Chapter 6 – Doubt Was My Baptism

Keywords: doubt, water, silence, drowning, whisper, womb, salt, promise

1. They told me faith looked like certainty.

But mine looked more like a storm.

A shiver.

A girl with her head underwater

asking if anyone was still listening.

2. My doubt wasn’t rebellion.

It was a cry.

A thirst.

An instinct older than language.

3. I didn’t walk into belief —

I sank into it.

Drowning was the door God used to reach me.

4. They handed me scriptures.

I handed them questions.

They handed me rules.

I handed them my heart, still bleeding.

5. I thought I had failed.

But really, I was just being baptized the way no one talks about —

in the salt of my own confusion.

6. There was no choir.

No oil.

Just the silence between my prayers

echoing like a canyon inside my ribs.

7. I asked, “Are You there?”

The silence asked back,

“Are You ready?”

8. I went deeper.

Into the dark part of faith —

where nothing glows,

but everything grows.

9. It was wet there.

Unknowable.

Like the inside of a womb,

where everything is becoming

but nothing is yet named.

10. The water didn’t kill me.

It stripped me.

Of assumptions.

Of Sunday-school answers.

Of all the words that weren’t mine.

11. Doubt isn’t death.

It’s a breaking of the shell.

So the voice inside you

can learn how to breathe.

12. Some nights, I couldn’t pray.

So I wept.

So I screamed.

So I stared at the ceiling and whispered “prove it.”

13. And I thought Heaven was ignoring me.

But it was just holding me still

so I wouldn’t miss the whisper.

14. And oh, that whisper.

That crack in the silence.

That breath against the bones.

It didn’t give me answers.

It gave me presence.

15. I didn’t learn how to believe.

I learned how to wait.

I learned how to stay wet

and let the flood write its gospel in my lungs.

16. The Spirit never shamed me.

She just circled.

Hovered.

Watched me wrestle in the river.

17. I thought the flood would kill me.

But it was just washing off the lies.

The performance.

The pretending.

18. When I rose from the water,

I had no doctrine —

only a knowing.

19. And the knowing was this:

Faith doesn’t silence your doubt.

It swims with it

and holds your hand under the waves.

20. I don’t have a perfect belief system.

But I have a covenant —

written in the flood.

And carved in the cracks of my soul.

21. That covenant is not built on certainty.

It’s built on a Promise:

“I will never leave you underwater without Me.”

22. In the name of the whisper that answered my scream,

the water that baptized my doubt,

and the womb that birthed my belief,

Amen.