The Wall in Spiritual Formation: When Faith Falls Apart
Most of us eventually reach a place where the faith that once felt stable no longer holds together in quite the same way.
A diagnosis overturns our future. A marriage ends. A trusted leader betrays us. A theological question refuses to go away. A child suffers. A career collapses. A prayer we expected God to answer seems to disappear into silence. The beliefs, routines, and explanations that once provided security suddenly feel inadequate.
This experience is sometimes called the Wall. It can feel like faith is falling apart. Yet it may also become an invitation into a deeper, more honest relationship with God, others, and ourselves.
What Is the Wall?
The Wall is not simply a difficult event.
A job loss, illness, divorce, betrayal, move, or season of doubt may lead us to the Wall, but the defining feature is what the experience does to our inner lives. What once felt solid no longer feels solid.
Promises we relied upon seem uncertain. Bible verses that once comforted us may feel distant or hollow. Questions we believed were settled return with greater urgency.
We begin asking:
- Is God actually good?
- Is He present?
- Can I trust Him?
- Who am I now?
- What was all my service and sacrifice for?
- Why did my community fail me?
- What do I truly believe?
These are not merely intellectual questions. They emerge from the bedrock of the heart.
The Wall exposes the distance between what we say we believe and what we actually experience.
My Experience of the Wall
I began following Jesus when I was six years old. For most of my life, I would have described my relationship with Him as steady and consistent. I possessed a firm belief system, a relatively stable family life, and a progressing career.
Then came 2020.
Through a series of remarkable events, Jessica and I lost our careers, our community, many friendships, and much of our sense of security. Dreams and plans disappeared. We became isolated, confused, and increasingly uncertain about the future. Even my health began to fail.
Those circumstances alone did not constitute the Wall. The Wall was what happened inside me.
My inner life began to disintegrate. Depression, loneliness, confusion, apathy, worthlessness, anger, and unanswered questions became regular companions.
I had spent decades teaching, leading, serving, and affirming what I believed about God. Yet suffering began uncovering ideas and desires beneath those beliefs that I had never fully explored.
That is often what the Wall does. It reveals what was already present beneath the surface.
Why Crisis Exposes the Heart
Most of us do not naturally explore the deepest parts of our hearts.
We remain busy. We perform our roles. We attend church, work, raise families, serve, and move through familiar routines. As long as life remains relatively stable, we can avoid difficult questions about God, ourselves, our relationships, and our stories.
Crisis interrupts that stability. A missionary who has spent years serving God may witness so much suffering that she begins questioning whether God is good or whether He exists at all.
A pastor may experience betrayal and discover that his identity was more deeply rooted in ministry success than he realized.
A parent may lose a child and find that familiar explanations about God no longer reach the depth of the pain.
In such moments, the surface gives way.
We encounter ideas that may differ from our stated beliefs:
- I believe God loves me, but I experience Him as absent.
- I believe God is good, but I do not trust Him.
- I believe my value comes from Him, but I feel worthless without my role.
- I believe the church is a family, but I feel abandoned by it.
- I believe suffering can form us, but I desperately want it to stop.
The Wall does not necessarily create these tensions. It exposes them.
Common Responses to the Wall
When we reach the Wall, we have several possible responses.
We retreat
We may return to earlier, safer patterns. We suppress our questions, repeat familiar answers, and attempt to reconstruct the life we had before the crisis. We may feel guilty for doubting and fear that our church, family, or friends will reject us if we reveal what is happening.
The old structure may no longer hold, but we continue pretending that it does.
We numb ourselves
Our culture offers nearly unlimited ways to avoid the inner life. We can numb ourselves through work, church activity, entertainment, social media, food, alcohol, unhealthy relationships, anxiety, compulsive planning, or endless rumination.
Numbing does not resolve the Wall. It simply delays the encounter.
We go through the motions
Some people remain physically present in Christian communities while their hearts slowly withdraw. They attend worship, participate in groups, and say the expected things, yet they feel disconnected, listless, and increasingly indifferent.
From the outside, little appears to have changed. Internally, faith is fading.
We leave
Some become “dones.” They may still love Jesus but feel unable to return to the institutions or communities that failed them. Others leave Christianity entirely. Still others enter a process commonly called deconstruction, reconsidering doctrines, institutions, biblical interpretations, and inherited assumptions.
These responses are understandable. Pain naturally searches for safety.
But changing beliefs, communities, or labels does not automatically address what is happening beneath the surface.
We press into the Wall
There is another possibility. We can invite God into our doubts, anger, disappointment, confusion, and suffering. Rather than suppressing our questions or allowing them to govern us unconsciously, we begin exploring them with courageous curiosity.
We ask what the crisis has revealed about our hearts.
Pressing Through Does Not Mean Trying Harder
“Pressing through the Wall” can sound like a command to work harder, pray harder, believe harder, or force ourselves back into certainty. That is not what I mean. Pressing through is not spiritual willpower.
It is honest surrender.
It means acknowledging that we may not know what we thought we knew. It means allowing ourselves to grieve. It means exploring our stories, wounds, ideas, desires, and disappointments without assuming that honest questions threaten God.
The journey may include statements such as:
- God, I am angry with You.
- I no longer understand what You are doing.
- I am not sure that I trust You.
- I feel abandoned.
- I do not know who I am without this role.
- I am afraid that my community will reject me.
- I believe You are good, but my heart does not experience You that way.
God is not surprised by these statements. He already knows what is present in us. The invitation is not to inform Him but to become honest with Him.
Doubt Is Not the Opposite of Faith
Many Christian environments treat doubt as spiritual failure.
Questions are viewed as threats. Anger toward God is considered disrespectful. Revisiting inherited beliefs can be labeled rebellion. Yet Scripture is filled with people who wrestled openly with God. Job demanded answers. The psalmists expressed abandonment, rage, confusion, and despair. Jonah argued with God. Jeremiah accused Him of deception.
Biblical faith is not the absence of struggle. It is the willingness to bring the struggle into relationship with God.
Doubt becomes dangerous when it is hidden, shamed, or allowed to operate without examination. When expressed honestly within a secure relationship, it can become an invitation into deeper trust.
The Wall and Christian Deconstruction
The Wall frequently leads people into deconstruction. That is not necessarily a bad thing.
Some beliefs, interpretations, institutional loyalties, and images of God should be examined. Harmful ideas often hide beneath language that sounds orthodox and faithful.
But deconstruction can remain on the surface if it focuses only on exchanging one intellectual framework for another.
The deepest question is not simply:
Which doctrines or institutions do I now reject?
It is also:
What has this crisis uncovered about my heart?
Perhaps my idea of God was rooted in the expectation that He would protect me from suffering. Perhaps I confused loyalty to Jesus with loyalty to an institution. Honest Christian deconstruction can become an invitation to self-knowledge—not merely the dismantling of beliefs, but the uncovering of the hidden ideas and desires that formed those beliefs in the first place.
Do Not Face the Wall Alone
The Wall is deeply personal, but it is not meant to be faced in isolation.
We need safe people who can remain present without rushing us toward an answer.
A trustworthy companion does not shame our questions, offer simplistic explanations, defend an institution reflexively, or insist that everything happens for a reason. They listen. They help us grieve. They allow the same story to be told repeatedly. They remind us that confusion does not erase our value and that God is not threatened by our honesty.
Depending on the crisis, a counselor, therapist, spiritual director, pastor, or mature friend may become an important companion. The title matters less than the person’s capacity for patience, wisdom, humility, and safety.
The goal is not to find someone who will tell us exactly what to believe. It is to find people who will help us remain present to God and to what is happening within us.
What May Be Waiting Beyond the Wall
The Wall rarely provides quick answers.
Some losses remain losses. Some questions remain unresolved. Some institutions do not change. Some relationships are not restored.
The promise is not that pressing through will return us to the life we had before. The invitation is into a different kind of faith. A faith in which our stated beliefs and lived ideas slowly become more integrated.
The Wall may feel like the death of faith. In some ways, it may be the death of a version of faith that could not carry us any further.
But death is not always the end of the story.
When we invite God into our doubts, disappointments, disagreements, and suffering, we may discover that He has been waiting for us beneath the surface.
Not with condemnation. With patience.
Perhaps even with the gentle relief of someone saying:
“It’s about time. I’ve been waiting for you.”
Brian Fisher is the founder of Soil & Roots and the author of Soil & Roots: Cultivating Deep Discipleship. He writes and speaks about spiritual formation, the inner life, and how people become more like Jesus from the inside out.
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