Why adults turn toward God, what really drives it, and what honest faith looks like
Why do people embark on an adult faith journey? How does that differ from that of a child?" My own road, like yours, fellow beleaguered believer, has been complicated. Full of mis-starts, missteps and more instances of self-sabotage than I would care to admit. But what if that's not a bug—what if it's the point?"
I used to travel with my former pastor to conferences that would have us driving across half the USA. He was a nonstop kind of guy. Stop to fuel, feed, pee and get back on the road. The destination was the point. The journey? Just miles that are in the way.
Now the way we travel, we leave our spot n Connecticut for New Mexico in Mid October with the intention of getting to New Mexico when we get there. For us? The journey is the point. I think faith is like that. Some folks are all set on making into to heaven someday. And life is just that thing that is in the way until they get there. What if maybe this isn't the best approach? What if the journey is the point?
But first, why? Why pour your life energy into something generally viewed as irrational to begin with? Regardless of the type of traveller, why do people take this journey to something they don't truly understand at the point of embarkation to the vaguest of all destinations?. Read on.
When Everything You Trusted Stops Working
Embarking on a faith journey as an adult can be driven by an number of situations and human conditions ranging from doubt to desperation.
- The executive realizes the third therapy approach still doesn't touch the grief.
- The parent watches anger pattern repeat across generations despite all the books and intentions.
- The academic discovers their explanatory framework can't explain their own despair.
- The minister begins to doubt everything they ever believed.
The adult faith journey begins—not in certainty or comfort, but in the honest recognition that the tools we've relied on have limits.
Faith rarely arrives in adulthood the way it does in childhood. It doesn't come packaged in certainty, tradition, and inherited language. It comes late, worn, and a little embarrassed and unsure. It comes after life has landed a few good blows. After time and pain have had their way with us.
By the time someone turns toward faith as an adult, they have already tried other explanations. They have trusted systems that failed or betrayed. They have believed stories about progress, success, love, or self-mastery that seemed to be what other people are good at. And then something cracked. Sometimes slowly. Sometimes all at once. But there is a breaking.
This is not a weakness. It is a reckoning of the self.
Faith that begins in adulthood is rarely about comfort alone. It is about coherence. Viktor Frankl, who survived Auschwitz by finding meaning in suffering, observed that humans can endure almost any *how* if they have a sufficient *why*.1
The adult faith journey often begins when our previous answers to "why" collapse under the weight of lived experience.
When we try and figure out if life still makes sense when the easy answers no longer hold.
The Pressure of Meaning
One of the most common drivers of an adult faith journey is simple and uncomfortable: life stops letting us postpone the big questions.
Mortality becomes personal. Regret becomes real. Time feels finite instead of theoretical. The question is no longer *What could my life be?* but *What has my life been?*
At that point, many discover that meaning cannot be improvised indefinitely. It has to come from somewhere deeper than preference or productivity. The book of Ecclesiastes captures this moment with brutal honesty: "I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind" (Ecclesiastes 1:14, NLT). The Teacher isn't being pessimistic—he's naming the exhaustion of trying to generate significance from achievements alone.
Faith enters not as fantasy but as claim: that life is not random, that suffering is not the final word, that the story might be bigger than what we can see. As theologian N.T. Wright observes, Christianity offers not escape from reality but a deeper way of engaging it—the promise that God is at work "to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven" (Colossians 1:20, NLT).2
When Pain Outruns the Tools
Another common path is suffering that outpaces the available tools.
Therapy helps, but it does not explain everything. Self-care helps, but it does not redeem loss. Distraction helps, until it doesn't. Many adults do not turn toward God until the strategies that once worked stop working.
Yes, God Can Be Used as a Crutch
It needs to be said plainly, right here.
Some people use faith to avoid responsibility. Some use it to quiet anxiety without confronting its source. Some use it to replace thinking with slogans. Some use it to shield themselves from grief they refuse to face.
That is not honest faith. That is spiritual anesthesia.
Critics often call any turn toward God "using faith as a crutch." But a crutch only offends people who refuse to admit the injury exists.
The real question is not whether the journey begins in weakness or need. The question is whether it remains there, or whether it becomes something else—a framework not for escaping pain but for processing it honestly, for finding meaning that doesn't deny reality but helps us bear it.
Pain does not automatically produce faith. But it often strips away the illusion that we are self-sufficient. And once that illusion collapses, the door to something beyond the self opens. What matters is whether we walk through that door toward genuine transformation or use it as an escape hatch from responsibility.
Misuse does not invalidate the thing itself. It only reveals how easily humans distort what they touch.
Moral Exhaustion
Adulthood brings another quiet pressure: moral fatigue.
Most people begin life believing they will be better than those who came before them. Kinder. Wiser. More just. Then they discover how easily fear, self-interest, and resentment take over.
They hurt people they love. They compromise. They rationalize. The problem is no longer abstract evil "out there." It is the self, uncomfortably close.
This realization often marks a turning point in the adult faith journey—not toward moral superiority, but toward moral honesty. Paul's confession in Romans resonates here: "I don't really understand myself, for I want to do what is right, but I don't do it. Instead, I do what I hate" (Romans 7:15, NLT).
This isn't spiritual defeat—it's the beginning of realism.
Moral honesty means recognizing the gap between who we want to be and who we actually are when threatened, tired, or afraid. It means admitting that willpower and good intentions are not enough. Psychologist Carl Jung understood this when he wrote that we don't become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.3
Faith offers not denial of our moral complexity, but a framework for transformation that begins with confession rather than self-congratulation.
This is a far cry from performative righteousness. It is closer to what the ancients called *metanoia*—a complete reorientation of the mind and heart. This is the word most often translated as "repentance" in the scriptures.
The Collapse of the Adult Freedom Archetype
Many adults arrive at faith after discovering that total freedom is not as liberating as promised.
Choice without formation leads to fragmentation. When we can be anything, we often become nothing in particular—a collection of preferences rather than a coherent self. Sociologist Robert Bellah documented this phenomenon in *Habits of the Heart*, observing how American individualism, untethered from community and tradition, often produces not freedom but profound loneliness.4
Desire without guidance becomes tyranny. The self that follows every impulse eventually discovers it is being driven rather than driving, enslaved to appetites it cannot satisfy.
Autonomy without meaning becomes exhaustion. The burden of creating significance from scratch, of justifying our own existence through achievement or experience alone, eventually crushes under its own weight.
Faith begins to look less like control and more like orientation. Not a cage, but a compass. Not the end of freedom, but freedom pointed toward something worth choosing. Jesus himself reframed freedom this way: "If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free" (John 8:31-32, NLT). Freedom is not the absence of constraint—it's alignment with reality.
This is especially true for those who have lived long enough to see how easily identity becomes armor, ideology becomes refuge, and certainty becomes a substitute for truth.
What Honest Faith Looks Like
Honest faith, especially in the adult faith journey, is quieter than advertised and far more demanding.
- It does not erase doubt. It learns to live with it.
- It does not protect the ego. It exposes it.
- It does not promise certainty. It invites trust anyway.
Honest faith separates God from political power, institutional preservation, and identity performance. It allows mystery without panic. It accepts responsibility instead of escaping it.
It is not about being right. It is about being transformed.
This transformation doesn't happen through spiritual anesthesia—numbing ourselves to reality with religious platitudes.
It happens through faith that begins in weakness but refuses to stay there. Faith that starts with "I cannot do this alone" and moves toward "I am learning to live differently."
The Apostle Paul understood this paradox: "Each time he said, 'My grace is all you need. My power works best in weakness.' So now I am glad to boast about my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ can work through me" (2 Corinthians 12:9, NLT). Strength through acknowledged weakness isn't contradiction—it's the pattern of the kingdom.
This kind of faith does not make life easier. It makes life truer. It asks more of the believer, not less. It demands we face what we'd rather avoid, forgive what feels unforgivable, and love when self-protection seems wiser.
Faith as a Chosen Posture
The adult faith journey is rarely inherited. It is often chosen under pressure.
Sometimes it begins as a lifeline. Sometimes as a question. Sometimes as a quiet refusal to accept that this fractured world is all there is.
What matters is not how faith begins, but whether it deepens. Whether it leads to humility rather than hardness. Love rather than contempt. Courage rather than control. Service rather than superiority.
The movement from weakness to transformation looks like this: recognizing our need, accepting help beyond ourselves, allowing that help to reshape how we see and how we act, and then extending that same grace to others who are struggling.
This is not the faith of easy answers or tribal belonging. This is faith that costs something. Faith that changes the believer more than it changes their circumstances. Faith that makes us smaller in our own eyes and larger in our capacity to love.
A Different Kind of Faith
That is the kind of faith Faith Over Factions exists to explore. Not faith as faction. Not faith as armor. But faith as a way of standing honestly in the world we actually inhabit.
Not certain.
Not superior.
But awake.
The adult faith journey is not about finding a system that finally works to make you comfortable. It is about finding a truth that works on you, that refuses to let you stay as you are, that continually calls you toward something more honest, more humble, and more human.
It is faith that begins where we are—in weakness, confusion, need, or despair—but does not leave us there. It is faith that transforms crutches into walking, dependence into discipleship, and broken people into bearers of grace.
This is not faith as escape. This is faith as awakening.
Footnotes
- Viktor E. Frankl, *Man's Search for Meaning* (Boston: Beacon Press, 1959), 75-76.
- N.T. Wright, *Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church* (New York: HarperOne, 2008), 193.
- Carl Jung, *Psychology and Alchemy*, Collected Works Vol. 12 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), 99.
- Robert N. Bellah et al., *Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life* (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 142-163.
