I loved Jesus before I understood denominations, church history, theology, legalism, restoration movements, or why Christians could read the same Bible and somehow come away with seventeen different opinions about what to do with a fellowship hall.

When I was around five years old, I came home from school and told my mother I had talked to Jesus on the playground and that one day I was going to tell people about Him. I did not know enough then to make faith complicated. I simply knew Jesus.

Life eventually did what life tends to do. It got complicated.

My childhood held genuinely beautiful memories of church, family, Bible camps, Scripture, and the kind of faith that felt safe. It also eventually held grief, addiction, abuse, instability, and the painful experience of watching people I loved become people I barely recognized. Somewhere in the middle of all that chaos, I became desperate for something solid.

I wanted rules.

I wanted certainty.

I wanted someone to tell me exactly where the lines were so I could stay safely inside them.

I did not realize it then, but fear had started dressing itself up as faithfulness.

As a teenager, I found a small church of Christ congregation that loved me during one of the hardest seasons of my life. I was baptized at seventeen, and I still look back on that decision with gratitude. I believed Jesus was the Son of God. I believed I needed Him. I wanted to follow Him.

That congregation was not the villain of my story. It gave me community when I desperately needed it.

But later I entered a much stricter Christian environment where convictions, institutional rules, interpretations, and biblical commands could begin to blur together. Stricter often looked holier. Personal convictions could become tests of faithfulness. I was already afraid of getting Christianity wrong, so I absorbed that way of thinking easily.

I thought if one boundary was good, another boundary five feet farther away must be even better.

Eventually, I had so many fences around God’s commands that I was no longer sure where God’s actual boundary was.

That is one of the things legalism does so well. It can look remarkably similar to devotion.

It can involve sacrifice, modesty, discipline, Bible study, and obedience. The problem is not simply having conservative convictions. The problem begins when my interpretation, tradition, or personal conviction quietly receives the same authority as God’s Word.

There is a difference between saying, “God said this,” and saying, “I believe this is the most faithful application of what God said.”

I did not understand that difference for a long time.

After leaving that environment, I was tired, lonely, and still desperately hungry for certainty and belonging. Then another religious community entered my life offering structure, family, purpose, clear answers, and a place where my past did not seem to disqualify me.

And belonging is powerful.

Sometimes it is powerful enough to feel like proof.

I experienced real friendship, kindness, service, and community there. I built a life, married, became a mother, worshiped, served, studied, and sincerely wanted what I believed to be true.

But over time, questions began growing.

At first, I did what I had always done when religious discomfort showed up.

I tried harder.

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

Eventually one question became impossible to avoid:

Do I believe this is true, or do I need it to be true?

Those are not the same thing.

Then 2020 happened.

The world slowed down, and while my house with three young children was certainly not quiet, my religious life became quiet enough for me to think.

I began listening to Christian sermons again. I opened my Bible without immediately filtering every passage through the framework I had been given.

And one question started changing everything:

What does this actually say?

Not what does my church say it says?

Not what did my college teach me it means?

Not what does my family believe?

Not what interpretation makes me feel safest?

What does the passage actually say?

That was the beginning of my deconstruction.

And I want to be very clear about what I mean by that word because Christians can hear deconstruction and immediately assume rebellion.

I was not deconstructing Jesus.

I was not throwing away my Bible.

I was not deciding Christianity was false because Christians had hurt me.

I was trying to figure out how much of what I believed came from God and how much had been handed to me by people.

First Thessalonians 5:21 says, “Test everything; hold fast what is good.”

That became the framework.

Test it.

Not automatically reject it.

Not automatically protect it.

Test it.

Some beliefs survived beautifully.

Some became stronger because I finally understood why I believed them.

Some needed adjusting.

Some things I had treated as universal commands turned out to be interpretations, traditions, or matters of conscience.

Some things could not survive the questions.

And somewhere along the way, I had to face one question that may have been harder than all the others:

Am I willing to be wrong?

There is no point in examining your beliefs if you have already decided what every answer must be.

If I only questioned things I disliked while protecting everything familiar, I was not really searching for truth. I was just changing teams.

So everything went on the table.

Including the Bible.

That part mattered deeply to me because I could not criticize other people for accepting religious claims on authority alone and then turn around and say, “Well, the Bible is true because I have always been told it is.”

I needed to know whether Scripture deserved to become the measuring stick I was preparing to use.

So I studied manuscripts, translation, textual transmission, archaeology, historical context, ancient sources, prophecy, Jesus, and the resurrection.

I learned that modern Bible translations are not produced by repeatedly translating one English Bible into another like an ancient game of telephone. Translators work with Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek manuscript traditions. I learned that manuscript variations exist and that scholars openly study them rather than hiding them. I learned that the Dead Sea Scrolls give us biblical texts centuries older than many manuscripts previously available and that the manuscript story is more nuanced than the polished slogans Christians sometimes use.

I learned to stop asking archaeology to prove everything. Archaeology can establish places, people, historical settings, and artifacts. It cannot independently prove every theological claim attached to them.

I looked at Jesus historically before asking what I believed about Him theologically. I looked at the earliest Christian proclamation and kept running into the resurrection.

I examined prophecy while also learning to acknowledge scholarly disagreements instead of pretending they did not exist.

And slowly, the evidence became cumulative rather than magical.

There was no notarized certificate dropped from heaven saying, “Congratulations, Ashli. Christianity is true. You may stop overthinking now.”

Trust me, I would have appreciated one.

Instead I found layers.

Manuscripts.

History.

Archaeology.

Ancient sources.

Prophecy.

The early Christian movement.

And always, Jesus.

Eventually I reached the conclusion that I could trust Scripture and that I believed it to be the Word of God.

And once I reached that conclusion, I had a problem.

Because if Scripture was going to measure everyone else, it had to measure me too.

My old church traditions did not get immunity.

My newer religious beliefs did not get immunity.

My family did not get immunity.

Preachers did not get immunity.

My personal convictions did not get immunity.

And my very strong personality most definitely did not get immunity.

If Scripture contradicted me, Scripture did not need to move.

I did.

But there was another side of that commitment that changed my faith just as much.

If Scripture did not command something, I needed to be very careful before turning my own conclusion into God’s universal command.

Jesus Himself condemned religious leaders for elevating human commands and traditions until they competed with God’s Word.

Paul addressed Christians who sincerely disagreed about matters of conscience.

Some things in Scripture are clear commands.

Some are principles requiring wisdom.

Some are interpretations or inferences.

Some are traditions.

Some are personal convictions.

Those categories matter.

The goal was never less obedience.

It was learning to obey what God actually said without adding to it or subtracting from it.

That standard eventually forced me to test religious systems I had once trusted deeply. I had to examine claims about authority, prophets, additional revelation, priesthood, temple ordinances, salvation, and even the nature of God.

That process hurt because theology is rarely just theology when your family, memories, friendships, marriage, community, and identity are tangled up inside it.

But sincerity is not evidence.

Certainty is not evidence.

Belonging is not evidence.

A powerful emotional or spiritual experience cannot be used as permission to ignore contradictions.

Eventually, some of those beliefs did not survive Scripture for me.

And then something unexpected happened.

I had become extremely good at identifying what I did not believe.

But I realized I did not want to spend the rest of my life sitting in religious rubble.

Deconstruction was never supposed to become my permanent address.

I did not want my identity to become former this, hurt by that, or the woman who knows why everybody else’s theology is wrong.

I wanted to know God.

So I started rebuilding.

I reread the New Testament asking a different set of questions.

What did the earliest church actually look like?

What did Jesus emphasize?

What did the apostles repeatedly teach?

What was commanded?

What was example?

What was inference?

Where did Christians have liberty?

What did religious leaders get wrong?

I wanted to see the bones.

And, to my chagrin, after everything I had questioned, dismantled, studied, rejected, and reconsidered, I landed surprisingly close to where I had started.

Just in a very different font.

The bones were familiar.

The environment was not.

That surprised me because reconstruction does not always mean discovering something completely new. Sometimes you tear a house down to the studs and discover the foundation was sound while some of what had been built on top of it needed to go.

My faith was no longer mine because it was original.

It was mine because I had examined it.

I also had to relearn who God was.

For years, my picture of God had been tangled up with performance, judgment, rules, religious approval, and the constant fear that I might misunderstand something and ruin everything.

Reconstruction required more than correcting doctrine.

I had to learn to approach God as God.

Faithful.

Holy.

Just.

Merciful.

Present.

Patient.

Redeeming.

I had to learn that grace was not the enemy of obedience and obedience was not payment for salvation.

I obey because I belong to Christ.

I do not obey so that I can become impressive enough to make Him save me.

Then I had to relearn discernment.

Leaving an unhealthy religious environment can make suspicion feel like wisdom.

You can become so afraid of being manipulated again that you trust nobody.

But discernment is not paranoia.

The Bereans were praised because they listened and then searched Scripture.

Healthy faith does not require blind trust in leaders, but neither does it require permanent isolation.

I learned to test teaching, look at context, pay attention to character and fruit, ask whether leaders were accountable, and notice whether questions were treated as threats.

I learned that imperfect people are not automatically unsafe people.

That distinction made Christian community possible for me again.

Then came freedom.

Not the kind of freedom where truth no longer matters or obedience becomes optional.

Biblical freedom.

Freedom from performing for people.

Freedom from needing everybody to approve of me.

Freedom from believing anxiety is proof that I take God seriously.

Freedom to hold convictions without assuming every Christian must share them.

Freedom to say “I don’t know yet.”

Freedom to remain teachable.

And eventually faith had to stop living entirely in my notebook.

If reconstruction was real, it needed to change how I loved.

How I served.

How I forgave.

How I set boundaries.

How I treated people who disagreed with me.

How willing I was to admit when I was wrong.

There is a temptation after deconstruction to become incredibly proud of how much bad theology you can spot.

Suddenly you know why that preacher is wrong, why that denomination is wrong, why that religious system is wrong, and why everybody else apparently needs to catch up with your research.

Congratulations.

You escaped one form of spiritual pride and built yourself another.

I had to confront that too.

The fact that I changed my mind does not make me wiser than everyone who has not changed theirs.

The fact that I have studied deeply does not mean I have studied everything deeply.

If Scripture proves me wrong again, I want enough humility to change again.

That has become one of my deepest prayers.

Eventually, my family began looking for a church again.

That was scary.

We did not want to return to a religious environment simply because it was familiar. We also did not want fear to become the reason we never participated in Christian community again.

So we looked carefully.

We studied.

We asked questions.

We watched leadership.

We listened to teaching.

We paid attention to whether people could disagree without being treated as enemies.

We found community.

Not perfection.

Community.

And I finally learned something I wish I had known years earlier:

Christ is my identity.

A congregation is my community.

Those are not the same thing.

Today, I can look back at the winding road of my faith and see one truth standing taller than everything else.

God is a Redeemer.

I have seen that in my family. Relationships that once seemed destroyed by addiction, anger, and years of hurt have experienced healing I once thought impossible.

I have seen it in my faith too.

There were years when I believed my only choices were to cling to everything I had been taught or walk away from all of it.

Those were never the only choices.

Some things needed to fall apart.

Some needed to be examined.

Some needed to be repented of.

Some needed to be put back in their proper place.

And some survived the fire and became stronger than they had ever been.

I no longer believe being unshaken means having every answer.

I used to think certainty was strength.

Now I think an unshaken faith can ask difficult questions without panicking because its foundation is not my ability to answer every one of them.

Truth matters.

Doctrine matters.

Obedience matters.

But I am no longer interested in manufacturing certainty where Scripture leaves mystery or adding rules because fear feels safer.

For me, the foundation became Scripture and the Christ I found there.

Not a Jesus made softer because I wanted fewer commands.

Not a Jesus made harsher because fear felt holier.

Jesus.

The One who welcomed the weary, confronted hypocrisy, forgave sinners, called people to repentance, touched the rejected, challenged religious pride, spoke truth without apology, and went willingly to the cross.

I wanted the real thing.

And that is what I want for anyone reading this who feels like their faith is shaking.

You do not have to be afraid of every question.

You do not have to defend everything you inherited.

You also do not have to throw everything away simply because some of it hurt you.

Read Scripture.

Read it in context.

Ask where your beliefs came from.

Learn the difference between command, inference, tradition, wisdom, and conscience.

Test teachers.

Pay attention to fruit.

Read people who disagree with you.

Be willing to discover that something you desperately want to reject is biblical.

Be willing to discover that something you desperately want to keep is not.

And be humble enough to say, “I don’t know yet.”

Most importantly, know God for yourself.

Not only the God your parents described.

Not only the God your church described.

Not only the God a preacher, author, influencer, religious leader, or friend described.

Know Him.

And if you are standing in the rubble right now wondering what stays and what goes, do not rush reconstruction.

Roots grow slowly.

Trust grows slowly.

Learning Scripture takes time.

You do not have to solve your entire theology by next Tuesday.

Keep moving honestly toward Christ.

That is what I did.

Not perfectly.

Not quickly.

Definitely not without detours.

But I kept moving.

Legalism taught me how easily fear can disguise itself as holiness.

Various religious systems taught me how powerfully belonging can feel like evidence.

Deconstruction taught me to test what I had been told.

Scripture taught me to stop making myself the final authority.

Grace taught me that obedience is not payment.

Christian community taught me that imperfect people can still be safe people.

And Jesus taught me that the point of all of it was never to become impressive at religion.

The point was to follow Him.

That is still the point.

My faith is not unshaken because I have never doubted.

It is unshaken because I brought the doubts into the light, tested what I believed, let what needed to fall apart fall apart, and found Christ still standing when the dust settled.

I am unshaken.

The full version of Unshaken: A Journey of Deconstruction, Reconstruction, and Faith expands this story with deeper teaching, Scripture study, research, and guided journaling for readers who want to work through their own process of deconstruction and reconstruction. It will be available on Amazon this October.