There are seasons when the weight of the world feels unbearable.
When you look around and it seems like people have forgotten their softness, their compassion. Everything feels divided. Loud. Heavy. And somewhere in the middle of it, you feel small, powerless, helpless.

I’ve been there. Staring at the chaos, wishing it were different, wondering how to hold onto my own heart when it all feels so fractured. And that’s when I realized: I can’t keep looking outward for proof of peace. I have to look within. And beyond. Back to something I had left on the shelf for decades — my faith.

✨The Confusion I Inherited

Faith wasn’t simple in my childhood. It was contradictory, confusing.

My grandfather was an Episcopalian priest, so respected he gave sermons at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. My grandmother held her beliefs like a compass, steady and unwavering. But my mother? She rebelled. To her, religion was control — something to distrust, something to resist. She raised us wary of it all, yet sometimes still brought us to church because it meant so much to my grandmother.

My stepfather was a non-practicing Jew who seemed indifferent to any of it. So faith floated in the background of my life as something fractured: sacred to some, dangerous to others, irrelevant to a few. I learned to keep it at arm’s length. I put it on a shelf, where it gathered dust.

✨A Gradual Awakening

Spirituality found me anyway. Through crystals, through art, through meditation, through angels and signs and synchronicities. I built a connection with the Divine on my own terms — but faith, in its rawest form, still felt complicated.

Until recently.

I carved my way into prayer without even knowing I was looking for it.

This year there were many of those “proof of God” moments, but one stands out so clearly it changed how I move through life. I went to say goodbye to my mother in the hospital. The first time I saw her in that bed my body simply couldn’t hold the weight of it. I felt myself unraveling — the kind of breaking that makes your lungs fail you. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t even stay standing. I turned and walked out of the room to gather myself, and — for the first time in a long time, I prayed. I prayed for strength because I knew I didn’t have it on my own.

And in a micro-moment, something shifted that filled me from the inside out. Strength came through me like a current. I felt strength, otherworldly strength, enter my body I felt carried. Like all I had to do was ask, and it was received. Like my angels were just waiting in the wings for me to ask for help so they could give it. In that trip from that point forward, I felt something greater working through me which carried me through it. I felt less like a vessel — moved and steadied by something greater than myself. It felt like solid proof. Not theory. Not wishful thinking. Proof.

That wasn’t the culmination of everything; it was simply another turn on the path. But it taught me something fundamental and unwavering: faith is not always a doctrine. Sometimes all it takes is an experience — raw, undeniable, and intimate. And sometimes it can’t be heard or felt until you’re in the most desperate moments. But when it arrives, it changes the way you translate the rest of your life.

As the months have passed, one chaotic event following the last, watching the world twist in division, something within me clicked: If I wanted to keep my heart open, if I wanted to keep believing in compassion, I couldn’t outsource that belief to the world around me. I had to go inward. I had to trust something greater than myself.

Faith. Hope.

Not faith as control. Not faith as fear.
Faith as compassion. Faith as trust. Faith as remembering that no matter what is happening out there, I am held. We are all held.

✨Faith as Practice

One of the most powerful things I’ve learned through Al-Anon is Step One: admitting I am powerless. That surrender cracked me open. It taught me that I don’t have to carry it all. That I can hand over what I can’t control to something higher, and breathe again.

Faith, in total and true trusting, I’ve realized, is not passive. It’s not just belief — it’s practice. A daily choice we can choose to pick up in each moment, and move through each day.

For me, these practices looks simple, but they are everything:

• Prayer when I need to soften.
• Meditation when I need to listen.
• Spiritual literature that reminds me I’m not alone in the seeking.
• Near-death experience stories and channeled sessions that remind me love doesn’t end.
• The “God Box” ritual — when I need to release and turn it over; writing down what I want to surrender to the Divine, placing it in a box, and trusting it’s no longer mine to carry. I love how physical that surrender becomes.
• Gratitude lists where I track “proof of where God is” in small daily miracles.

These are not commandments. They are doorways back to practice — small agreements I make with myself to remember I am not alone.

 

✨Redefining Faith

So what does faith mean for me now?

It’s not perfection. It’s not certainty. It’s not the version of belief other people tried to hand me as a child.

Faith, for me, is trust. Trust that I am guided even when the road feels unclear. Trust that I am held even when I feel alone and untethered. Trust that what I cannot carry is not mine to hold alone. Trust that everything is ultimately okay, even if I can’t see the whole picture yet.

It’s a relationship — with the Divine, with the part of me that knows how to receive, with life itself.

It’s not fixed. It shifts, it deepens, it evolves as I evolve. It asks for courage, for vulnerability, for trust. It’s a relationship. One I’m still learning how to deepen.

✨Questions to Sit With:

I don’t want to lecture. I want to invite. I want to leave you with a few questions. Not to answer right away, but in your own time, if and when you feel inspired:

• What beliefs about faith did you inherit? Do they still fit you now?
• Where do you feel powerless in your life — and what might you surrender to something greater?
• What small practice could help you notice the proof that already exists?
• If you redefined faith on your own terms, what would it look like today?
• What does it feel like to trust you are guided, even in the unknown?

 

✨Final Thoughts

I don’t have all the answers in my life. I have moments of proof, a handful of rituals that keep me steady, and a new tenderness for the fragile work of trusting again. And I know this: when I turn inward, when I lean into faith, I find presence again. I find compassion again.

And maybe that’s the whole point — that faith doesn’t erase the chaos, it simply reminds us we are not alone in it.

If you’re like me — if you grew up with confusing messages, if you put faith on a shelf because it felt safer to avoid it. But know that there is always room for growth and for change, and that powerlessness can become choice. So wherever you are, however you were raised, whatever you’ve been taught — may you find your own way back to faith. In God, in the Divine, in the Universe, in love itself. May it hold you the way it’s holding me.

If you ever want to share what faith looks like for you, I want to hear it. Tell me one small proof you’ve seen — the little evidence of grace that made you pause. Sometimes sharing the proof aloud is another way of remembering we’re not doing this alone.

You are held. You are guided. You are carried. Always.