The Beauty in the Mystery

I grew up as a quiet kid in a Pentecostal world—a world that expected noise. Loud prayers. Loud praise. Loud declarations of faith. The more visible and vocal you were, the more spiritual you seemed to be. At least, that’s how it felt.

But I wasn’t loud. I didn’t shout when I prayed. I didn’t jump up and down during worship. I didn’t have the kind of outward fire that others celebrated. And for a long time, I thought that meant something was wrong with me.

In that environment, spirituality came with a volume knob—and mine was always turned too low.

It took me years to realize that what looked like silence on the outside was actually a deep and attentive listening. That maybe God didn’t need me to be louder—maybe He had made me quiet on purpose.

That realization didn’t come easily. It came through wounds and questions, through loss and longing. And eventually, it came through mystery—the kind of mystery that doesn’t offer easy answers, but instead invites us into something richer. Something more beautiful.

This is a story about finding God in the quiet. About discovering that presence doesn’t always come with fireworks. And about learning, slowly, that beauty is often hidden not in certainty, but in mystery.

The World I Grew Up In

To understand my story, it helps to understand the world I came from.

I grew up in the Pentecostal church—specifically within the Assemblies of God, one of the largest and most influential denominations in the evangelical world. If you've ever been to a worship service where people raised their hands, spoke in tongues, or were "slain in the Spirit," you've likely brushed up against this tradition.

Pentecostalism is passionate. It believes in miracles, healings, prophecy, and the real, present power of the Holy Spirit. In many ways, it taught me to expect that God could move now, in real time, with power and emotion. And that’s not a bad thing. There’s something beautiful about people reaching with all their hearts for divine connection.

Many of the worship songs sung in churches across the world today—especially the ones that crescendo into emotional swells—have their roots in charismatic and Pentecostal churches. These communities know how to create movement. They know how to stir hearts. They’re incredibly effective at gathering people, growing churches, and cultivating shared experience. There's power in that.

But there’s a shadow side, too.

When you’re trained to chase the emotional high of a spiritual experience, it can become hard to distinguish between the Spirit and the spectacle. And when numbers and performance start to matter more than quiet transformation, it’s easy for things to slip into manipulation—especially when power and influence are on the line.

What began as a sincere desire to experience God can slowly morph into a machine that runs on hype and pressure. You’re told to press in, worship harder, believe bigger—and if nothing happens, the implication is that the failure lies with you. You didn’t have enough faith. You didn’t pray the right way. You weren’t spiritual enough.

For a naturally quiet kid like me, it sent a message: “You’re not wired for God the way we are.” And I started to believe it.

When the Miracle Didn’t Come

None of this—none of my questions about performance, silence, and worthiness—became more real than when my daughter Katelyn died.

My wife and I had all the faith in the world. So did our family. So did our church. We prayed. We believed. We cried out for healing. We held onto the promises we’d heard over and over again: God is able. God is willing. Just believe. And we did.

And still, she died.

I didn’t grieve where she went. I’ve never doubted that Katelyn is fully alive in a way that we here on earth can’t begin to imagine. I hold onto that hope with everything I have. What I grieved was something else—something harder to talk about.

I grieved the miracle I didn’t get.

In the Pentecostal world I was raised in, miracles were proof of favor, of closeness to God, of powerful faith. When you don’t get the miracle, it’s easy to feel like you didn’t measure up. Like you weren’t chosen. Like you missed something others somehow knew how to unlock.

That was the quiet ache I carried: Why not me? Why not her? What did I do wrong?

No one said it out loud, but I had absorbed the message through years of charismatic theology: the deeper your faith, the bigger the breakthrough. So when the breakthrough didn’t come, what was left of my faith?

A few years after Katelyn’s death I went on a retreat that upended this idea. I wasn’t expecting much. I was still raw, still hurting, still trying to keep my spiritual life from falling apart entirely. I didn’t know it yet, but I was carrying the weight of a lie—the belief that I had failed, that my quiet faith had somehow disqualified me from God’s best.

What happened on that retreat changed everything.

God in the Quiet

The retreat was different from any I’d been on before.

I was used to the usual format: big emotional worship sets, nightly altar calls, calls to repentance followed by loud declarations of victory. There was always a sense that if something didn’t happen, something had gone wrong. That if you didn’t cry, or shout, or feel the fire, you’d missed it.

But this retreat didn’t come with hype. There was no dramatic music cue, no pressure to perform. Just a small group of us, gathered around gentle teachings about God as a loving parent—not a demanding taskmaster. We sat with the idea that we were already loved, already wanted, already enough—without doing anything to earn it.

There were long, spacious pauses for listening prayer. Time set aside just for silence, contemplation, journaling. It wasn’t flashy. It didn’t stir the same adrenaline as a roaring altar call. But in that stillness, something sacred opened up.

And in that space—quiet, safe, and free from performance—I heard God speak.

He said, "I didn’t abandon you.”

He said, “You don’t need loudness or spectacle to find me.”

He said, “I made you quiet on purpose.”

Something broke open in me. Not a breakdown—more like a breaking free. All the years of pressure to be louder, bolder, more expressive… it all began to fall away. I realized I had never been disqualified. I had simply been listening for God in the wrong frequency.

In the silence of grief, He whispered the most profound secrets.

And for the first time in a long time, I believed Him.

That moment undid so much of what I thought it meant to be “spiritual.” It reframed everything. Maybe God didn’t want me to be someone else. Maybe I wasn’t a spiritual failure. Maybe I was exactly the kind of person who could carry His presence—not in noise, but in stillness.

When Stillness Doesn’t Sell

Coming home from the retreat, I felt like I was carrying treasure.

I had encountered God in a way that didn’t require striving, emotion, or spectacle. I had tasted a kind of love that was quieter, deeper—more like a slow-burning flame than a lightning strike. I came back changed, or at least, awakened.

But almost immediately, I realized something: this kind of encounter doesn’t fit well in the machinery of modern church life.

Church, especially in evangelical and charismatic spaces, often runs like a well-oiled machine. The lights, the music, the sermon series, the metrics—all finely tuned to create engagement, excitement, and growth. And just like our culture at large, the church can become obsessed with results: attendance numbers, salvations, shares, baptisms, tithes.

Stillness doesn’t sell.

You can’t track how many people were moved in silence. You can’t livestream a quiet moment of deep inner healing. You can’t build a platform on mystery. And in that kind of culture, my new revelation didn’t feel particularly welcome.

It’s not that people were unkind. It’s just that they didn’t know what to do with someone who didn’t want to be loud anymore.

I wasn’t interested in hype. I didn’t need the next big worship experience. I wasn’t looking for answers wrapped in neat theological bows. What I had found was something softer: a God who whispers in the silence, who walks with the brokenhearted, who doesn’t need to prove Himself with fireworks.

And the tragedy is, this kind of God—the One who shows up in the stillness—is often overlooked in our rush to make church happen.

It made me wonder: how many people like me are sitting quietly in our congregations, believing there’s something wrong with them because they don’t match the energy of the stage? How many are carrying quiet revelations, gentle faith, aching questions—and wondering if there’s room for them in the house of God?

A New Experience of God

I’m learning to stay with the God I met in the quiet.

Not the God of hype, not the God of results, not the God who shows up only when the lights are low and the bridge of the song swells. But the God who remains. The God who holds. The God who whispers when all the noise has faded.

This God isn’t trying to fix me or teach me how to be louder. He’s not waiting for me to get it together. He’s not asking me to pretend I have answers. He’s simply with me.

And when I slow down long enough to notice, I begin to feel something deep and true settle in: I am worthy just by being. Not by my gifts. Not by my impact. Not by my theology. Not by my expressions of faith or acts of devotion. Just by the sheer fact that I exist.

That’s not something I learned from a sermon. It’s something I felt. It’s what happens when you stop trying to prove yourself and start letting yourself be held.

Maybe this is what faith can be.

Not certainty, but mystery.

Not striving, but stillness.

Not performance, but presence.

And so, if you’ve ever felt too quiet, too different, too “not enough” for the world of church—this is my invitation to you:

Come sit with me in the mystery.

You don’t have to understand everything. You don’t have to fix anything. You don’t even have to know what you believe. You just have to be. Because, at the end of the day, we all belong.