Never Once Alone

I grew up with God the way a lot of us do.

Not intimately. Not with certainty. More like — adjacently. God was there on holidays, in the rituals I'd memorized without fully understanding, in the responses I gave at church because everyone around me was giving them too. I went through the motions. I showed up. I did what was expected.

And sometimes, when things got hard enough, I talked to God the way you talk to someone you're not sure is listening. Just in case. Just because you need somewhere to put the fear.

I wasn't sure it was real. But I wasn't sure it wasn't, either.

That in-between place — that quiet, uncommitted maybe — is where I lived for most of my life. And for a long time, it was enough.

Until it wasn't.

The question I wasn't supposed to ask

In the depths of my postpartum depression — a place I could later only identify as my own personal hell — when the medication wasn't working, the therapy wasn't reaching it, and I had already made the phone calls I never thought I'd make, someone who loved me gave me the advice I'd always been given:

Pray. Read your Bible. Trust God.

So I tried. In total desperation, I opened my Bible the way I'd always been taught — to any page, randomly, trusting that it would speak to where I was.

It opened to Abraham.

To the story of a father being asked by God to sacrifice his son.

I sat with that story for a long time. And something shifted in me — not away from faith, exactly, but away from the version of faith I'd been handed. Because a question rose up that I couldn't push back down:

What does it really mean to be obedient to God?

And underneath that — quieter, more frightening:

Could I love my children more than God does?

I had been taught about the full range of God's love — when it was bestowed, and when it was withheld. I had grown up with stories of a God who was pleased and a God who was disappointed, a God who rewarded and a God who punished. And I had measured that love, quietly and carefully, against my own.

Because I knew what I felt for my children. I knew the staggering, wordless totality of it — the kind of love that doesn't negotiate, doesn't keep score, doesn't threaten to withdraw. The kind of love that would never, under any circumstance, ask what Abraham was asked.

How could it be possible that I loved bigger than God?

I closed the Bible. I didn't have answers. But I had something almost more unsettling — I had compassion. For Abraham. For every parent who had ever loved a child so fiercely that the question of sacrifice — of any kind — became unbearable. For the mothers whose stories had started all of this for me, and who I could now see not as monsters but as women whose minds had taken them somewhere no one should have to go alone.

Depression had taken me to deep, dark places. But somewhere beneath the fear and the questioning, I knew there was a reason for all of it. I kept walking forward in faith — even when I didn't know what faith meant anymore.

I had been taught that meditation could lead somewhere dangerous. That quieting the mind that way opened doors better left closed. But I had run out of doors that were working.

So I closed the Bible, opened my laptop, and pressed play on a stranger's voice.

What arrived in the stillness

I've already told you about that afternoon. The couch. Mary Maddux. The stillness that arrived when the voice went quiet.

What I haven't told you is what came next.

Eyes still closed, somewhere in that silence — an image arrived. Simple. Unannounced. Almost casual, the way an image appears when someone says picture a beach and you just do.

Footprints in sand.

That was all. No color, no drama, no voice from above. Just footprints. Simple and still and completely ordinary.

Except that I knew exactly what they meant.

I had grown up with the poem. The one about the person who looks back at the path of their life and sees two sets of footprints — theirs and God's — and then notices that in the hardest moments, there was only one set. And asks, devastated: where were you when I needed you most?

And the answer: that is when I carried you.

In that moment, eyes closed on my couch — desperately trying to crawl my way out of whatever this was I was in — something landed in me that I can only describe as a deep knowing. Not a thought. Not a conclusion I reasoned my way to. A knowing — quiet and complete and somehow more certain than anything I had ever learned in a classroom or a church.

The word "God" is so loaded — it means something different to every person depending on what you've absorbed from your family, your culture, your religion. I still can't limit what I experienced that afternoon to a single word. But whatever it was, I knew this: it had always been with me.

Not watching from a distance. Not keeping score. Not waiting for me to get the rituals right or say the right words or be obedient enough.

With me. Through every hard thing. Through the fear I couldn't name and the thoughts I was too afraid to say out loud, and the childhood moments when I wondered whether I truly mattered. Through all of it. Every single moment.

I had never once been alone.

What forgiveness feels like when it arrives uninvited

Something else came with that knowing.

My parents had divorced when I was young. They loved me the best they could — I know that now, and I believed it even then. But there were moments in childhood when I wondered about the depth of it. When I felt like I existed at the edges of their lives rather than the center. I had carried those moments quietly, in ways I hadn't fully acknowledged, even to myself.

But in that stillness, something released.

Because suddenly I could see them differently. Not as people who had fallen short, but as people who had been struggling — uniquely, privately, in ways I was only now beginning to understand from the inside. People who had their own fear they couldn't name. Their own layers they hadn't found their way through yet.

We had all just been human.

The things I'd been quietly carrying — I didn't decide to let them go. They just went. Replaced by something that felt, unmistakably, like compassion.

The God I hadn't been taught

What I found that afternoon wasn't the God I grew up with.

It was something bigger. Quieter. More personal and less institutional. Not outside me, judging and tallying. But woven into everything — into the stillness, into the knowing, into the compassion that arrived without my asking for it.

A nameless, universal something that I didn't yet have the right word for — but that I recognized, the way you recognize a place you've never been but somehow always known.

I would spend years after that afternoon exploring what this meant. Reading, listening, learning from traditions and teachers across centuries and cultures — all of them, in their own language, pointing at the same thing I had stumbled onto on my couch.

And eventually, after all that searching, all that peeling — I would come full circle. Back to the faith I started with, but transformed. Not the God of obligation and ritual and fear. Something I could finally, genuinely, call my own.

What I want you to know

If you have ever sat with a question you weren't supposed to ask — about God, about faith, about whether any of it is real or whether you're doing it right or whether something is wrong with you for not feeling what everyone around you seems to feel —

You are not alone in that.

And if you have ever been in a moment so dark and desperate that you reached for something you'd been told was dangerous, because you had simply run out of safe options —

You are not alone in that either.

The thing I found in the stillness that afternoon wasn't available only to me. It isn't hiding. It doesn't require a particular tradition or a particular set of beliefs or a particular kind of faith.

It just requires getting quiet enough to notice what has been there all along.

You have never once been alone.

Not in the hardest moment. Not in the question you were afraid to ask. Not in the version of yourself you were most ashamed of.

Not ever.

Where to go from here

If this piece cracked something open — or brought up questions you don't yet have words for — you don't have to figure it out alone.