortably alongside the Bible. Whenever those questions surfaced, my response was usually to try harder.

Read more. Pray more. Serve more. Do more. Believe harder.

Essentially: earn that salvation.

For years, I exhausted myself trying.

But underneath everything was a question that refused to disappear:

Does this actually line up with Scripture?

Then Came 2020

When the world shut down in 2020, something unexpected happened.

Life became quiet—which sounds absolutely ridiculous considering I was a mother of three children five and under at the time.

But in one sense, it did.

For the first time in years, there was nowhere to be, nowhere to rush, and no calling waiting for me to fulfill. I suddenly had space to think, pray, listen, and open my Bible without immediately filtering everything through what I had been told I was supposed to believe.

I began listening to Christian sermons and podcasts again. I began reading Scripture differently. Instead of looking for verses to confirm what I already believed, I allowed myself to ask what the Bible actually said.

And slowly, I had to admit something that terrified me:

I didn’t believe what I was claiming to believe anymore.

That was incredibly difficult to admit. There was probably some pride mixed in there too. After all, people had told me I was crazy for joining the Mormons in the first place, and nobody particularly enjoys admitting that the people who warned them might have had a point.

But pride wasn’t enough reason to keep pretending.

Eventually, I knew I needed to leave the Mormon church.

The problem was that leaving one belief system didn’t magically tell me what I believed instead.

I tried attending churches connected to the different Christian traditions represented in my family. Instead of immediately giving me clarity, it left me even more overwhelmed.

I was embarrassed. Angry with myself. Hurt. Confused. Scared.

And spiritually exhausted.

For a while, all I really knew was this:

I still loved Jesus.

I didn’t know what church I belonged in. I didn’t know which labels I wanted. I wasn’t even sure how much of what I had believed throughout my life was genuinely biblical and how much had simply been handed to me by someone else.

So I did something I had never really allowed myself to do before.

I started over.

I put my beliefs on the table and began examining them one by one. I stopped asking, What have I been told to believe?and started asking, What is actually true?

That process became a years-long journey of deconstruction and reconstruction.

Some beliefs survived.

Others didn’t.

Some questions eventually found answers. Others taught me that faith doesn’t require having an answer for absolutely everything.

But underneath all of the questions, confusion, studying, changing, and rebuilding, there was one foundation I couldn’t shake.

Jesus.

The same Jesus that little girl believed she talked to on a playground all those years ago.

And that is where Unshaken truly begins.