I've been a pastor for nineteen years and I stopped believing somewhere around year fourteen.

I'm going to be precise, because "lost my faith" is a phrase that covers too much and I've hidden inside it.

I don't think there's nobody there. I'm not an atheist — I wish the question were that clean. What happened is that I stopped being able to tell the difference between prayer and thinking, and once you notice that, you can't un-notice it. I pray and I hear myself.

That's all. Fourteen years in, I noticed, and five years later I still notice, every morning.

Meanwhile I run a church of about two hundred and thirty people.

Let me describe the mechanics, because this is the part that'll tell you who I am. I write a sermon every week and they're good — better than when I believed, honestly, because I'm no longer trying to describe something, I'm trying to construct something that holds.

I sit with the dying. I did four funerals last year and I said the words at every one. I baptized a baby in September and held her up and said what you say.

None of that is cynical. This is the thing I can't make anyone understand: I still think the work is real. When I sit with a widow on a Tuesday afternoon, something true is happening in that room whether or not I can locate God in it. I'm just not sure anymore that I'm the kind of thing I'm presented as.

What I can't do is the small talk. Someone says "I'll be praying for you" in the parking lot and I say "thank you, me too," and that is the moment, every time, where I feel like a man wearing another man's coat.

My wife knows. I told her in 2022, in the car, after a long drive. She cried and then she said, "Can you keep doing it?" and I said I didn't know, and we have not had a real conversation about it in three years. She still goes. I think she believes.

I've stopped asking because I'm afraid of the answer in both directions.

The practical trap: I'm fifty-one. This is my only career. The parsonage is church-owned. If I say it out loud, my family loses our house, my wife loses her entire community, and two hundred and thirty people lose something they didn't ask to lose. There's no version where I'm honest and only I pay.

So I keep going, and every year the exit gets narrower, and I'm aware that "I can't afford to be honest" is exactly what a dishonest man would say.

I'd like to hear from clergy who've been here. Did anyone stay and find a way to be at peace with staying? Did anyone leave at my age and survive it? And please — I'm not looking for someone to argue me back into it. That's been tried, by me, for five years.