Faith is supposed to be a simple thing—trust, belief, a leaning-into without demanding proof—but somewhere along the way, we dressed it up in rules and rituals and handed it over to the men behind the pulpits. We let them tell us what faith is and who gets to claim it. We let them draw borders around something that was never meant to be fenced in.
But long before I ever sat on a pew, long before I ever heard a preacher thunder from a stage, I learned faith sitting on my Great Gran’s front porch. Her kind of faith wasn’t loud. It wasn’t something she weaponized or used to measure a person’s worth. It was in the way she hung laundry on the clothes line while humming old mountain hymns, or how she’d fix an extra plate the moment she heard a car pull into the driveway, certain that whoever stepped through her door needed a hot meal.
Gran was always feeding folks. No one ever came to her home without being offered food—biscuits fresh from the cast-iron skillet, a scoop of beans, a slice of whatever pie she’d managed to throw together. She fed people the way some folks prayed: freely, instinctively, like she “had a feeling they could use it.”
It was in the way she bowed her head at the kitchen table, not to impress God with fancy words, but because gratitude came easier to her than breath.
She didn’t have much money, but she had trust—trust that if she had food on her table, then her neighbor ought to have some too. Trust that a prayer whispered in the quiet was just as holy as one shouted from a platform. Trust that the Sacred wasn’t something you had to chase down in a church building; it was something that lived in your bones if you learned to listen.
That was the first time I understood faith as something small, everyday, and profoundly human.
“I used to think faith was something you had to earn or get right. These days, I think faith is simply the way we hold the unknown. And Lord knows life gives us plenty of unknown to hold.”
misty gay
So I’ve always wondered: why do we spend so much time tying faith to a pulpit? Why do we act like it belongs to one religion, one book, one deity, one way of believing?
I think it’s because humans want certainty, and religion often promises it. Certainty is tidy. It fits neatly into sermons and Sunday School lessons. But life—the real, lived kind—is rarely tidy. It is full of questions, twists, and sacred contradictions. And faith, at its core, is not certainty at all. It’s the courage to walk forward without it.
That makes people nervous.
But I’ve come to believe faith is far bigger than the walls we’ve built around it. Faith is what rises up when the doctor shrugs their shoulders. It’s what gets a parent out of bed after a night of tears. It’s what keeps an addict trying one more day. It’s what sends a woman back into the hills she grew up in—hollowed out by grief, but hungry for healing—and finds her sitting in moss and sunlight, remembering that the earth has never lied to her.
Faith is not a belief system. It’s a heartbeat.
I used to think faith was something you had to earn or get right. These days, I think faith is simply the way we hold the unknown. And Lord knows life gives us plenty of unknown to hold.
When I walk the ridge line back home, I feel the kind of quiet that presses its forehead to mine and says, Child, you’re not as lost as you think. The trees don’t care what religion I claim. The creek doesn’t ask me for a statement of belief. The wind doesn’t quiz me on doctrine. Creation doesn’t shame me for doubting—if anything, it honors the questions.
There is theology in the land if you know how to hear it. There is scripture written in the shape of the mountains. There is liturgy in the way a grandmother’s hands move when she cooks. There is communion in a shared meal, sacrament in a soft place to land, and resurrection every time someone chooses hope after being broken.
Faith belongs to all of us because uncertainty belongs to all of us. You don’t have to sign a membership card to believe in something bigger than yourself. You don’t need a pastor’s permission to trust that goodness still exists. You don’t need a choir to sing over you when the hills have been doing it since before your ancestors ever crossed them.
People think faith is about answers, but the older I get, the more I think it’s about curiosity. The holy kind. The childlike kind. The Appalachian kind that comes from sitting with your feet in a creek, asking the sky questions it will never answer out loud.
We are curious beings by design. We are meant to wonder. And wonder, I’ve learned, is its own kind of faith.
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So when folks try to tell me faith is only for the religious, I smile a little. They don’t know my Gran. They don’t know the mountains. They don’t know the way the Spirit shows up in the most unexpected places—like the barren seasons, like the unanswered prayers, like the quiet courage that keeps us going.
Faith is for the skeptic, the seeker, the weary parent, the college kid asking big questions, the woman rebuilding her life after thirty years, the person who loves Jesus, the one who loves the Goddess, the one who isn’t sure about anything at all.
Faith is for anyone who has ever whispered, “I hope there’s more than this,” and then dared to live as if there is.
Faith has never belonged to the pulpit. It has always belonged to the people.
And maybe—just maybe—that’s exactly where the Sacred intended it to be.
