I had to lose my religion to find my faith. I know it sounds trite. Just hear me out.

I used to believe religion made me moral. It tamed my “natural man,” inclined to selfishness, sin, and imperfection. Religion was my fixer, filling my failings with God’s ways and truths.

I clung to religion because it made sense of sorrow, depression, and guilt. Religion told me the how, the why, and the why not to worry.

I felt safe, warm, and protected in religion. If I did right, chose right, and said right, I would be right, I would be all right.

Religion was not just a way of thinking, but a way of being. My religion came with its own language. I could name my sins, successes, and my purpose. I even gained a new, unspoken name.

Religion meant purpose when life felt purposeless. It made sense of the senseless. Religion gave me definition, distinction, and difference.

And, in many ways, I’m deeply grateful for the ways religion pushed me to make choices that didn’t simply focus on the now, how it helped me survive my father’s cancer treatments and death in my teens, and how it helped me find my best friend to build a life with.

But there came a time in my life when religion’s rigidity and limitations could not help me comprehend, embrace, endure, and even advocate to change the complexities, the beauty, the mysteries, the uncertainties, and the inequalities of life.

For years, I used the terms “religion” and “faith” interchangeably. If I didn’t have religion, what good was faith anyway? Where would I direct my faith? How would I know what was right? Where to go? What to do?

But my life experiences demanded I lean into complexity, love, compassion, and my own moral compass. I began to ask, “What good is an all-consuming, all-demanding religion if it can’t stand up to scrutiny?; If following your religion challenges your conscience?; If it breaks your trust with God?”

Losing my religion felt- and I know this sounds melodramatic – like experiencing a death. I mourned my religion. I mourned – I mourn – my lost self. I feared becoming all of the things my religion warned me about: sinful, prideful, offended, selfish, and worldly. Who would I be now?

One day, my therapist asked me how I imagined God, separate from anything I’d been taught or told. I let my mind touch the idea and initially recoiled internally, asking, “I can do that?!” Then, I imagined Her. She radiated light, peace, hope, and acceptance. She was in me.

I started to see how faith survives outside of religion. I made lists of what God wasn’t and what God was. The first list proved much longer. It remains so.

Faith allowed me to sit with uncertainty and even embrace it at times. To allow for change. To explore. To improve and strengthen relationships. To place love over dogma. To look for God in new and unexpected places.

And, most surprisingly, faith helped me discover God in me. I saw how miracles happen through people. Medicine, science, agriculture, teaching, creating, befriending and discovering: All Godly traits. The world viewed this way suddenly seemed infinitely beautiful. I felt moved anew to hope, to help, to change, to love. If the goodness of God is in humanity, then we have so much potential for good.

And that would be the reward. Here. Now. Today. Not in some afterlife, enticing us to good. Faith doesn’t follow God for future rewards or to push out sin. Faith is God acting in us and inspiring the best parts in us to help. Love and a better world now is the reward.

If we want God to move us, we need less religion and more faith. Less church and more community. Action. Hope. Perseverance. A never-ending well of love we discover and cultivate within ourselves. This kind of God makes no “us” and “them.” This God dwells with us and you can see God in someone else’s words, in art, inventions, actions. Faith doesn’t require a special book or rituals to reach God. Our conscience shows us what is good, kind, and meaningful.

I lost my religion and found my faith. Most days, I still feel a bit unanchored. But I don’t feel wrong, or bad, or sinful. I don’t see myself as the failure I feared. For a time, locked in religion, following all directions, I couldn’t keep turning to God anyway, because I felt so much anger, confusion, and hurt. Until I could begin to let those feelings go, I would always be struggling with my faith.

I’m letting God be an unknown for now. He/she/it/spirit/body/parent/being. I honesty don’t know.

But I do know love when I see it, when I feel it, and when I act on it. I know goodness. I know when my conscience feels at peace. I know when the kind of God I can follow acts through me. I have faith.