Help My Unbelief

Have you ever had something happen that rocked you to your core? Something that had you questioning not just what you believed but who you were?

I can point to the exact moment it happened to me. I was sitting in my dorm room at Tennessee Temple University, working through Genesis for an Old Testament survey class, when I got to the story of Jonah and the great fish. And I remember thinking — how can I believe this?

In that moment everything I had been taught, everything I thought I believed, felt like it was going out the window. For the first time in my life I was on my own. And I was faced with a question I could not avoid any longer — was this faith actually mine, or had it simply been handed to me by someone else?

In that dorm room I remembered a story from Mark 9. A father brought his son to Jesus — the boy had been tormented by a demon since childhood, thrown into fire, thrown into water. The disciples had already tried and failed. The father was desperate.

He said to Jesus: "If you can do anything, have compassion on us and help us."

Jesus answered: "All things are possible for one who believes."

And the father, overwhelmed, cried out something that has stayed with me ever since:

I believe; help my unbelief. Mark 9:24

That was me. Sitting alone in that room with a Bible open to a story I was not sure I could accept, I prayed the same prayer. Jesus, I do believe. Help my unbelief. And that was the moment my faith became my own. Not inherited. Not assumed. Mine — because I had surrendered it, doubts and all, back to Him.

That moment was not just about belief. It was about identity. Because the crisis of faith forced me to ask a deeper question — who am I, really, when everything familiar is stripped away?

We live in a world that tells us to build ourselves up, protect ourselves, pursue ourselves. The gospel tells us something that cuts directly against that instinct:

If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. Matthew 16:24–25

The invitation of Jesus is not self-improvement. It is self-surrender. And the paradox is that the only way to truly find your identity is to stop clutching it — to lose it entirely into Him.

Jesus makes the stakes plain in John 15:

I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing. John 15:5

We have all seen what happens to a branch when it falls from a tree. It does not struggle. It does not search for water. It simply dies. But a branch that remains connected flourishes — it grows, it bears fruit, it fulfills the very thing it was made for.

Faith is only as good as the object in which you place it. If your identity is rooted in your job, your marriage, your children, your achievements — what happens when those things shift or break or disappear? Every one of them can be taken. And when they go, if that is where you were anchored, you go with them.

If our identity is not fully submerged into Christ, we will spend our lives confused and searching — begging to know who we are and what we are here for.

It was in the discomfort of that dorm room — alone, uncertain, faith suddenly feeling fragile — that I found Jesus waiting. Not to condemn the doubt. Not to demand certainty before He would help. Just waiting. Ready.

That is often how it works. It is in the moments we are separated from our comfort, stripped of the familiar, that we discover whether what we believe is real. And more often than not, we find Him there — precisely in the place where everything else ran out.

Abide in Christ. Let Him guide your steps. I am not saying you will not struggle again — you will. But when you do, the struggle will not undo you. Because you will know not just who you are, but whose you are. And that changes everything.