My relationship with God didn’t break all at once. It fractured slowly.

The first crack came when my mother died. I was still a child, and the loss didn’t just leave me grieving — it left me questioning. No one explained God to me in a way that made sense of that kind of pain. No one sat with my questions. So instead of comfort, I learned confusion. Instead of trust, distance.

I didn’t turn away loudly. I drifted.

Years later, when I was around twelve or thirteen, my dad enrolled me in a Catholic school. I had gotten into trouble the year before. I hadn’t grown up in church. I had received my first communion as a child, then disappeared from faith altogether. This wasn’t a return — it was an insertion. And I felt it immediately.

The kids there had grown up together. They shared history, routines, unspoken rules. I was the new girl — the outsider — and I never quite fit. I was already carrying grief, already acting out, already experimenting with things I didn’t yet understand.

I smoked weed.

I made choices adults warned about but never explained. I lost my virginity while enrolled there. And the judgment was subtle, but constant. The looks. The distance. The quiet exclusion.

I wasn’t corrected with care — I was categorized. I learned quickly that once you’re labeled in a religious environment, it’s hard to be seen as anything else. Their attitudes didn’t draw me closer to God. Instead, they confirmed the version of Him I was already afraid might be true.

Critical. Disappointed. Withholding.

Still, when I entered confirmation classes later on, a part of me hoped. I started those classes in August or September. I showed up. I tried. I wanted to understand faith on my own terms instead of inheriting someone else’s rules.

By November of my sophomore year, I found out I was pregnant.

When my dad and stepmom found out, they told me we had to tell the priest. They said it wasn’t optional. I would eventually be showing. It was something the church needed to know. So we told him. And what he said to me is something that reshaped my faith for years. He told me it would be best if I didn’t continue attending confirmation classes. He believed I would be a bad influence on the other kids.

I was fifteen.

I wasn’t asked if I was safe. I wasn’t asked if I was scared. I wasn’t offered guidance or support. I was dismissed. By that point, the message felt familiar. I already knew what it felt like to be the outsider. To be whispered about. To be quietly removed instead of lovingly corrected. But this wasn’t just school anymore.

This was the church.

You’re fifteen, and you don’t have the tools to distinguish God from the people who claim to speak for Him. I didn’t think, That priest is wrong. I thought, God doesn’t want me. And that belief hardened.

What I understand now — what I couldn’t understand then — is that what I experienced was not Christ.

Jesus didn’t avoid people like me. He moved toward them. He didn’t exile women whose lives made others uncomfortable. He defended them.

But at fifteen, all I saw was rejection wearing religious language. My mom’s death planted the first question. The school confirmed the doubt. And the church sealed it.

It would take years to untangle God from the people who misrepresented Him. The journey involved a long road through addiction and loss. To learn that grace isn’t revoked by mistakes, and that Jesus doesn’t withdraw from broken people.

But back then, I was just a girl who needed mercy. And instead, I learned how easy it is for religion to wound when it forgets love.

CLOSING PRAYER

God,

I bring You the questions that began when my mother died. The doubts that grew in silence. The wounds that came from people who spoke Your name without Your heart. Heal the places where judgment distorted who You are. Separate Your voice from the voices that pushed me away. And restore what was fractured before I ever had the words for it. Thank You for remaining faithful — even when my understanding of You was shaped by humans.

Amen.

XOXO, The Healing Wildflower