Holy Disruption: Embracing the Uncomfortable Terrain Between Who You Were and Who God Is Calling You to Become
There is a particular kind of spiritual loneliness that rarely gets named from the pulpit. It is not the loneliness of having walked away from faith. It is not the grief of a crisis that has shaken everything loose. It is something quieter and, in many ways, more disorienting — the feeling of being suspended between a faith that once felt certain and a faith that has not yet taken its new shape. You still show up. You still pray, however haltingly. You still occupy your pew on Sunday morning. But something has shifted, and you cannot quite say what it is or where it is taking you.
If that description resonates, this reflection is for you.
The Myth of the Straight Line
Western culture tends to reward narratives of clean progression. We celebrate the testimony of someone who was lost and then found, who suffered and then healed, who doubted and then believed. These stories are real and they are beautiful. But they can also, unintentionally, create a kind of spiritual pressure — the sense that a healthy faith moves in one direction: upward, forward, increasingly illuminated.
The biblical witness, however, tells a far messier story. The Psalms careen between ecstatic praise and raw despair, sometimes within a single poem. The prophet Elijah, immediately after one of Scripture's most dramatic demonstrations of divine power, collapses under a broom tree and asks God to let him die. The disciples, having walked with Jesus for three years, scatter in confusion and fear at the moment of his arrest. Even Paul, whose theological confidence fills letter after letter, acknowledges an interior wrestling that he cannot resolve.
Faith, as Scripture actually presents it, is not a straight line. It is a winding path through terrain that includes both mountain vistas and long stretches of fog-covered valley.
What Disorientation Might Actually Signal
The theologian Walter Brueggemann has written compellingly about three movements present throughout the Psalms — orientation, disorientation, and new orientation. In the first, life feels ordered and God feels near. In the second, something breaks open: a loss, a question, a season of spiritual dryness, a shift in understanding that leaves the old frameworks inadequate. In the third, a new sense of God's presence emerges — not the same as before, but deeper, more honest, more resilient.
Brueggemann's insight is crucial: disorientation is not a sign that something has gone wrong. It is a necessary passage. The problem is that most of us, when we enter that second movement, assume we have failed. We compare our interior fog to someone else's apparent clarity and conclude that we are doing faith incorrectly.
But consider what disorientation often accompanies: a conscience that is expanding, a theology that is becoming more honest, a willingness to sit with questions rather than paper over them with easy answers. These are not symptoms of spiritual decline. They are symptoms of spiritual growth that is actually costing something.
The Particular Courage of the In-Between
There is a reason that liminal spaces — thresholds, transitions, the territory between what was and what will be — have held sacred significance across cultures and centuries. They are uncomfortable precisely because they require us to release our grip on what we have known without yet being able to grasp what is coming. That release is not passive. It is an act of profound trust.
At Asbury UMC Madison, we take seriously the United Methodist tradition's emphasis on grace as something that works in us long before we are aware of it. The doctrine of prevenient grace — the idea that God is actively present and moving in human lives even before conscious faith takes hold — has a powerful implication for the in-between season: God does not wait for clarity before showing up. God is already present in the confusion.
This means that the season in which your prayers feel hollow, in which old certainties have loosened and new ones have not yet formed, in which you are not sure what you believe about something you once felt settled about — that season is not God-forsaken. It may, in fact, be one of the most God-saturated seasons of your life, precisely because it is stripping away what was secondhand and building something that is genuinely yours.
Practical Wisdom for the Wandering Season
Naming the in-between as sacred does not make it comfortable. Here are several practices that may help sustain you through it.
Stay connected, even imperfectly. The temptation during seasons of spiritual struggle is to withdraw — from worship, from community, from conversation. Resist it where you are able. You do not need to perform certainty you do not feel. Simply showing up, even with your questions, keeps you tethered to a community that can carry some of what you cannot yet carry alone.
Pray honestly rather than correctly. If your prayers feel dry or scripted, try abandoning the script. The Psalms model a kind of raw, unfiltered address to God that does not dress things up. Tell God exactly where you are. The honesty itself is a form of faith.
Seek out the wisdom of those who have been here before. Within any congregation of meaningful depth, there are people who have navigated long seasons of spiritual uncertainty and come through them changed for the better. Their stories will not resolve your questions, but they will remind you that the path you are on has been walked before.
Allow yourself to be a beginner. One of the gifts of the in-between is that it invites a posture of genuine openness. When the old answers no longer satisfy, we become capable of hearing things we could not hear before. Approach Scripture, worship, and conversation with the curiosity of someone who does not already know how everything turns out.
Be patient with the timeline. Transformation rarely announces itself with a precise arrival date. New orientation tends to emerge gradually, in retrospect — you look back and realize that something has quietly shifted. Trust the process even when you cannot see its arc.
You Are Not Behind
Perhaps the most important thing to be said to anyone navigating a difficult season of faith is this: you are not behind. You have not missed a step. The very fact that you are wrestling, questioning, and refusing to settle for a faith that no longer fits your lived experience is evidence of a spiritual seriousness that deserves to be honored rather than pathologized.
The church at its best has always been a community that makes room for the full range of human spiritual experience — the mountain and the valley, the certainty and the doubt, the arrival and the long, uncertain journey. At Asbury UMC Madison, we want to be that kind of community for you.
Whatever season you find yourself in today, you are welcome here — not despite your questions, but with them. The messy middle is holy ground. You do not have to navigate it alone.