The feeling was real; I had simply been taught to call it God.
Field Notes
As a child, I believed deeply. Praise and worship music filled me with wonder, surrender, connection, and certainty, and Christianity gave me the only language I knew for those experiences. It taught me that what I felt was coming from an authority outside me—that faith meant trusting God above my own mind, body, and understanding.
For a while, leaving that language behind made me think I had also lost my faith. But the further I followed my own path, the stronger that inner certainty became. I began to understand that what I had called faith was never merely obedience to an invisible authority. It was trust in what lived experience was teaching me, in the convictions forming within my body, in my connection to nature, and in the larger calling I could feel before I knew how to explain it. I did not lose the sacred feeling I had as a little girl. Freed from the belief that it belonged to something outside me, it has only grown. The faith was mine all along.