S2E7: Renovating Your Faith - When Reading the Bible Feels Hard & What Jesus Does With Your Doubt

We're kicking off our Pillars of Life series with a talk about Spiritual Health, specifically when reading the Bible feels heavy, distant, or even anxiety-producing. If that's you, you are not broken — and you are not alone.

In this honest episode, we talk about what to do when spiritual routines that once felt life-giving begin to feel hard, disingenuous, or overwhelming. If you’ve ever felt shame, doubt, or tension around your quiet time, your faith, or the Church, this conversation is for you.

We explore the cyclical nature of faith, why seasons of doubt and questioning are not failures but invitations, and what it looks like to approach your spiritual life with curiosity instead of condemnation. We'll talk about what I call “spiritual maintenance and renovation,” and a deeply personal story about how trauma, church hurt, and nervous-system responses can shape the way we experience Scripture.

Most of all, this episode is a reminder that Jesus is not afraid of your questions — and He meets doubt with compassion, patience, and love.

If your faith feels tired, tender, or in need of repair, you are invited to take a deep breath, step inside, and walk through it together.

Scriptures Explored:

2 Timothy 3:16

Psalm 119:11

Genesis 32

John 20:24–29

Mark 9:24

Matthew 11:2–6

Philippians 2:12

Psalm 4:4

Hebrews 4:12

Isaiah 55:11

Psalm 19:1

Other Sources:

Deconstructing Faith: Why Americans Are Leaving the Church

New York Times, "The Largest and Fastest Religious Shift In America Is Well Underway"

Pew Research Center

Loving Lately:

The Big A## Calendar System

Follow me on Instagram!

Join me on Substack!

Transcript

Samantha Ray 0:13

Hello and welcome to season two of Let's Talk Life. I'm Samantha Ray, your host. This is a podcast about embracing both the beautiful, miraculous parts of life and the gritty, hard parts too. Here we believe that honesty is the key to connection, and connection is a key to healing. We know that the messy journey is the good stuff. We're not about batting a thousand and we don't tie our worth to perfection. We embrace imperfections while standing ever taller and more confidently in our unique experiences, learned lessons, giftings, strengths, and needs. I want this podcast to feel like coming over to a friend's house just as you are for a good beverage and a snack, and we just talk about life. The good, the hard, the spiritual, the practical, and everything in between. So come on in and let's talk life. I am Sam, your host. For those of you who are new around here, I am from central North Carolina. I'm a mother to four. My kids are still pretty little. They are five and younger. And I've been married for 13, almost 14 years. I love Jesus. I love deep thoughts, and I love fun. So just like you would have a conversation with many of your close friends, you might cover the really deep, really heavy parts of your life. Um, and you then you'll jump and you'll talk about a meme that you just saw and something random that you just did. This is kind of how it is over here in this corner of um podcasts. So welcome. I'm so glad that you're here today. I hope that wherever you find yourself today, you are feeling, at least right now, that you're listening to the voice of a friend. And um I hope that through this episode you can kind of um come home to yourself and to your body, come home to your mind and your heart and have a little landing spot in your day and in your week. So uh, like I said, some of my episodes are pretty kind of surface and fun, and other episodes are a little bit deeper, and this episode is a little bit deeper. So let's buckle up. You might have to take this one in segments, that's fine. But it's something that I'm really excited about. So this is the first episode of a series of episodes that I'm doing about all different pillars of our life. So today we're going to be talking about our spiritual health. And what I want to talk about specifically with that is what to do when you're going through a time in your life where your religious acts of faith, your religious practices in your faith expression start to feel really hard or disingenuous, or doubt starts to creep in, and you just need to take a step back, you need to take a breather. Um, and today I specifically want to talk about when reading scripture feels hard because let's be honest, sometimes it just does. I am going to share some reasons why reading scripture might feel hard. I'm going to talk about the difference between like a deconstruction and reconstruction versus what I would call maintenance and renovation of your spiritual life. I'm going to share about where I am in this in my own life right now. And then I'm going to leave us with some encouragements about how to approach scripture when it's feeling particularly hard and how to have a rich, honest, deep relationship with Jesus that's not only reading the Bible. And right off the get-go, I want to say that my biggest encouragement is do not spiral into a crisis or into self-condemnation or self-hatred if you're struggling with routines of your faith like reading the Bible. Instead, I would suggest to get curious, do not hide, invite God in and ask for help. So we know that if you've been in a relationship with God for some time, you may have experienced the type of cyclical nature that our walk with him can look and feel like. There are times of deep devotion, discipline, and stalwart faith. And then there are times when there's more tension, there's doubt, there's outgrowing certain things and knowing that Jesus is there, but having to honestly work through some things, both of those times are good and necessary to long-term growing faith with Jesus. Do you remember a few years ago after the pandemic when there was a pretty widespread church deconstruction going on in America? The term gained a lot of notoriety and it allowed for many frank discussions on the American church as an institution and where the church, the body of Christ, is headed. Data from the Public Religion Research Institute in 2023 showed that 27% of Americans identified as religiously unaffiliated. The number of U.S. adults identifying as Christian continued a long-term decline with projections by the Pew Research Center suggesting they may become less than half of the U.S. population by 2070. Even major news organizations like the New York Times noted the largest and fastest religious shift in America. And stick with me here on this one. I don't think that this is necessarily a bad thing. It is heavy, yes. It has a gravitas and a sober-mindedness to it. I do not take that lightly. But I do think that it leads to authenticity, faith from relationship, and starts to naturally prune away religiosity, which is like works with a hierarchy of importance, using a lot of spiritual language that tends to be absent of compassion. If you grew up in the church like me, I started going to church when I was eight years old. You were likely taught the importance of the Bible and its infallibility as the holy word of God, like it says in 2 Timothy 3.16, all scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness. And you were likely taught how to have a quiet time or a time with Jesus, just kind of like one of the cornerstones of what our faith looks like every day. And what it looks like, you are probably taught this like me. It looks like you read your Bible and you pray every day. Um, and there's also an importance on memorizing scripture and keeping scripture hidden in your heart, like it says in Psalm 119. And I fully agree with all of that. I fully stand by all of that. But what do you do when you start to experience a disconnect or you have doubt or there's some type of disillusionment when it comes to reading the Bible? And I'm gonna be honest with you. I personally have really been going through a hard time with reading the Bible recently. Now, to be clear, I am not talking about a laziness or an apathy that requires self-discipline to kind of climb your way out of. What I'm talking more about is a wrestling of the faith, like Jacob, who wrestled with God all night long by the Jabok River, and he demanded a blessing from this stranger who was God. He didn't know it yet, but he got that blessing. He fought for it. That's from Genesis 32. So Jacob got his blessing in the form of a new name. So he got a renewed identity and a deeper relationship with God. And that is anything but apathetic or lazy. It is contending because you believe in or you so want to believe in something. The last year I've been going through more of a tension-filled time in my faith. And it's not tension with God, but tension in what the religion surrounding Jesus, specifically in America, looks like and what it sounds like, and who I know Jesus to be in my own experience and in my testimony. I have been trying to decipher with a lot of discernment what is actually Jesus and what is actually scripture and what the scripture really means, and what is a lot of culture that has surrounded all of that. And it's been hard work, and I think it's been good work. So obviously, being aware of these terms like deconstruction and reconstruction, I have held that against what I feel like I'm going through right now, and really what I feel like I'm experiencing is more like maintenance and renovation. So if you think of your faith as a house and you've lived in that house for quite some time, there will be very normal and necessary periods of maintenance and maybe even renovation to that house that you love. That's a good thing. What worked for us for a time now needs repair. It needs shoring up and it needs improvement of its structural integrity. We want that house to hold up for the long haul. Maintenance and renovation implies that I love the home of my faith. I still trust the bones. Like any good house that's been lived in and loved well, there is wear and tear. Some of the things that I started out with worked really well then, but have over time caused maybe some blindness to functionalities that could actually be better as I've grown and matured. So right now I feel like it's a time to improve. It's a time for me to step back and try to look at it with fresh eyes and ask, what part of this have I just accepted that could actually be stronger, better, and more functional? It's a time to demo some of the parts of the house that aren't working so well anymore or didn't really need to be there to begin with. And it's a time to bring in more structural and functional integrity. I was talking with my friend Laura about this, and I told her it's it had been the first time that I had really expressed this to anyone in these words. And of course, it's a little nerve-wracking because you don't want to feel like you're weak or failing in something that is obviously so important. And Laura, as she normally does, she received it with such grace. And she came back and said, Sam, isn't it amazing that you're able to do this renovation and maintenance now that you have the resources? And I thought about that, and it was like, wow, that is so true. That this journey that I've been on, going through counseling, receiving a lot of inner healing. I think like leveling up and maturing in how I approach my relationships and um just certain things in my life, these are all resources that it's like, okay, I have the tools in my tool belt to be able to take on this renovation with a lot of care and obviously a lot of trust in God, but also with some skill. Maybe you are in a time of spiritual maintenance and renovation yourself. This time has been a little disorienting for me, to be honest, um, because of how much I was taught about the importance of the Bible as the word of God. I still believe that. But I never want to become blasé about it or just discipline myself into kind of like a sing-song answer that I know is right, but that I have a hard time believing, or that has caused some sort of disconnection inside of myself. It's like my mouth can say the Sunday school answer, but my heart longs for something deeper, a deeper-rooted belief, and this um unbreakable connection with God. Again, I'm trying to decipher what's actually scripture in context, God's word for then and God's word for today, and perhaps some of the cultural ideologies that have snuck in with some of those scriptures and spiritual practices. Now, as a side note, I do believe in self-discipline in doing things even though you don't feel like doing them, like reading the Bible. But I think sometimes in religious spaces, we have so denied how we're feeling that what we think is devotion is actually religion devoid of our heart, but it's actually full of self-judgment and judgment upon others. I'm gonna get into that a little bit later. If I know anything at all about Jesus, it is that he handles doubt with compassion, he provides proof, encouragement, and patience. We see that with Thomas in John 20, who needed to touch Jesus's wounds to believe that he was there, risen from the dead. We see that with the father of the demon-possessed boy in Mark 9, who cried, I believe, help my unbelief. And we see it with John the Baptist in Matthew 11, to whom he sent evidence of his messiahship from prison, demonstrating that Jesus meets people in their questioning rather than condemning them. So instead of pretending to have it all together and instead of going all self-discipline and no softness, curiosity, or inviting God into my doubt, I'm kind of just standing outside of the front door of the house of my faith, and half the roof feels like it's missing, and we're at the point where it looks worse before it gets better, but I'm holding the blueprints in my hand, and Jesus is beside me, and I'm looking at him and I'm asking, Will you help me make this stronger? It makes me think of the verses, work out your faith with fear and trembling, and also to meditate within your heart on your bed and be still. So if you're there too, let's go together. So I'm gonna share a little bit about my personal experience when I uh started feeling like reading the scripture was getting really hard for me. This all started a couple of years ago when I started having a pretty profound experience anytime I tried to read my Bible, and it didn't start really strong. It started a little bit at a time and then it grew. But I would assume the position of my quiet time, Bible, journal, coffee, um, and I already would be bringing in like a little bit of shame and guilt that I hadn't been as consistent or as deep as I'd like to be during these times. And I started what to have what I now know is a panic attack. And I thought, for real, like while I'm reading the Bible, like this is exactly the opposite time of when I should be feeling anxious or like I'm having um like a biological response that feels so uncomfortable. Now, for my charismatic friends, before you think demonic attack, I want you to understand that Jesus in that moment feels so much compassion in this situation. Now that I'm older and a bit more healed up, and I have a few more resources under my belt, I see that those weren't demonic influences to feel ashamed of, but trauma responses to be brave enough to one call out what it was, like say, I'm feeling this way. Number two, investigate with God and qualified other people, and three, get healing from. So I started to piece together at that point some other moments surrounding church and faith that I had been feeling these trauma responses. And sometimes it would happen while I was standing and singing at church. Definitely anytime I was leading worship, I I've had to battle these feelings. Um relationships and and trusting church community and trusting church leaders, I've felt that that trauma response. And then reading scripture. And as I've had some time to ponder over this, I can really see how this makes a lot of sense. And I'm gonna share a little bit about that with you. So as a child until really young adulthood, faith was my lifeline for everything, but church was often a place that I had to mask out of safety because of my family dynamics. I've talked a little bit about that in episodes past. I definitely um want to be as respectful as I can. But there was this dynamic in church growing up that um my family put on, like many families do, you kind of put your best foot forward, you put your best face on when you go to church. But um, my family dynamics were a very heightened version of that. And then what was going on at home was very different than um the reputation that we had at church, and it created a lot of very complicated uh experiences for me. And then as a young adult, I experienced a pretty gut-wrenching severing of one of my closest friendships, which also took place inside of very complicated church dynamics and involved a lot of hurt from my church community at the time. Scripture was used without compassion. There was ghosting and gossip and a lot of spiritual language around all of that that made it seem okay and even needed. And I felt so much judgment. It was really sticky and very confusing, especially in my early 20s. And it remains one of the most hurtful relationship situations that I've ever had to traverse. And even though I've received a ton of healing from that experience, my body held on to the repercussions of it. Being in church became a place where that panic would kind of surface. And I was so confused by that, but my body was keeping the score. And I've had to and continue to receive healing for that. Having to navigate faith being the place I get my deepest sense of identity and reality, and also acknowledging that the faith systems can be hurtful and even manipulative has caused me to step back and investigate what parts of my spiritual practices need re-evaluation and shoring up. Someone who has escaped or denied their emotions due to trauma may need to re-enter how they are feeling before just trudging forward in religious activity. They may need to reconnect their heart with their mind and their spirit and learn to reassociate religious activity with safety again. So that's a little bit about my story. There are plenty of other reasons why reading scripture or having a quiet time might feel hard for you. It could look a little something like my experience. You've had a traumatic experience or a difficult experience in which people used scriptures as a band-aid or to cover up bad behavior. You could be in a season of life where you truly do not have a lot of time and there's not a lot you can do about that. I just want to say that this is all very normal to the human experience. So if you're there with me, I want to give you some encouragement. If reading the Bible feels capital H hard, remember these things. Jesus is a man. Reading the Bible is part of our relationship with this man, but it is not the relationship itself. There's grace when we go through seasons in which reading the Bible feels hard and we step back to realign our hearts with who He is and what His Word says. You can approach Scripture at any time, in any place, to any extent, and it will not return void. Isaiah 55, 11 says, So shall my word be that goes out from my mouth, it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it. So any seed of time that you have to give to reading the word, that's not going to return void. It's not going to be without fruit. It's going to yield a fruit. So give the time that you have. You know, when the widow gave all she had and it was nothing compared to the gifts of others, Jesus said it was the most valuable thing to him. Okay, reading scripture does not have to be tied to performance, tied to your worth, or a place where you experience imposter syndrome. It can be an experience that accepts you when and how you come, but does not leave you as you are. John 6, 37 says, Whoever comes to me, I will never drive away. And in Matthew 11, it says, Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Reading scripture can be an experience that brings comfort, clarity, and conviction, which is different than condemnation. In Psalm 19, it says, The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul. The testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple. And reading scripture can be an experience that does not have a specific time requirement. So in Psalm 1, it says, Blessed is the one whose delight is in the law of the Lord and who meditates on his law day and night. That person is like a tree planted by streams of water. So we see a word meditate, and then we see a time frame that's just day and night. Day and night. That's all through your day when you're doing normal things or when you're sitting down to have a specific time with God. I would encourage you by reminding you that God speaks through many things. He understands our human limitations. He will speak through nature, and we see that stated in scripture that the heavens declare the glory of God and the skies proclaim the work of his hands. He will speak through music, art, relationships, poetry, books, movies, and miracles. God is not mad at you for being bad at reading the Bible. He's not keeping score and tallying how many times a week and how many minutes you're in there. Just start right where you are with what you have right now. Some verses that uh bring a lot of comfort to me with that idea is from Hebrews 4. It says, We do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weakness, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are. Yet he did not sin. Like Jesus gets it. And also that God's word is a lamp and a light. It's a lamp unto our feet, it's a light unto our path, and it's to help us to know where to put our feet and what steps to take. So if it's one verse or one concept or one book of the Bible, just start there. Spending time with God can look like thinking, sitting still, and remembering what God has done in your life. So what we see in scripture is really an emphasis meditating on God's law, but also on his works and also on his words, day and night for wisdom and prosperity. Philippians 4.8 expands this to meditating on pure, noble, and virtuous things. So not always just reading scripture, but meditating on who God is, what his character is like, stuff that's pure and noble and virtuous. And in Psalm 46, it encourages us to be still and just know God, just be with him, highlighting that meditation involves deep contemplation and focus on the divine. So that's just to color in some of what being with God can look like. That's not just memorizing scripture, being in the book of the Bible and going through with your highlighters and reading it, although all that stuff is good. But there are other activities that comprise our being in relationship with God the Father and with Jesus and with the Holy Spirit. So I want to end today's episode by listing out some things you can do to stay rooted in God's word and his truth when reading scripture feels hard. You could listen to worshipful or beautiful music. You could listen to scripture, use an app like the Bible app or dwell, and pick a translation and a voice you like and just listen. Unplug from the noise of the world, subtract extraneous voices, take regular breaks from social media to allow space for God to speak to you and for you to listen. And take a break from input that causes you to feel broken, bad, condemned, or not Christian enough because of what you're going through. Mother Teresa said, We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. So unplug the noise. Pray while you're doing very normal things, taking a more meditative approach rather than an academic one. Pray while you're doing the dishes, while you're folding laundry, while you're driving, or when you're going on a walk. Pray when you're playing with your kids, or after you've had a tough conversation with your spouse. Just keep prayer as almost like a breath in and out through your days and nights. You are not disqualified from prayer if you haven't been reading your Bible enough. Okay, I would also encourage you to journal your prayers. Journal them out. Write out how you're feeling. There's something about that practice of going from your head down through your hand on an actual piece of paper that really helps me organize my thoughts. And then journal listening to God. Actually, journal what you feel like He is saying back to you in your heart or in your mind. That is some of the most powerful. Um, those are some of the most powerful journal entries that I have that I can look back on and see how God has been working in my life. Also get outside and look up regularly. Meander through the woods, allow your spirit some space to breathe and commune with God's spirit. Find scripture that fits the reality of the spiritual season that you're in and meditate on those words. That's one of my favorite things about the Bible is that it is an incredibly rich and an incredibly diverse piece of literature. You will find poetry, you will find uh chronologies, you will find stories almost like you're reading a novel. And it encompasses such a wide stretch of human emotions and the human experience that you will be able to find something that you resonate with in the Bible. And lastly, I would encourage you to talk to somebody that you love and trust about how you're feeling. So, like I said before, I opened up to my friend Laura about how I was feeling, and it was hard to put words around it. And um she said, you know, sometimes things can stay in the darkness when we're too afraid to put words around them. And it feels so much better when we bring those things out into the light, even by telling one person, and it kind of loses some of its um uh scariness, it loses some of its power and fear over us. And um, like I've said in other podcast episodes, there is nothing quite like opening up in that way to somebody and being met with, oh yeah, no, I've experienced something like that. Like you're not weird, you're not crazy, let's go through this together. The reality is there are some times in life where we need to step back and re-evaluate our spiritual practices and remember again why we're doing them. Things like reading scripture and prayer and attending church are such beautiful cornerstones of our faith expression as followers of Jesus. And I encourage you that if you feel anything that you're not so sure about when you're doing those practices, get curious. Step back and invite God in and ask Him to help you renovate those parts of your spiritual life. There's so much hope ahead, friend. I'm so proud of you and I'm so thankful to be in it together with you. Be sure to tune in next week. We are gonna talk about the pillar of our life that is our emotional health, and it's gonna be a fun one. I can't wait. Love you guys. Bye. Alright, alright, alright. It's loving lately time, you guys. I don't know if that was um Andre 3000 or if it was Matthew McConaughey, but there it was. Okay, the first thing that I'm loving is a very large calendar. And you might be thinking to yourself, Sam, you've talked about the skylight calendar, you've talked about your planner, and now you're talking about a big calendar? Yes. I don't know if it's ADHD, O C D C P T S D, but I love a calendar. Don't get on me. Um, and it truly does help me. It truly does help me visualize um my time well, especially as the manager of a household that has six total people in it and a lot of goings-on. And also like it really helps me to accomplish the things that I want to accomplish. So this calendar is called the Big A pound pound calendar. So you can read between the lines there. Um it truly that's how it's spelled. And what I did is that I printed out our last name, Ray, and pasted it on top of that word, and it says the big Ray calendar 2026. But it's a calendar that is a uh dry erase calendar. It's huge, it's I think four feet by three feet. And you put it up on your wall, and it shows you every single month and every single day in the month. Um, and it color codes these stickers where you can basically say, okay, here are all the trips we know we're taking this year and it's all in one color. Here are all the birthdays this year, and it's all in one color. And then you can pencil in things like spring break, summer break. And as things um come up as we get further into the year, it's gonna help me to see what blocks of time I actually do have to say yes to things and to prioritize the stuff that I really care about and be able to easily say no to things that sound good, but it might not be the right year for that. So I will link that. They also have a really good philosophy on how to plan your year. And basically they say um you take one thing called a misogi, and that's like your one big feat that you want to do, whether that is write a book or run a marathon, and then uh Kevin's rule, which is six miniature adventures and four winning habits. And I think that's a very sustainable way to look at goals in a new year. Okay, the second thing that I am loving is farmers markets, and that is nothing new. I have always been a huge fan of farmers' markets. We live in a really um agriculturally rich area in central North Carolina, and we have a huge state farmers market in downtown Raleigh that's open every single day of the year, and I love seeing different things that are available at different times of the year. I love seeing the seasonality of produce. I love um even getting to know uh people who farm their own meat, and there's chicken eggs, and there's duck eggs, and there's cow's milk and goat's milk and products that you can make from that. I think it's just so beautiful. And uh right now we live outside of the city in a small town about 30 minutes from Central Raleigh, and maybe a little bit longer than that, actually, but there's a lot of farms out here, and as we have settled into this community, I've started to find out um what farms are around me and who I can support in a very hyper-local way, and that's exciting to me. So maybe that's an encouragement that you could look and see um who's around you that you could perhaps um buy eggs from or buy meat from or buy produce from, and not all the time. I'm not trying to get every single grocery from a farmer's market, but it really is nice to get things that are local and in-season, and that's a philosophy that I've carried with me for a long time when it comes to how I feed myself and my family. The third thing that I'm loving lately is please don't make fun of me, but it is listening to audiobooks, particularly of the autobiography genre, particularly celebrities. Guys, it's just so much fun. It's so much fun to hear in somebody's own words what their story has been like. And I am just at the tip of the iceberg, but already I've hit some good ones: Tom Felton Beyond the Wand, Britney Spears, the Woman in Me. And it's a lot of fun, almost like listening to a podcast, but in a really long form. And it's something that I can listen to a little bit more passively. It's not like I'm trying to get every single nugget of wisdom from this person's life. It's more that I want to um really hear from people in their own words what their experience is. And as somebody who likes to write, I kind of like to decipher like what is um being said that is actually what that person said, and what maybe their editor or co-writer like used to fluff up some of the story. Okay, well, this was a silly loving lately, but I am curious, what are you loving lately? What is something that is bringing you some joy or some efficiency to your life? Let me know. Hit the button that says send us a text on the podcast description, and that comes straight to me. Okay, we'll see you next time. Bye! Thank you so much for listening to Let's Talk Life. If you would like to read more exclusive content, my everyday writings, or just get to know me a little bit more, you can join me over on Substack. You can find that link in my show notes. You can also join me on Instagram, I'm there pretty regularly. I hope you have a great week. Lean into what's good. Lean into the glimmers and go suck out all the mirror of life. Love you.