I grew up in an African home where faith was not just something we practiced on
Sundays but the rhythm of our everyday lives. My family went to church every week,
and often more than that. The church was where we dressed our best, where my
mother sang in the choir, where my father served as an elder, and where we children
were expected to sit upright, listen, and learn. Sundays were sacred—there was food,
laughter, fellowship, and always the Bible at the center of it all. I can still hear the
sound of drums and voices rising together in worship, the way the air seemed thick
with reverence and hope.
As a child, I believed everything I heard without question. The stories from scripture
felt larger than life, almost magical. Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah—they were
not just names in a book but real people whose choices were meant to guide ours.
Faith felt simple then. God was good, church was home, and the Bible was truth.
That simplicity did not survive adulthood. Life has a way of pressing questions into
you even when you are reluctant to ask them. For me, it began gradually. At first it
was just the quiet recognition that prayers sometimes went unanswered. Then it
became more personal: my father’s illness, the strength of the man I had always
leaned on slowly slipping away. Losing my apartment. Losing my livelihood. Each
event carried its own weight, but together they broke the fragile glass I had built
around faith. I had done everything I thought I was supposed to do—prayed, obeyed,
hoped. Still, I was left with silence.
During that time, I stumbled upon a video on social media where someone questioned
the Bible with a kind of boldness I had never dared to. They spoke about
contradictions and silences, about how the stories we were taught as children can feel
very different when measured against the disappointments of adulthood. At first, I
dismissed it as cynicism. But in the quiet of my own struggles, their words began to
echo. What if faith was not as seamless as I had been taught? What if the stories I
loved as a child were more complicated than the lessons drawn from them?
I found myself returning to scripture, not to be comforted but to investigate. I began
with Genesis, the foundation of it all, but I read differently this time. I was not
searching for the reassurance of a neat story; I was searching for honesty, even if it
meant confronting contradictions. And what I discovered was not the collapse of faith
but the complexity of it.
The complexity lay not only in the text itself but in what it revealed about life.
Genesis is a book of beginnings, but even beginnings are rarely tidy. They are messy,
layered, and sometimes inconsistent. In one sense, this troubled me: if the foundation
of faith is complicated, what does that mean for everything that follows? But in
another sense, it felt profoundly real. Human life itself is not seamless. We hold
together multiple voices, perspectives, and even contradictions in our own stories.
Why should scripture be any different?
This realization did not answer all my questions. It did not make my father well or
restore what I had lost. But it gave me a way to read—and perhaps to live—that felt
more honest. I no longer felt the need to defend faith as if it were flawless. Instead, I
began to see value in the wrestling itself.
It reminded me of something philosophy teaches: clarity does not mean simplicity. To
make something clear is not to strip away its depth but to express it in a way that
others can grasp and engage with. In that sense, the contradictions and silences of
scripture are not obstacles to clarity but opportunities for it. They are invitations to
reframe, to interpret, to translate complexity into understanding.
That is what I have tried to do here. This piece is only a segment of a much longer
exploration, but it illustrates my approach. I begin with lived experience, because that
is where questions take root. I bring those questions into conversation with a complex
text, not to flatten it but to make it speak in ways that are relatable. And I write with
the aim of making difficult ideas—faith, doubt, justice, truth; not only understandable
but meaningful to others.
For me, clarity is not about offering perfect answers. It is about making space for
honest wrestling and giving language to things people often feel but struggle to say. If
I can do that; if I can take something complex and make it accessible without
diminishing its weight then I consider the writing worthwhile.