There are multiple parallels between being married and being a person of faith. One we seldom talk about is that both relationships bring us face-to-face with disappointment.
Though marital disappointments look and feel different from those we experience with God, the church, or fellow believers, they share the same common denominator: expectations.
All of us carry expectations for each other, specifically for the people we’re closest to. Expectations are not bad. In fact, some of the expectations we hold for our spouses are essential to the success of our marriages, and we typically agree on them long before exchanging rings. Faithfulness, honesty, and fidelity belong in this category.
However, we also tend to carry subjective, unspoken hopes for our partners that rarely get discussed in premarital classes. These might involve division of household labor, the caliber of family vacations, and whose career will get put on hold to care for children.
Some expectations are heavily influenced by our families of origin. (Said by my husband early in our marriage: “My mom always made turkey and lasagna for Thanksgiving dinner.”) Others flow from our personality types. (Said by me early in our marriage: “Can we please find a working definition for punctuality and cleanliness?”) Though navigating disappointment feels unpleasant, it can helpfully pinpoint any unrealistic expectations and guide us toward negotiating ones that are based on who we actually married.
We cannot enter into marriage unencumbered by expectations—and we cannot embark on our spiritual journeys without expecting God and fellow believers to show up in certain ways. Religious expectations come from many sources, such as sermons, conference speakers, and books. I don’t think it’s possible to read Scripture without making assumptions about the life of faith, including the assumptions that our physical needs will be provided for (Matt. 7:9), that God will protect us from harm (Prov. 4:12), and that physical healing will follow confession and prayer (James 5:16).
Even to faithful followers, such biblically based promises can fuel confusion or anger when, say, a layoff comes days after buying a house or cancer ravages a child. Just as how we process marital disappointment affects the quality and longevity of our marriage, how we process spiritual disappointment affects the course of our relationship with God.
Based on the current buzz about deconstruction and deconversion, abandoning the faith seems to be a growing trend. But disappointment doesn’t have to lead us away from God. (Nor is disappointment the only reason folks deconvert.) Catherine McNiel and Jason Hague’s new book, Mid-Faith Crisis: Finding a Path Through Doubt, Disillusionment, and Dead Ends, offers a welcome alternative.
Similar to other well-known books that focus on spiritual journeys (see M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled and Brian McLaren’s Finding Faith), the authors base their work on the premise that faith has “predictable stages that include disorientation and disintegration.” Mid-Faith Crisis gives names to these stages as Inherited Faith, Confident Faith, Mid-Faith, and Conscious Faith, plotting them along a chronological line from childhood to adulthood. (Readers like me, who came to faith later in life, may feel that the authors’ first stage doesn’t necessarily align with their lived experience.)
What precipitates the shift from Confident Faith to Mid-Faith? McNiel and Hague use the bulk of their book to consider this question. As they argue, the journey toward a conscious, mature faith will route most of us through a spiritual wilderness that feels unpleasant, disorienting, and at times frightening. The authors name seven possible catalysts for these wilderness periods, grouping them under a single heading: “The Crisis.”
Mid-Faith Crisis does not rush through these catalysts; it gives each one its own chapter. They include doubt, toxic churches, abusive or morally corrupt leaders, unanswered prayer, long-term suffering, the crumbling of our theological constructs, and a loss of emotional connection to God. One of the book’s strengths lies in how the authors lead readers through the various wildernesses.
Doubt kicks off their list for good reason. It is a common—perhaps the most common—catalyst for a crisis of faith. Doubts emerge for many reasons, including an insufficient or faulty understanding about who God is and the cognitive dissonance we feel when our beliefs and our realities no longer align. For instance, many of us have tried but failed to make sense of how an all-knowing, all-loving, all-powerful God does not stop the horrible evil that happens all around us. Questioning his character or backing away from our beliefs may seem like the best solution because it eases that inner tension.
But the reality is, we will never be able to fully know God or resolve all our questions because the glass we look through will always be opaque. We are finite beings, and no amount of Windex will provide us with an unobstructed view of an infinite, holy God. McNiel and Hague encourage us to accept that mystery and unanswered questions are not antithetical to following Jesus. Rather than assuming doubt is “the beginning of the end” of our faith, they reframe it as an essential component of that faith, because it forces us to wrestle with our beliefs and recommit to the trajectory of our journey. They write, “Since there is no path named Certainty, we choose the one named Faith.”
Each of the chapters covering a particular cause of mid-faith crisis is thoughtful and robust. At least for me, however, chapter 6 (“When Our Prayers Fell Silent”) reads as the strongest and most resonant. I imagine that most followers of Jesus have diligently, faithfully prayed for a specific (godly) outcome, only to have their hopes and expectations crushed. Even Jesus faced this reality when he pleaded for the cup of suffering to pass him and yet died by crucifixion.
Hague opens up about repeatedly petitioning God to give his autistic son, Jack, the ability to speak. He vulnerably recounts his pain and how he finally came to realize that “prayer can become all about how persuasive we can be at getting God to do what we want.” Indeed. His honesty, as well as the not-yet-answered prayer, gives Hague’s conclusion real heft: “It’s worth spending time with God, worth practicing how to live in God’s presence, even though we can’t control what God does, even though we know God won’t make all our dreams come true or remove all our pain.” In other words, it’s worth figuring out how we might learn to love God in the darkness. The authors offer numerous handholds for this.
Throughout the book, the writers differentiate humans’ bad behavior from the reality of a good and faithful God, which helps reorient readers from confusion and misplaced expectations back to the Cross. One of the most salient questions McNeil and Hague ask is “How can we be formed such that the searing pain of the world carries us to the suffering Jesus—rather than pull us, like the tides, further and further away from the God who is close to the brokenhearted, the hope and comfort we long for?”
Because they write as fellow sojourners who name and validate the pain and confusion that often accompanies a life of faith, they establish themselves as trustworthy guides. Their gentle, pastoral approach gives readers permission to feel and grieve the losses connected to their crises. (I unexpectedly found tears running down my face several times.)
Hague and McNeil bring the book to a close by referring to Jesus as the Good Shepherd who leads us out of the darkness into verdant pastures and spaces of rest. While readily acknowledging that “we will at times feel lost,” they assure us that “we are never, ever alone.” They say, “How long will we stay here in our mid-faith crisis? There’s no way to be sure. … And there is no rush. The shepherd has all the time in the world.” Because we often feel impatient when a crisis hits, we need to remember that faith is a lifelong journey—not a sprint.
None of us can predict what kind of hardship and loss we may encounter in the years ahead or foresee how such seasons will affect our faith. Mid-Faith Crisis presents a compelling argument for holding onto Jesus during those long, dark days and exchanging doubt, disillusionment, and disappointment for a deeper, more trustworthy faith.
Dorothy Littell Greco is the author of Marriage in the Middle: Embracing Midlife Surprises, Challenges, and Joys and the forthcoming For the Love of Women: Uprooting and Healing Misogyny in America. You can find more of her work on Substack or on her website.
