Walking the Dark Road
I once belonged to a religion that many now accuse of being high controlling. Whether that judgment is entirely fair or not, I cannot deny that among many of its people there existed a deep sincerity, even if I now believe that sincerity was often guided by fear, control, and misplaced certainty.
Today the organisation is haemorrhaging numbers, and I often find myself thinking about the lost sheep who have wandered from it. Not with condemnation, but with compassion. Because when a person leaves a religion that has shaped most of their life, they do not simply walk away from doctrine. They lose an entire world.
They lose friends, identity, structure, purpose and sometimes family. I say sometimes due to members compromising their own belief system and continuing to associate with their relatives who have left which raises questions about the “believers “sincerity in itself.
In that darkness, many desperately search for something to replace what has been lost. Some run toward internet personalities, bloggers, online movements, or communities of former members. Others swing violently toward scepticism or cynicism. The soul, stripped bare, reaches for certainty again because silence can feel unbearable.
Yet perhaps the dark place is not always an enemy.
C. S. Lewis once wrote of those seasons where God seems absent, hidden, or silent. But sometimes that hiddenness is itself a kind of mercy. A stripping away of noise. A dismantling of false foundations so that faith may finally stand upon Christ alone rather than institutions, systems, or human authority.
If a wounded believer rushes too quickly into another framework, another teacher, another rigid certainty, they may merely exchange one captivity for another. But in the lonely wilderness something deeper can happen. The soul begins, perhaps for the first time, to encounter God without the machinery of religious pressure surrounding it.
The Christian’s identity is not ultimately found in organisations, leaders, or labels. It is found in Christ.
Perhaps one of the most beautiful lines in all of Scripture is found in Epistle to the Colossians 3:3:
“For you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God.”
There is a profound tenderness in those words.
The believer’s true life is hidden:
- hidden from the world’s understanding,
- hidden sometimes even from the believer’s own sight,
- protected in God,
- untouched by worldly status, recognition, or approval.
A Christian may appear weak, overlooked, uncertain, or afflicted. Yet their deepest reality is concealed safely within Christ Himself.
The world measures life by visibility:
success, influence, beauty, possession, power.
But God measures differently. He looks for union with His Son.
And hidden things are often safest with God. Seeds grow hidden beneath the soil before they ever break into light. Roots deepen in darkness before branches can bear fruit. Even Christ Himself passed through the hiddenness of the tomb before resurrection morning came.
Perhaps many who leave controlling religion feel as though they are dying. In a sense, they are. Old certainties collapse. Old identities crumble. But death is not always destruction. Sometimes it is preparation.
The wilderness can become holy ground.
Not every unanswered question needs immediate resolution. Not every silence means abandonment. Faith does not always begin with clarity; sometimes it begins with exhaustion, with grief, with sitting quietly before God having nothing left to defend.
And there, in that strange and painful emptiness, Christ often meets people most gently.
Not as a system.
Not as an organisation.
Not as fear.
But as Himself.
For those wandering in confusion after leaving the religion that once defined them, perhaps this is the hope worth holding onto: your life was never meant to rest securely in human structures. Human systems fail. Religious movements rise and fall. But the soul that is hidden with Christ in God rests in something eternal.
And what is hidden with God is never truly lost.
Scripture quotations are from the New English Translation (NET Bible®), copyright ©1996–2017 by Biblical Studies Press, L.L.C. Used by permission. All rights reserved.