Ep 031: Kendall Mariah: The Questions I Was Never Supposed to Ask, Part 1

What happens when faith no longer feels simple?

In this conversation, Kendall Mariah opens up about the tension of deeply loving God while struggling with parts of Christian culture that often leave little room for honesty, grief, mental health struggles, or difficult questions.

Kendall shares how infertility, anxiety, internal conflict, and years of wrestling quietly with her own thoughts pushed her into asking deeper questions about faith, identity, and what it really means to follow Jesus.

Together, we talk about church hurt, political division within Christianity, deconstruction, and why so many people silently feel disconnected while still desperately wanting to hold onto their faith.

Kendall also shares why she believes questions are not proof of weak faith, but often evidence that someone still deeply cares.

This conversation is thoughtful, vulnerable, and deeply validating for anyone who has ever wrestled with belief, disappointment, or the fear of asking difficult questions out loud.

Topics discussed:
• Faith and deconstruction
• Church hurt and Christian culture
• Mental health and infertility
• Asking difficult questions
• Rebuilding faith
• Politics and Christianity
• Doubt and belief coexisting

Connect with Kendall:
Instagram: @kendallmariah
Website: kendallmariah.com

Every life has a story worth telling. Follow Unspoken Lives Podcast on your favorite podcast app and join the conversation. Visit unspokenlivespodcast.com and follow @unspokenlivespodcast on Instagram. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:05

Welcome to Unspoken Lives, the podcast that uncoves the powerful, untold stories of everyday people. The real stories you don't always hear, but ones that deserve to be told. I'm your host, Kelsey Billingsley. In each episode, we'll explore journeys of growth, resilience, and transformation. Conversations with guests who have faced challenges, embraced change, and discovered new purpose along the way. Through their stories, you'll find inspiration, hope, and a reminder that every life has a story worth telling. Let's dive into this next unspoken life. Kendall Mariah is an author, speaker, and someone who has built a platform around being honest about the parts of life and faith that don't always feel clear or easy. Her debut book, This Little Fire of Mine, is rooted in real moments from her own life, moments that shaped her beliefs, her identity, and the way she shows up today. Kindle, I'm so thankful that you're here. I think it's going to be a really meaningful conversation. So thank you for joining.

SPEAKER_00 1:13

Thank you so much, Kelsey. This is, I mean, the perfect podcast to be sharing about exactly what's in my book and my life, because I believe so much in stories, not just my own, but hearing other people. So I it's an honor that you'd give me a space to do that today.

SPEAKER_01 1:28

Thank you for saying that. Well, I'd love to just get started with getting to know you. Do you mind introducing yourself in your own words and you know what life looks like for you today? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:39

So I am a true millennial. I am 33 years old. And I I think that's important to know. I know some people are a little weird about tiny how old they are, but for a lot of the context of my faith in the book, that kind of sets a framework. You know, when you grew up in purity culture and some of the things we might talk about, it's good to know. We have similar things in that. But I am married to a high school sweetheart. My husband is named Justin. We've been together since I was 15 years old. So 18 years this month. And we have one daughter. Thank you. We have one daughter. Um, her name is Daddy Ann, and we were blessed by way of adoption um to become her parents. So we're a military family. My husband's currently gone right now, and that of course sets a big framework for our life and our lifestyle too, because it is different than the norm. So through all those things, I have been somebody who has been deep in my faith since I was a little girl. I've never questioned whether or not God exists because God has been in parent to me since I was tiny. But I've questioned everything else. The framework of faith, the Christianity, the why do Christians not always act like Christ. Um, I'm the person that is going to ask the question everybody's thinking, even when I'm not supposed to, and I've done that since I was a child. I'm neurodivergent. I've recently been open and honest about even being autistic. I've always been open about having ADHD, but it has become more apparent that I need to be completely transparent and let people know that autism is a part of that as well. But that has been such a vulnerable part of my story. It's been a little bit harder to share because I knew what that feedback would be like once you kind of talk about those things out loud. But just as you know, you mentioned off recording before we got on that, you know, we all carry masks. And as someone who's neurodivergent, that is a very big part of my story. And even trying to shield myself from the questions and the pain that would come from having to explain my neurodivergence to my autism to other people is part of that mass. It's that safety part of it. So all of those factors, being a military spouse and an adoptive mom, being raised in the South, and being neurodivergent are parts and puzzle pieces to who I am and really make a lot of the stories that I talk about in the book.

SPEAKER_01 4:01

Is that, I mean, I guess I'm asking, what prompted you to write the book? You have all of these things you talked about, but what made you decide, you know, I think I'm gonna write about a book about this.

SPEAKER_00 4:12

Well, 10 years ago, this year, I was going through a real difficult season. And as someone who felt the call to ministry as a kid, I didn't know what that looked like. Um, I didn't see myself being a music minister, I didn't see myself being a children's minister, I didn't understand how long-term missions might work. I just never really got a clear picture of what ministry would look like. But I I felt that call. But in 2016, after going through a health crisis and some mental health issues, I noticed that there was this really big gap in Christian culture where we don't talk about those things. You know, we put on those masks, we highly everything's okay. We say the things like, well, you just need to pray more or plead more or trust more, you know, and don't use those titles or don't say that you're depressed, or that's not your label. It there was just all this Christian knees going on, if they even talked about it at all, or surrounding mental health and infertility and things that just different women were going through, eating disorders, and I saw the gap and I was pained to not be able to find the resources to help myself. And it became very transparent then that well, if you can't find the resource, then it's your job to create it. And so I started this online blog called Unapologetic Ministry, where we unapologetically talk about the topics and the things that people don't want to in Christian culture that sometimes seem taboo. Now, in the 10 years since then, I started more people are talking about these things. But when I definitely 10 years ago, no, I mean I warned my mom about it. I was like, listen, this is what I'm gonna be talking about. This is, I mean, I wrote a blog post, Kelsey, that said I would rather talk about the last time I had an orgasm than why I can't get pregnant. Like that was one of the lines. Because in Christian culture, everybody would ask you as soon as you got married, when are you gonna have babies? When are you gonna have babies? But it would it wasn't appropriate to talk about sex, but yet you were also not comfortable with talking about infertility, but it was okay with you to pry into my life to know why I wasn't pregnant yet. And that was really difficult for me. And it made me angry and frustrated. And I was like, I cannot be the only person in the world feeling this way. Right. And so between 2016 and 2020, I really just started writing and documenting, you know, how I was feeling. And I started an online Bible study, and I led online Bible studies weekly for over 200 sessions for people that feel this friction of, I want to have faith. I desire a relationship with God, I want to know more, but church feels prickly, church feels like it's full of hypocrisy, or I've been burned by the church, been hurt the church. I doesn't feel safe enough to go there yet. And so I wanted to be that kind of bridge between places. And I started noticing that that pattern, that friction-y feeling wasn't just synonymous with your feeling directly with church, but even with some of the other issues in faith, and just started making note of it. And then for me in the last few years, social media had blown up, which gave me a platform and the ability to land a book deal. And so when I came to me and said, Are do you are you interested in writing a book? I was like, Am I interested? I've already got one outlined, you know, because God had been putting it on my heart for a decade. And so a lot of people think, and I'm sure this works for some people, that you get approached by a book deal, then you come up with the idea, and then you write the book. And for me it was the other way. You know, this theme, this idea, this prompting has been a decade in the making. And I wanted to write the book for people that have been hurt by Christian culture, but are still trying to live within it, that want to deconstruct, but don't have the permission to ask questions because they feel like that's a slippery slope. And just really have that tool and that friend, that like sisterly person to say, you're not crazy. You're not alone. Like there's so many of us out there that are also asking the big questions, pushing back and saying, This is not okay, but what do I do with those feelings? So that's where it all came from. And it wasn't just that I was like, oh, I could write a book on this and started writing that. You know, it was a long time in the making.

SPEAKER_01 8:32

Yeah, no, that makes sense. So you're writing about this. Are you at the same time still going through, you know, you kind of talk about that friction of faith and life? Like, are you still going through that as you're, you know, finishing up this book and talking about it? Oh, Kelsey, Kelsey girl. Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_00 8:50

I mean, a lot of what I talk about is is the contradiction of seasons of life that you can be in. I opened the book with talking about my husband deploying just weeks after we adopted our daughter. Here I was experiencing the blessing of becoming a new mom and my husband deploying when she's five weeks old. Um my book is coming out right now, is debuting. My husband left last week. That has been the theme for me, ironically, in this deployment season. The day my manuscript was due last year, my husband was set to deploy a day later. You know, like it is the contrast of having and the friction of the highest moments for me, professionally or personally, also while having to navigate really hard and difficult seasons. I mean, have you ever had to explain war to a five-year-old while also getting opportunities like this to talk to you about something that I've worked for so long on and caring both at the same time. But through all this, I've had conversations with other people that, you know, they're experiencing pregnancy after years of infertility while they lose somebody in their life, you know, or you're finally getting the acceptance letter into the school or the program that you wanted while at the same time getting a diagnosis. Like it is life, the constant friction. And naturally to say, God, where are you in this? And trying to say, okay, friction can do two things. It's going to create a fire. So are we going to allow that fire to burn it down and to make your life blow up or your house burn down? Or we can use fire as something to light the way, to bring warmth, to bring light to darkness, to be that beacon of hope. You know, so so much of the book is me trying to help you see how I've had to frame and reframe and work through difficult seasons and conversations, though they are hard. And I don't want to deny any of that and acknowledge the absolute suck of some of it and terrible parts of it. But how on the other end, it did make my faith stronger and bolder and more concrete because it wasn't just built on, I believe something because I was told to believe it. Right. And I think that's the reckoning a lot of us have when we're going through difficult seasons, is our faith doesn't feel strong. It doesn't feel tangible. It feels like something we've just inherited and we're told to lean on it. But what does that even mean?

SPEAKER_01 11:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 11:19

And we realize that our faith is actually just the sum of beliefs that we were told to believe, not actual truths that we are holding on to spiritually. And so the book, it goes through talking about doubts and questions and and how learned that that was okay and finding peace of that very own in life and in faith, and all the way through how do we reconcile where we are right now with our faith and the context of culture and our country, and and how do we figure out what do we actually believe? How do we sift through all those things and be left stronger and not feel flailing at the end? Yeah. And I think that's where a lot of people get is they start asking questions or they start feeling the friction and it starts to burn everything down or it feels like you're blowing your life up. And so I'm someone that believes in the power of deconstruction because I believe that makes room for reconstruction. Like my house right here is a hundred-year-old house. If you've ever remodeled a hundred-year-old house, you're not doing it because you don't love the house. You're doing it because you want it to be stronger on the other end. Just because I've I want that house to live another hundred years. So I'm having to pick some things apart. I'm having to take some walls down, I'm having to redo some wiring because I want it to last longer. And that's really the angle I want people to see deconstruction as is not this thing to tear it apart to throw it away, but to make room for something more solid and more strong that can last for a long time. That's beautiful.

SPEAKER_01 12:48

What would you say to someone if they're in that, I don't know what you call it, that season of deconstruction, if they're in the thick of it right now and just, you know, in their head and almost wanting to give up, what would you say to them?

SPEAKER_00 13:01

One, you're in good company because I think all of the greatest theologians and thinkers of the world are people that ask hard questions, right? The theologians that I've enjoyed following and learned so much from, you know, so much of what they do has started with a hard question. I mean, think about the most brilliant minds in the world, you know, scientists, historians, they often start with a hypothesis, a question that they're trying to work through. So quit questions have gotten a bad rap in modern Western Christianity. But that has not been true historically. That has not been true biblically. How many questions did Jesus ask? Jesus asked far more questions of his disciples in the way that he taught than he ever gave answers. And that is so hopeful to my inquisitive mind. So, one, you're in great company. You're in great company of theologians of brilliant minds. You're a deep thinker, you're a critical thinker. But it also encourages me that your faith means enough to you to ask the question. What I know to relate it to, because I believe a big part of faith is relational with God, is I wouldn't ask questions about a relationship, whether it's a friendship or a spouse or partner, if I didn't care. You know, when when they do something that upsets me or offends me or just feels weird or like I don't really understand their logic behind that, I ask them questions because I care. I want to know, I want to better understand. It's when I don't ask questions that I don't care. I'm already checked out. So I think we also have to reconsider that questions aren't proof that you don't believe or proof that you don't care. It actually shows that you do, you're invested because you're not checked out. It's important to you. It's something that you're trying to work through. In the book, I use the example. The best religion class I took in college, I went to a Christian school, had nothing to do with Christianity, it had nothing to do with religion at all. It was an art class because it taught me how to better critically think. I triple majored, and one of my majors was art, and you learn how to critique. That's as an art artist. Yeah. And I was a cocky 19-year-old, as many 19-year-olds are in college, and I had memorized the whole paragraph about the piece of work that I was supposed to, like, know everything I'm supposed to do about this piece of art. And I, you know, rattled it off back to my teacher when I and I'm in class the next day when he calls on me. And I kind of looked at him like, ta-da, I did it. And he just like, okay, well, what else? And I'm like, what do you know what else? I literally just rattled this off to you, verbatim, you know, 19 cocky-old stuff. Yeah. And he's like, Yeah, well, you've got the right information, but you're not asking the right questions. Uh my brain probably physically exploited, you know, like a quirking moment where you see like all the question marks and all that happening. And you're like, well, what do you mean? And he's like, well, you've got all the information, but you need to be asking things about the subject matter. What why do you think they use that color scheme? Why do you think they position the subjects in that order? Who is that person in the background? And why would they paint someone in the background of a portrait of a family? Why is there a mirror? And all of a sudden, I was like, oh my gosh, you're so right. Because in him explaining that, I realized that as an art student and someone who's cared a lot about art my whole life, as the child of an artist, I was like, you're right. Those are the interesting things that draw us into art. That's why we care about art. But in order to appreciate the art, we have to learn to not just understand the practical, logical information, but to think like the artist and ask questions about every choice that is being made, or what story is it trying to tell, or how can it be perceived by me in the lens that I bring versus you. You might get something else out of it. And I started seeing faith and the narratives that we read about in the Bible through that same critical lens, that there's so much more to it than this 2D rendering that we see at surface level or that we're told. But even in the Bible, it tells us that as we grow in faith, our faith should grow and change. We shouldn't think like a child anymore. We shouldn't just see things at face value. We shouldn't think that things are just going to be black and white, you know, that this is just a group of rules or laws or directions that there's going to be some nuance. There is going to be some difficult conversations that have got to be had. But we can't, you know, make our babies jump into the deep. Yeah, we don't ask children to go into these hard philosophical or theological conversations or a new Christian to go there because they're not ready yet. But we we go through processes, you know, like sanctification and transformation that allows us to understand in a different way. So I think we just have got to reframe the fact that questions are good.

SPEAKER_02 17:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:50

Having a wondering thought is not bad. I think that is such a new Western, a lot of times American view of faith that questions are bad. We need to listen to what we're told. You know, I'm like, even when you say it out loud, you're like, yeah, that doesn't feel a lot like Jesus. Like he probably that's actually very different. I mean, we're recording this now during Holy Week. And you gotta think about how counter-culture Jesus was, even countercultural to the culture of religion at the time. Like he wasn't just countercultural to the you know secular culture, he was countercultural to, I mean, Monday of Holy Week, he goes in the temple and flips the table. He doesn't go in there and flip the table because he didn't have a relationship, he had a relationship with the people at the table with that synagogue. So he was able to do that. He he was coming to push back to the church, he was coming to push back against the status quo. Like, so for us to think that the one of the points of Christianity is to get in line and follow suit because someone primar primarily a white man told us to is so contrary to the example we see of Christ in the Bible. And as Christians, we're called to not be a part of a religion, we're called to be a Christ follower. And so that's why I say look at the character of Jesus, look at the patterns that he displayed and how he treated people, how he showed up, the way that he inconvenienced himself, the way that he intervened, the way that he questioned. Follow that pattern. And then once you've really studied him, then go back and you know read the Old Testament and see how those patterns even show up there. But I think a lot of times we go in the opposite direction. We come in with law and order, and we want to get that figured out first, and then we want to cast Jesus into that when Jesus Himself said, I've come to do away with all that. And so I think it's just kind of rewiring our own mind and telling ourselves we're not in trouble for asking questions. Yeah, you're not going to be reprimanded. You know, there's not someone that's going to take away a star from your Bible study chart for asking a question and not believing in that certain specific way. I actually believe there would not be a point in the Holy Spirit if we didn't need help from discernment from something else, if we truly had all the information in the Bible. If we had absolutely everything, there would be no need for it. There would be no need for that. So trust in that, trust in the work of God in your own life and that He wouldn't be leading you into those questions if there wasn't something fruitful on the other side of it.

SPEAKER_01 20:31

Yeah. Yeah, I like that. Okay, going back to 19-year-old you, when you have this aha moment that questions are good and looking at things in with a different lens, when you started to go down that path, did you get any pushback? Whether it's, you know, family or church or at your school, did you start feeling any of that tension?

SPEAKER_00 20:52

Yes, and just like micro conversations. Okay. Because thankfully I was raised in a church that I was allowed to ask questions. Like that was part of the culture. Like critical thinking was part of the culture of our church. I grew up in a Baptist church, but it wasn't Southern Baptist, and it's kind of important to defend J because I always saw women in leadership. I always saw people asking questions, going deep into conversation. And I also saw where sometimes people landed on different sides of conversation, and that was okay. Yeah. You know, that people didn't always walk away with the same take from reading the same scripture, and that was that was an okay standpoint. So interestingly enough, I didn't start receiving the massive pushback until the last five, six years as I grew up platform online where I came in contact with more and more Christians who hadn't had that same experience in church, um, where they saw questions as an attack or a scenario where you needed to be defensive. And so in my personal life, there was people. That as I was asking questions and I was landing in different places and they were didn't always agree with me or didn't land just quite right, but they didn't question the work of the Holy Spirit in my life. They were okay with me and them not being on the same pitch because I'm not questioning my salvation, I'm not questioning your salvation, I'm not questioning Jesus as the person to follow. It's all these secondary and tertiary topics that are not going to keep people in or out of heaven. Yeah. Which I think is something that we we need to be very open about. That there's so many things that Christians are dying on as hills that are not going to keep people in or out of heaven. But we are losing relationship and we are losing very valuable ground because we're wanting to die on hills that Jesus never even talked about.

SPEAKER_01 22:43

But like Well also, I feel like you saying it was in the last few years, do you feel like a big part of that is social media? Like I feel like having a coffee conversation with someone is way different than someone maybe commenting on an opinion you have.

SPEAKER_00 22:58

I yeah, I think there's a combination of things. You know, social media at the same time, the social political climate has changed a lot in the last decade, in part because of social media. And because I grew up in my church knowing that there were people on both parties, like there was people that served at our state level government on both sides of the aisles in our church that both served as deacons at the same time.

SPEAKER_02 23:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 23:23

So it was never a foreign concept to me that there was people on both sides of the aisles that were both Christian. Yeah. But suddenly in the last like five, six years, people have tried to monopolize one party or the other as the Christian party. That has been very strange to me as someone that's like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Like because there's nothing new under the sun. But we're allowing these things to be dividing factors within the church body that again are secondary, tertiary topics that are not about salvation. They are not about you know Jesus as our Lord. And so I think that's been the hardest for me is that people from my experience in my comment section, it's see me asking questions as me poking holes in them and they personally get defended. When I'm asking questions of myself and my own experience, and that's how I frame it in the book is and that's how I blew up online, is because I realized as a white woman who grew up in the South, who's now raising a daughter of a different skin color, my experience of the world is vastly different than people who don't look like me or talk like me or sound like me. And there is some level of privilege or just difference that just frame the way that I navigate the world. And I have to acknowledge that to understand how we could come to different conclusions when we read the Bible or when we go into things like politics. But because of the divisive nature, I think that it also has just emboldened people to think in a very tribalistic way that if you don't think just like me, you're against me. And I'm trying to say, no, no, no, no. We're actually all on the same team. Like we're all trying to get people to heaven or get people to Jesus, but uh, there's room for us to ask questions.

SPEAKER_02 25:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 25:16

And what I've learned thankfully, and what's been so refreshing and encouraging as I get to have conversations like this with you, and people are reading my book is they're like, oh gosh, like thank you. Like this is a breath of fresh air. I've been feeling some of these conversations and just not sure how to articulate it because I'm scared people are gonna attack me or come after me. And and then you're like living on the inside of your head because you're scared to articulate it. I see it as I'm just willing to go first. Yeah. Like I'm gonna lay it all out there. And there's conversations that I I literally had having this book that I hadn't told my husband about, about my my mother didn't know about. I told you about about uh a sexual assault situation that happened that nobody else knew about until the book came out and I warned them. But it was imperative in the arc of talking about purity culture and shame that this story be put in there and how it tied into even infertility about me just never having autonomy over my body ever. Even when I'm doing all the right things, the Bible told me all that I'm doing all the right things, bad things continually happen and feeling that friction. And so I'm sure you've seen that just through this vehicle of a podcast that when you give people space to tell their story, it brings down walls, it breaks down barriers that people say, Wow, I would have had no idea that you went through that or you experienced that, or absolutely there was not a space to have that conversation. Social media was not the place for me to have that conversation about sexual assault. But for whatever reason, being able to write it in my own words and take the time to write it in a way that felt delicate and personal and in the framework of the whole chapter, and knowing that you were going to be reading it one-on-one felt like having that conversation over coffee or you coming to my house, you know, and having it in a more personal way.

SPEAKER_01 27:05

So you said your mom and your husband didn't know about that until they read it. Um what was that conversation like after they read it? Thank you for listening to part one of this conversation. Next week we'll continue the story in part two. Here's a preview of what's to come.

SPEAKER_00 27:25

And when you've experienced something like that, you're already gaslighting yourself. Well, was I wearing the wrong thing? Was that wasn't me? Did I do it? I didn't want to have to rehash it and relive it with every person and to validate it to every person. I, you know, even said people, people are gonna invalidate it and say that wasn't really a sexual assault. When I know that it was, and by definition, but it could have been worse. At least you weren't right.

SPEAKER_01 27:51

That's it for this episode of Unspoken Lives. If today's story moved you, inspired you, or made you reflect on your own journey, hit that subscribe button so you don't miss the next powerful conversation. I'm always on the lookout for new guests. If you know someone with a story that deserves to be shared, I'd love to hear from you. Check the show notes for contact details and make sure to follow along on social media at Unspoken Lives Podcast. Until next time, keep listening, keep sharing, and remember, every life has a story worth telling.