There are lessons I have learned in suffering … but obedience is not one of them.
The past three years have stripped me bare. I lost my father. I lost my footing. I lost what little sense of stability I had managed to build around me. My businesses struggled. My job search felt like an endless desert. And behind me, a family waiting, hoping, depending on me to be the one who would make it out alive — and bring them with me.
I know what depression tastes like. I have held it in my mouth like iron. I have fought it with the fragile weapons I had left: small routines, hope against reason, silent prayers without expectation.
I do not blame life for being hard. I know I am not entitled to ease.
But what I cannot accept, what I will never bow to, is the spiritual violence of a faith that tells me this suffering is somehow divine.
I was raised on stories like that of Job — the man who lost everything, stripped of children, wealth, health, and dignity, just to prove a point in some celestial bet.
People love to quote Job as a model of unwavering faith.
I read Job and see spiritual abuse.
Because what kind of parent — what kind of God — watches their child drown in grief and calls it a lesson?
Not the kind of parent I want to be. Not the kind of God I want to believe in.
I do not know when this theology took root in us — the idea that we must suffer endlessly before being worthy of joy. The idea that begging is holy. That prostration is the only way to be seen.
But I know this: it did not begin with us.
It began when our stories were stolen.
When our cosmologies were interrupted.
When our relationship with the divine was hijacked by colonizers who needed us to bow — to them, to their God, to their way of seeing the world.
And we have bowed for so long that it almost feels natural.
But it is not.
I am tired of praying as a performance of endurance.
I am tired of being told that silence means favor is coming.
I am tired of spiritual frameworks that tell me my only power is in waiting — quietly — for a breakthrough that may never come.
I believe in God.
But not the God who abandons.
Not the God who needs me small to love me.
Not the God who mistakes humiliation for holiness.
I am unlearning.
Unlearning the colonial faith of scarcity and suffering.
Unlearning the doctrine of waiting rooms and closed doors.
Unlearning the silence that shames us for asking: Why would a parent let their child suffer like this?
I am remembering.
Remembering that I come from people who met God in rivers, in drums, in laughter.
People who did not need to be broken to be blessed.
People whose prayers were not whispered in fear, but sung in gratitude.
I do not have all the answers.
But I know what I will not do: I will not teach my children that God is a test they have to pass.
I will teach them that they are loved — here, now, without condition.
And maybe, just maybe, that is all the faith I need right now.