When people hear that I struggle with religion, they sometimes assume I never truly believed, that I became angry with God, or that I simply wanted an excuse to walk away.
None of those explanations describes what happened.
I grew up loving someone who had been permanently disabled by polio since early childhood. He was also a devoted Christian who spent much of his life believing that God would eventually heal him.
He prayed. Other people prayed for him. He fasted. He attended healing services and visited people who claimed to have spiritual gifts. He did the things religious people told him to do, and he continued believing that one day he would walk.
As a child, I believed it too.
I didn’t approach prayer with doubt or cynicism. I had the uncomplicated faith of a child. I prayed, cried, and fully expected God to heal someone I loved. I knew how much that healing meant to him, and I wanted it for him with everything in me.
But the healing never came.
He lived with the effects of polio for the rest of his life and eventually died without receiving the miracle he had been promised.
What makes that memory even more painful is knowing that some faith healers suggested the problem was that he did not have enough faith.
That explanation may protect the healer and the belief, but it does so by placing the blame on the suffering person. If someone is healed, prayer receives the credit. If someone is not healed, the sick person is told that something was deficient in their faith.
The claim can never lose.
If healing happens, it proves that prayer works. If it does not happen, the person did not believe strongly enough. If it happens years later, it occurred in God’s timing. If the person dies, the promised healing is redefined as healing in heaven.
In every outcome, the teaching survives. The person who suffers is the one left carrying the burden.
Even if someone believes my loved one’s faith was insufficient, what about mine? As a child, I had no hidden skepticism. I was not analyzing theology or questioning whether miracles were scientifically possible. I believed completely. I prayed out of love and with the absolute confidence children can have.
Did my faith not count? Did I use the wrong words? Was I supposed to pray longer or cry harder? Was there some spiritual requirement neither of us understood?
I no longer accept those questions because they place responsibility where it does not belong.
Polio caused permanent physical damage. It was not caused by a lack of faith, and it did not remain because someone failed a spiritual test. A disabled person is not a failed miracle. A child whose prayer is unanswered has not prayed incorrectly.
This history is why stories about miraculous healing affect me differently than they affect many people around me.
When someone says that a person had a mass, received prayer, and discovered the next day that the mass was gone, part of me genuinely wants the story to be true. I would love to know that such healing is possible.
But another part of me immediately thinks about all the people who prayed just as sincerely and were not healed. I think about the person I loved, who devoted his life to Christianity. I think about my childhood prayers. I wonder why one person would receive immediate intervention while another person spent a lifetime waiting.
Asking that question is not an attack on people who believe. It is not mockery, rebellion, or bitterness for its own sake. It is the result of taking their claims seriously and comparing them with what I have witnessed.
I remain open to the possibility that there is a God or some intelligence behind existence. What I struggle to believe is that God regularly intervenes in individual medical conditions in response to prayer. I sometimes imagine God, if God exists, operating at a “50,000-foot level”—as the source of existence or the foundation of reality, but not necessarily deciding which individual illness will disappear and which will remain.
I know that this does not match the personal God in whom many people I love believe. I am not asking them to surrender their faith or stop praying. Prayer may bring them comfort, hope, strength, and a sense of connection. I respect that.
I am asking them to understand that my position did not come from never believing.
It came from believing deeply.
It came from watching someone faithful seek healing throughout his life. It came from being a child who prayed with complete confidence and then had to make sense of the silence. It came from seeing how promises of healing can become accusations when the promised miracle does not happen.
If I agree to let someone pray for me, I am not being dishonest. I can receive that prayer as an expression of love. I can remain open to whatever happens. But I cannot accept the claim that the outcome will depend on whether I believe strongly enough.
If my condition improves, I will be grateful. I will also be honest that improvement following prayer does not automatically prove that prayer caused it. If it does not improve, I will not accept responsibility for supposedly preventing a miracle through doubt.
Faith may offer comfort to many people. For others, especially those with experiences like mine, claims about healing can reopen an old wound.
I do not need my religious family to agree with every conclusion I have reached. I only want them to understand that my doubt is not a rejection of them.
It is not evidence that I never cared.
It is not evidence that I never believed.
It is what remains after a child believed completely, prayed desperately for someone he loved, and eventually had to live with the answer he received.