A quick note: I’m currently writing a book. It’s going to be a spiritual autobiography that will include much of what’s in this post, and much of what’s already been posted on this blog, but will go into much greater depth. The topic of deconstruction alone has inspired entire blogs and books of their own. So with that being said, here’s a glimpse into my journey through deconstruction.

-JD Merrill

I remember the first time I felt the floor cracking beneath my faith.

It wasn’t a slow erosion—it was an earthquake. A single question at first, then another, then a tidal wave of doubt that left me gasping for air. Things that had once felt rock-solid—God’s goodness, the reliability of scripture, the purpose behind it all—suddenly seemed fragile, even hollow.

And the worst part?

I had been taught that doubt was the enemy.

In the faith tradition I grew up in, questioning wasn’t just discouraged—it was dangerous. It meant you were “backsliding,” being “led astray,” giving in to the deception of the world. There was a formula: Believe. Obey. Don’t ask too many questions. If the answers didn’t make sense, the problem was with you, not the system. So when my questions became louder than the sermons, when my prayers felt like they were evaporating into silence, I was left with an unbearable weight of guilt.

Maybe you know the feeling.

Maybe you’ve sat in a church service, surrounded by people singing with a sense of certainty, while something inside you whispered, I don’t know if I believe this anymore. Maybe you’ve tried to ignore the nagging contradictions, hoping that if you just had more faith, the doubts would go away. Maybe you’ve been told that your questions mean that you’re losing your faith. But what if that’s not true? What if deconstruction isn’t falling away—but waking up?

When the House Falls Down

For a long time, I saw faith like a house. A sturdy, well-built structure I had inherited, passed down from generations before me. It had walls made of doctrines, floors of biblical inerrancy, a roof of absolute certainty. It kept me safe. It kept everything in order. But when the cracks started forming, when I realized some of those walls weren’t as solid as I had been told, the whole thing started shaking. And when it finally collapsed, I thought I had lost everything. I felt like I had lost a God who had been my best friend for my entire life.

For me, deconstruction started in the background, on the periphery, like a creeping vine I wasn’t paying too much attention to. When something didn’t make sense to me, I could just set that aside until I had better understanding or a new perspective. I had always been one to challenge tradition and the status quo. I was raised charismatic, after all, so if something didn’t resonate with my spirit, I needed to know why. Why do we do things this way instead of that way? If I understood the “Why” I could either get on board, or find a new avenue.

After leaving the church we met at, my wife and I were part of planting a new church. As the Worship Leader I had the opportunity to decide what kind of songs and what kind of theology we were going to incorporate through music. So I started really paying attention to the lyrics of every song, to see if they resonated with what we believed, and what this new church was going to believe.

Bring On The Questions

It wasn’t the big doctrines that wavered at first—it was what I would consider secondary beliefs:

Was Noah’s Ark historical?

Was Jonah really swallowed by a great fish and survived?

Was Jesus actually born of a virgin?

Was the Earth created in 6 business days?

Were these stories meant to be taken literally, or was there something deeper I was missing?

As time went on, however, the questions grew bolder. The cracks spread. Pretty much everything except the person of Jesus stopped making sense to me—or at least, it didn’t make sense in the way I had always understood it.

And all the while, I was still leading worship. Still married to a Christian woman that I met at church. Still getting my paycheck from the church. It wasn’t just my faith that was unraveling—it was my entire identity. My career. My way of life. Worship leading wasn’t just my job; it was who I was. It was the thing I had always wanted to do, the dream I had carried since I was a kid.

And then, one night, while studying the Bible and examining the lyrics to a song, the last brick in the foundation of my faith crumbled.

And I still had to lead worship practice.

I had to pray out loud to lead a worship team that I was building, who were looking to me to lead them, knowing I no longer believed in a God who was out there somewhere listening. I had to lift my hands in the songs I had led a thousand times before, knowing they no longer meant the same thing to me. I had to stand in a room full of people who had no idea that, inside, I felt like I was disappearing.

The Dark Night of the Soul

This journey through doubt and uncertainty is not a new phenomenon. In the 16th century, St. John of the Cross wrote about the Dark Night of the Soul, describing it as a period of spiritual desolation, disorientation, and doubt that precedes a deeper communion with the Divine. He wrote:

“To come to the knowledge you have not, You must go by a way in which you know not.” —St. John of the Cross

Contemporary theologian Peter Rollins echoes this sentiment, suggesting that embracing doubt is integral to authentic faith. He says it this way:

“The point is only that the believer should not repress the shadow of doubt that hangs over all belief… Instead, the believer ought to acknowledge and even celebrate this dark night of the soul, understanding that this is not a threatening darkness which conceals an enemy but rather is the intimate darkness within which we embrace our faith.” —Peter Rollins

Deconstruction as an Invitation

For so many of us, deconstruction starts with grief. The loss of certainty, the unraveling of everything we thought we knew. But what if it’s not just an ending?

What if it’s an invitation?

To see the Divine—not in rigid doctrines, but in the uncontainable vastness of reality itself. To find meaning—not in having all the answers, but in the beauty of the mystery. To encounter “God”—not in the places we were told they must be, but in the places we never expected.

For me, the breaking of my faith wasn’t the end. It was the beginning of something deeper, something freer. I stopped looking for God in the confines of a religious system and started experiencing the sacred in the very fabric of existence. In music that shook me to my core. In the stillness of the morning. In the unfiltered, unforced moments of love and connection that needed no theological justification to be real. And here’s the paradox: It wasn’t until I let go of certainty that I actually found something worth holding onto.

Losing to Find

Jesus once said, “Whoever loses their life for my sake will find it.” I think that can apply to our faith, too. Maybe the faith we were handed—the kind that demands certainty, that requires obedience without question, that fears doubt like a disease—was never the point. For me it was just scaffolding, a temporary structure meant to get us to a place where we could finally encounter something real. The loss of that faith doesn’t have to be just a tragedy. Maybe it’s the first breath of freedom.

What Next?

If you’re in that space—the in-between, the aftermath, the uncertainty—I want to tell you something I wish someone had told me:

You are not broken.

You are not wrong.

You are not failing.

You are not alone.

But… keep an open mind.

I didn’t mean to stop believing in God. It wasn’t a choice I made, a rebellion I embraced, or a philosophy I eagerly adopted. It was more like a slow, unrelenting erosion—like the tide pulling the sand from beneath my feet until I realized there was nothing left to stand on.

At first, there was grief. Crying in my car outside of a church because I couldn’t’t take communion. That was for believers, and for the first time I was on the outside of that. But over a few weeks that led to a sense of relief. The weight of trying to reconcile an ancient faith with the brutal realities of the modern world had been exhausting. Without God, I was free. Free from the cognitive dissonance, the theological gymnastics, the need to justify suffering with some twisted divine purpose. Free to love and accept everyone, no matter their religion, sexual orientation, voting record, or any of the other ways we divide ourselves.

There was something clean about it, something sharp. The world made sense in a way it never had before—random, indifferent, ruled by chaos and natural laws rather than magical celestial orders. And for a while, that was enough. I leaned into thinkers like Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris, reveling in their unflinching logic. I found comfort in the idea that morality was an evolutionary construct, not a divine mandate. The universe didn’t care, and maybe that was okay.

But atheism, like the faith I had left, held its own brand of certainty and exclusivity. I saw it in online debates, in the way ex-believers scoffed at spirituality, dismissing anything beyond the material as childish wishful thinking. And if I was honest with myself, I had adopted that same posture. I had traded one dogma for another, one absolute for a different kind. I became cynical. There was no room for mystery, no space for wonder. The vastness of existence had been reduced to atoms and neurons, cause and effect. And yet, something in me still ached.

It was in that emptiness that I found something unexpected. Or rather, something found me. Because even when I had deconstructed everything, even when I had tried to empty myself of God, there was still… something.

Not the old man in the sky. Not the tribal deity of my childhood. But a presence, a current, a whisper beneath all things. It wasn’t a return to certainty—it was a surrender to unknowing. And in that surrender, I began to heal. I embraced experience, and found hope in adopting a mystical lens.

Deconstruction is not the end. It is the beginning. The bravest thing you can do is walk into the dark, not knowing if the ground will hold, trusting that even in the void, you are not alone. Because once you have a real question, there is no way out, only a way through.

As St. John of the Cross once wrote, “If a man wishes to be sure of the road he treads on, he must close his eyes and walk in the dark.”

So for today, don’t be afraid of doubts.  Don’t be afraid of questions. Your community may not understand, and there may be very real risks in being authentic and striving for truth. But if you stay curious, brave the uncertainty, and refuse to accept hollow answers, you will find truth. What is true will remain true regardless of your questioning. And any “God” worth believing in, will be there on the other side in a way that’s more true than you ever thought possible. And when new questions or doubts arise, you will have the tools and experience needed to navigate the mystery with intellectual integrity and joy.

And hopefully, like me, you’ll find that in the ancient wisdom traditions lies a truth that is so deep, so true, and so real that you have to use metaphor, allegory, and poetic language. Because once you pin down the butterfly to examine its wings, it loses its ability to fly.

Stay curious, my friends. The truth runs in the deep streams.