We Don't Outgrow God. We Outgrow the Containers That Held Our Faith
Sometimes the problem isn't our faith. It's the container we've been trying to keep it in.
Welcome to today’s reflection.
Each weekday, paid subscribers receive an exclusive reflection designed to offer a thoughtful pause amid ordinary life. My prayer is that these brief pieces create a little space for curiosity, contemplation and wonder amid the noise of the day.
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There have been moments in my life when I wondered whether something had gone wrong with my faith.
The things that had once nourished me no longer seemed to have the same effect. Worship that had once lifted me now felt strangely familiar. Sermons that would once have filled pages of notes no longer resonated with me in the same way. Even the rhythms of church life that had shaped me for years began to feel as though they belonged to someone I used to be.
For a long time, when I felt like that, I assumed the problem was me.
Perhaps I wasn’t praying enough. Perhaps I needed to try harder. Perhaps I had somehow drifted further from God than I realised. That felt like the obvious explanation. After all, if something that once brought life no longer did, surely the fault had to lie with the person experiencing it.
Looking back, I don’t think that was true at all.
I don’t think I had outgrown God. I think I had simply outgrown one of the containers that had held my faith for a season.
That feels like an uncomfortable thing to admit because many of us have been taught to think in much simpler categories. We tend to divide our spiritual lives into success or failure, faithfulness or compromise, staying or leaving.
When something changes, we instinctively assume someone must be right, and someone must be wrong.
