You have already met my faith in this series, though it entered quietly, the way it entered my life.
It was there in the Sundays: church first, then swimming, five children with chlorine eyes. It was there in Sunday school, where a five-year-old heard about satan and decided, with a shovel, to handle the matter personally. It was there in the rhythm of the house that built me: church and family, sacred in both senses.
But here is the thing about a faith you are raised in: for a long time, it is not entirely yours. It is your parents’ faith, and you are enrolled in it, the way you are enrolled in school. You attend. You participate. You absorb.
The question every raised-in-church child eventually faces is this: when nobody is making you go, will you still go? When the faith stops being the family programme, what remains?
For me, what remained was everything, actually. But it took on a different shape.
The inherited version of faith was about attendance and behaviour. Be there on Sunday. Be good. Keep the rules, and you know by now that I was excellent at keeping rules. If faith had only ever been rule-keeping, I would have passed with distinction and felt nothing.
The faith that became mine was something else. It was less about performing for God and more about being accompanied by Him. It showed up in the seasons this series has already covered: the girl far from home in Maryland building a life from scratch, the woman who came home to a country she no longer knew how to live in and nearly turned back. In those seasons, faith was not a Sunday activity. It was the quiet, load-bearing structure underneath the whole house.
Nobody was checking my attendance in America. I went anyway. Nobody assigned me the prayers I prayed in the hard years of the return. I prayed them anyway. That, I think, is when I knew: this was no longer my parents’ faith that I was borrowing. It had become mine.
And true to everything you know about me by now, my faith has never been able to stay in the audience.
You will not be surprised to learn that I am not the person who attends and leaves. I serve. I coordinate. I show up early and think about how things could run better. And over time, that quiet showing-up grew into something I would never have predicted for the girl in the audience: I became an elder in my church. The one who helps carry the thing, not just attend it. Church, it turns out, is one more place where I find my people the way I have always found them, not in the small talk over tea afterwards (you could not design a worse activity for me if you tried), but in the making. Building something together, weekly, with people who are also trying to live this thing out.
The girl who dug for satan in the garden grew up and picked a side properly. She is still, in her own way, on assignment.
The lesson of Day 36 is one I hold gently, because faith is personal and I have no interest in issuing instructions about yours.
But I will say this: the things we inherit, faith, values, traditions, even names, do not become ours by simply being handed over. They become ours the day we would choose them even if no one was watching. I was given church attendance. I chose faith. Those are related, but they are not the same thing.
And if you are somewhere in between the two right now, attending something, unsure if you own it, be patient with yourself. Some inheritances take years to move from your schedule to your spine.
Mine did. It was worth the wait.
Come back tomorrow for Day 35: the pivot, the day I left employment to become a founder.
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