When I Almost Lost My Faith—And Then God Spoke

I’ve been a Christian since I was at least nine years old. In all these years, there’s only been one time in my life when I wasn’t sure I could believe anymore—but that time was deadly serious.

Many people have different experiences with leaving faith. Some have felt judged, constrained, or deeply hurt by churches. But my fear wasn’t that Christianity was oppressive. I didn’t feel that. My fear is that it wasn’t true.

• A God Who loves me: Not true?
• A God Who died for me: Not true?
• In His resurrection I have eternal life: Not true?
• I have meaning and high holy purpose in this life: Not true?
• A God who answers prayers: Not true?
• And so much more outstanding, crazy, eternal blessing that I could hardly contain it all: Not true?

I wasn’t mad at God. I was terrified that He didn’t exist. But I had to be honest with myself. If He wasn’t true, I couldn’t talk myself into believing.

God Speaks in a Vision

Then during that time of painful doubt God reminded me of two things: one experiential, one intellectual. I need both to believe. That’s just how I’m wired.

The experiential piece of evidence came first. I remembered a retreat I attended in my mid-twenties at Forest Home, a Christian retreat center in the mountains of Southern California. I went with two close friends from church. One evening after dinner, the three of us decided to go to the chapel to pray. On the way in, we passed a young woman about our age sobbing uncontrollably, with a young man sitting across from her looking stunned and helpless. It was clear he wasn’t hurting her—he looked overwhelmed and worried.

We continued to the chapel, but as we began to pray, we could still hear her crying outside. The sound was heartbreaking. We looked at each other, and we knew we couldn’t just stay there, we had to go see if we could help.

They were sitting on log benches around a fire ring. When we sat down with them, the girl could hardly speak. The young man explained. She had been involved in Satan worship. And to be clear—this wasn’t Wicca or paganism. (I have friends who follow those religions, and they don’t believe there is a Satan.) This was something much darker. She said she could feel Satan trying to pull her back in.

The three of us had never done anything remotely like deliverance or intercessory prayer on that level, especially not for a stranger. But we sat down with her and that poor young guy. We prayed. And one by one, God brought to each of us a Bible verse, a song, a word of encouragement. It may have looked like a planned performance, but it wasn’t. It was the Holy Spirit.

And then I saw something: a vision from God. I had never seen one before and didn’t call it that at the time; I didn’t define it until later. Here’s what I saw:

As we sat in the physical forest clearing, a thick, solid darkness began rolling in from my left. At the same time, a brilliant white light appeared on the right and advanced towards the wall of black.

But the two never met. As soon as the light began to move forward, the darkness rolled back like someone turning a page. The light filled the whole clearing.

No one else said they saw it, and I didn’t speak of it right away. But something shifted. The girl stopped crying. She looked up and said, “I think I’m okay now.” And we asked her, “Do you want to accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior?”

“Yes,” she said. “I do.”

That vision—that moment—was what God brought back to me during my crisis of faith a decade later. It was real. I remembered it. I couldn’t deny what I’d seen or how God had moved.

God Speaks through a Tiny Book

The second thing God used to bring me back was intellectual. I had long loved C.S. Lewis—his Chronicles of Narnia, Until We Have Faces and That Hideous Strength. Sometime during my Lewis collecting phase, I also bought Mere Christianity, his nonfiction defense of the faith. (Also called apologetics: why we believe what we believe.)

When I read it, something clicked. The doubts I had wrestled with began to fade. You might say, “Really? Just like that?” But for me, yes. Mere Christianity answered the intellectual questions I had been too afraid to name, and reminded me why Christianity makes sense. And my vision reminded me that He does work in the world in miraculous ways.

When God Speaks

And ever since then—even though I still don’t know everything, even though I don’t always understand why God allows certain things or answers in the ways He does—I know this:

He is the God who loves me.

And I am the Me who loves Him.

I would love to see more Christian women in my Facebook group Your King Is Calling: Christian Women on Kingdom Adventure.

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