You find yourself mouthing words in a service you’ve attended for years, and somewhere behind your sternum, you notice you are speaking about someone you no longer quite recognize.
The words are the same. The ritual is familiar. But the image they point toward has shifted, and you are not entirely sure when it happened or what to do with it.
If your image of God is changing, that does not mean you are losing your faith. You may be growing into a more honest version of it.
This is what spiritual direction has shown me, again and again: the moments that feel most like rupture are often the moments of greatest maturation. The God who no longer fits the old image is not a smaller God. The person who can no longer be contained by the old certainty is not a person with less faith. They are a person whose interior life has grown large enough to notice what it was not large enough to see before.
This post is for anyone who has felt that shift and wondered what to do with it.
Why Does Your Image of God Change as You Grow?
Thomas came in worried about what felt to him like the crumbling of a load-bearing wall.
He was not angry. He had not suffered a dramatic loss. He had simply reached his mid-fifties and noticed that the image of the Divine he had carried since childhood no longer quite matched the one he was experiencing in his actual life. The God he had been taught had clear edges, clear rules, clear preferences. The one he encountered in silence, in his marriage, in his failures and recoveries, seemed to be something considerably less manageable.
'I feel like I'm outgrowing a house I still live in,' he said.
This is more common than most spiritual communities acknowledge. The images of God we receive early in life are containers suited to a particular stage of development. Many of them are too static to grow with us.
The contemplative tradition has long recognized that the Divine is never fully contained by our conceptions of the Divine. The maps and frameworks we are given serve a purpose in our development until our souls demand that we set them down to journey through the territory itself. When they no longer fit, that is not a failure of faith. It is a sign that something real is happening, something better.
How Do You Know If You’re Losing Faith or Just Losing a Smaller God?
This is the question most people are actually asking when they say their faith is changing, and it is worth taking seriously.
The difference is rarely doctrinal. It is more often felt in the body.
A faith transition tends to produce something different: an unsettledness that still contains hunger. There is discomfort, yes, and grief, and a disorientation that can feel very much like loss. But underneath it, there is still a pull. A person in the middle of a faith transition still wants to find God. They have simply outgrown the version they were handed.
In my experience, a faith crisis comes when a faith transition has not been allowed to breathe, to receive its due value. The unsettled feeling intensifies into a sense of being internally void, and the hunger turns into a fear that if something doesn’t change, the individual may be living, but a dead life. With this comes a sense of disconnection from self and others, and a greyness that reduces gratitude for life in general.
Whichever state you find yourself in today, turning toward and moving through the crisis or transition directly can bring a profound sense of meaning back to life within you, and a deep sense of connection to God, albeit a different one than before.
What One Person’s Shift Actually Looked Like
Thomas and I spent several months with his crumbling wall.
What he came to understand, gradually, was that his image of the Divine had been shaped almost entirely by the people who most needed God to behave in a particular way: to enforce, to adjudicate, to provide clear answers and clear consequences. That was the God he had inherited. It had given him structure, a moral framework, a sense of what was expected.
But the God he was encountering in his actual life was not that God. The God in his actual life was present in ambiguity, in questions without resolutions, in paradoxes, in moments of unexpected tenderness that had nothing to do with getting things right.
'That God,' he said at one point, 'actually scares me a little. It’s no longer in my control. But it’s also alive, and interactive, and actually interesting for a change. I find myself wanting my connection with that God, just for myself.'
He did not abandon his tradition. He did not leave his community. He let the smaller image die so that something larger could be born in its place.
That is, in my experience, what most healthy faith transitions are: a deepening, a resurrection to a life more full.
The Two-Image Practice
Here is a practice that has accompanied a number of people through exactly this kind of shift.
Set aside five minutes. Sit quietly with no agenda.
Call to mind the image of God you received: the one handed to you by your tradition, your family, your early faith formation. Give it a single sentence. It can be brief and honest. ‘This God is…’ and finish the sentence without editing.
Then sit with the image that has been forming in you lately. The one you haven’t had clear words for yet. Give it a sentence too. ‘This God might be…’
Do not reconcile the two sentences; imagine living with the God of each one. What is your life with that God like? What is it like to be with each other, to talk with each other, to act with each other? Do not decide which is correct. Just notice what each one does in your body. One may feel like a constriction. One may feel like a slight opening. One may reduce your sense of freedom and gratitude for life. One may expand and enhance them.
Try interacting with God on the basis of the image that draws you toward greater freedom and gratitude, then reflect on what your life together is like after those few days.
A woman I worked with did this practice after years of feeling like her faith was slowly dying. She wrote her two sentences and sat with them for a long time. Then she said: ‘The second one feels like the God I’ve been trying to get to for thirty years. I just didn’t have permission. I didn’t know I already had it.’
This practice is not about abandoning what you’ve been given. It is about taking seriously what you are actually experiencing. If you’re looking to take it even deeper, consider dream work, which I’ve written about here: Dream Journaling: A Spiritual Practice for Listening to the Inner Life.
If this practice surfaces something significant and you find yourself wanting a companion for the journey, I’d welcome a free, 30-minute exploratory conversation. Select one at Essence House.
You Haven’t Lost God
What most people are afraid of, when their image of God begins to change, is that they will lose the relationship itself. That if the God they have known no longer quite fits the God they are encountering, there will be nothing left, and that everything they have built up will have been for nothing.
What I have found, sitting with people at exactly this threshold, is almost always the opposite. The relationship does not end when the image changes. It gets better, becomes more free, more enlivening.
What you are standing at is an invitation. The question is not whether you still have faith. The question is whether you are willing to follow it somewhere larger than where it has taken you before.
Live and Lead with Soul,
Ben
Ben Shoup, M.Div., D.Min., is the founder of Essence House, a spiritual direction and discernment coaching practice in Northfield, MN. Learn more at essencehousesd.com.