I haven’t been to church since New Year’s Eve, and the year is more than halfway gone. My mother isn’t aware of this, not fully. Just last month, she called asking if I’d be attending the midweek service, and I mumbled something about being too drained from work. She didn’t press further, but I could feel her suspicion hanging in the silence that followed. She thinks I miss church sometimes because I’m always exhausted, and I may or may not have helped shape that narrative. But the truth is, she isn’t wrong. I am exhausted. There’s a dull ache behind my forehead and around my eyes, the kind that comes from living on screens. I spend most of my week frowning at glowing rectangles from nine to six, sometimes again at midnight. Work ends, then begins again. Even my rest is interrupted. I’ve woken at 3 a.m. more than once to the buzz of a Slack notification, torn between ignoring it and checking “just for a second,” only to lie awake for an hour after.

I used to write more—not for work, but for myself. Back then, writing helped me name the things I couldn’t say out loud. These days, I write to meet deadlines. I write because someone else is waiting. I respond. I deliver. But I rarely reflect. I rarely linger.

I wonder if this is what adulthood has become for people like me. A slow slipping away from the things that once grounded us—writing, prayer, community, faith. We mean to return to them. We really do. But Sunday comes and all we want is to sleep. The body is tired. The mind is full. The heart is unsure.

Still, there is a guilt that lingers. Not loud. Just soft enough to be constant. I whisper thank yous before sleep, more from habit than certainty. I pause when I hear familiar worship songs, but I’m not sure what they awaken anymore. I still believe, or I think I do. But belief feels different now. Less like a routine. More like survival.

It’s hard to carry faith when your hands are already full. When your life feels like a long line of unread messages, unfinished lists, and half-held thoughts. It’s hard to show up for church, or prayer, or anything that asks for presence, when you’ve spent the whole week giving yourself away in pieces.

But I want to believe there is still room for people like me. People who are trying. People who are tired. People who hold belief like a fragile thing in their pocket, not always visible but never fully gone.

Maybe faith doesn’t need to be loud. Maybe it doesn’t need to be dressed in performance or certainty. Maybe it can be quiet and soft and barely there. A whisper. A memory. A reaching. Maybe faith is something we return to in seasons. Maybe absence is not abandonment. Maybe silence is still a kind of speaking.

For now, I will sit in the stillness. I will whisper when I can. I will let belief be something I carry gently, even with tired hands. Last week, walking home at dusk, I caught the sound of a hymn drifting from a neighbor’s window, and without thinking, I mouthed the words. It startled me how easily they came back, like a language I hadn’t spoken in years but never truly forgot.

That will have to be enough. And maybe, just maybe, it is.