When My Anchor Was Gone

Permission to search for God in my own way.

When my grandmother died unexpectedly, the person who had anchored my world was suddenly gone.

She had raised me, protected me, and loved me through years when so much of life felt uncertain. Her faith was woven into everything she did. She did not speak about God as much as she quietly lived what she believed. Her love, faithfulness, and steady presence became some of my earliest understandings of God.

Because I loved her so deeply, I could not separate my questions about religion from my loyalty to her.

As long as she was alive, exploring another understanding of faith felt almost like betrayal. To question the church, the beliefs I had been taught, or the culture surrounding them seemed dangerously close to questioning her. And questioning her felt impossible.

Then she was gone.

Her death left an emptiness I could not begin to fill, but it also opened a door inside me.

For the first time, I felt free to ask what I truly believed.

I was not free from my grandmother. I would never want to be. I was free from the fear that searching for God in my own way meant rejecting her or everything she had given me.

In a college philosophy class, I learned the word atheist. For about a week, I tried it on. Perhaps, I thought, there was no God at all.

But the word did not fit. The explanations I heard did not describe what I felt somewhere deep within me. I could question almost everything I had been taught about God, but I could not quite question God Himself.

Then I tried calling myself an agnostic. I understood it to mean that the existence of God could not be proven. That seemed safer. I certainly lacked the theological knowledge needed to defend Christianity or explain matters of faith that are considered mysteries.

Agnostic lasted a little longer, perhaps a month.

Eventually, I had to admit something to myself.

I believed in God.

What I no longer knew was what to do with everything that had been placed around Him.

Looking back, I was never truly searching for a world without God. I was searching for God without the Southern rules, the conservative expectations, and the hypocrisy and judgment I had sometimes witnessed in His name.

I needed to discover whether God existed beyond the walls of the church I had known. I needed to know whether He was larger than the fear, shame, and need to prove myself that had become tangled with faith.

What I found was a God who did not require hoops, trophies, or perfect behavior before offering love.

His love was not something I had to earn.

It was simply there.

Steady. Patient. Unconditional.

And perhaps my grandmother had been showing me that kind of God all along.

Her death gave me the freedom to question the religion I had inherited. But her life had already planted within me the love that would eventually lead me back to God.

It would be several more years before that search became a deeply personal relationship. Much later, in Montana, far from the world that had first defined God for me.