This morning, I woke before sunrise to attend the second novena to Señor Sto. Niño through a live telecast. The world around me was still quiet, suspended somewhere between darkness and morning, and perhaps that stillness made everything feel more intimate. I was listening to the Mass when the priest began singing When You Believe by Mariah Carey. I knew the song, of course, but somehow it sounded different that morning. Maybe some songs change depending on what we have lived through before hearing them again. As the familiar melody filled the room, something inside me gave way, and the tears came before I could stop them. I was not crying only because the song was beautiful. I was crying because, somewhere between the music and the prayer, I recognised my own story—the years of asking, doubting, wandering, returning and trying to understand what it really means to believe when there is no visible evidence that anything is about to change.

Sometimes faith becomes most real not when God gives us the miracle we asked for, but when we discover that somewhere along the way, He has kept us believing despite everything that once made us want to stop.

There was a season when I questioned almost everything, including God. I have lost count of how many times I prayed for signs, answers and miracles that would somehow make sense of whatever I was going through. I have also lost count of how many of those prayers seemed to disappear into silence. There were moments when faith did not feel like an anchor at all; it felt like something I was desperately trying to hold while wondering whether there was actually anything on the other end. I think this is one of the things we do not always speak about openly enough when we talk about faith. We speak beautifully about believing, trusting and surrendering, but rarely about the frightening space between prayer and answer, when nothing appears to be happening and God seems painfully quiet.

It is easy to describe faith when the prayer has already been answered; the more difficult story is what happens to us while heaven still appears silent.

Back in 2016, I entered one of the darkest periods of my life. I was carrying a sadness I did not know how to name properly, and with it came the feeling that I had somehow failed everyone: my family, myself and the life I had once imagined I would be living. Everything seemed dimmer than it used to be, and eventually that darkness reached my relationship with God. I stopped going to church. It was not simply that I stopped entering a building on Sundays; something inside me closed as well. For almost a year, I turned my back on faith and told myself that perhaps God was not real, prayer did not work and all the things I had once believed were simply stories people told themselves because reality was too difficult to face without them. I was angry, disappointed and exhausted, and I think part of me believed that if God was truly there, He should have done something by then.

What I did not understand was that doubt and faith are not always complete opposites. Sometimes doubt is what happens when a person still cares desperately about the answer. I was questioning God because somewhere underneath the anger, I was still speaking to Him. Even saying, “I don’t believe You are there,” contains a strange contradiction when the words are still directed towards Him. Looking back at that season from where I stood when I first wrote this, I began to understand that perhaps God was not offended by every question I threw towards heaven. Maybe He understood the exhaustion underneath them better than I did. Perhaps faith is not the absence of questions; perhaps it is the inexplicable part of us that continues asking them in God’s direction.

By 2018, something began to change, although not dramatically. There was no thunder from heaven, no spectacular revelation and no single moment when every doubt disappeared. Instead, there were small encounters that seemed ordinary individually but strangely connected when I looked back at them. I met people who spoke to me about surrender, about trusting God and about allowing Him into the parts of life I had been trying desperately to control. They did not know everything I was carrying. They could not have known how close I sometimes felt to giving up. Yet their words seemed to arrive precisely when I needed them, and gradually something I thought had died inside me began responding again. Grace does not always enter our lives through grand doors; sometimes it slips quietly through the smallest openings we have forgotten to close.

One afternoon, I walked into a religious bookstore without really knowing what I was searching for. Perhaps that is one of the strange things about being lost: sometimes the soul begins looking for home before the mind is willing to admit that it misses it. I wandered among the shelves until I saw a Bible that immediately caught my attention. There was nothing complicated about the moment. I simply thought it was beautiful, and I wanted it. More than that, there was something inside me that felt as though I needed it. But it was expensive, and I could not justify buying it, so I eventually put it back and walked away. It seemed like such a small disappointment that I did not think it would become part of a story I would one day tell.

The following day, my mother told me something unusual. Two Bibles had been left outside our store. There was no name attached to them, no note explaining where they had come from and nobody asking for them. When I went to look, one of those Bibles was the same one I had been staring at in the bookstore the day before—the one I had wanted but had left behind. I remember the strangeness of recognising it and trying to understand how something so specific could suddenly appear in front of me. Nobody ever returned to claim the Bibles. To somebody else, perhaps it could have been dismissed as coincidence, and I understand that. Faith does not require every person to interpret an event exactly as we do. But I knew what that moment meant to me. At a time when I had spent so long wondering whether God still saw me, something I had quietly wanted appeared where I could not ignore it. Sometimes a miracle is not something that suspends the laws of nature; sometimes it is an ordinary thing arriving with such extraordinary timing that the heart recognises a message before the mind can explain it.

That Bible became more than an object to me. I began reading again, slowly at first, and then with a hunger I had not expected. The Gospel no longer felt like something I was reading simply because religion told me I should. It became personal. There were passages that seemed to meet questions I had been carrying for years, and there were others I did not understand at all. But perhaps understanding everything was never the requirement. I was beginning a conversation again after a very long silence, and like any relationship that has endured distance, returning required honesty. I could not come back to God pretending I had never been angry with Him. I could only return carrying the anger, disappointment, questions and tiny amount of hope I still had, trusting that perhaps He wanted the truth of me more than a polished version of faith.

Eventually, I found my way back to church and went to confession. I remember sitting there with so much inside me that once I started speaking, I could no longer contain it. I cried deeply and told the priest, “I’m so tired. I surrender everything to God.” Those words were simple, but they carried years inside them. I was tired of fighting everything alone, tired of demanding that life make sense before I allowed myself to trust again and tired of carrying questions as though I had to solve every one of them before I could believe. The priest became emotional too, and then he said something I have never forgotten: “God loves you deeply. And you have been chosen—to witness miracles.” I did not leave that confession suddenly understanding my entire life, but perhaps surrender was never supposed to give me a complete explanation. Sometimes surrender is simply reaching the end of our own strength and discovering that God’s presence was never dependent on our ability to remain strong.

Since then, I have thought often about what we mean when we use the word miracle. We tend to imagine miracles as extraordinary interventions: impossible illnesses reversed, closed doors suddenly opening, circumstances transforming overnight or prayers being answered exactly as requested. Perhaps those things can happen. But I am beginning to think that limiting miracles to spectacular outcomes can make us overlook the quieter ways grace enters our lives. Maybe the stranger who speaks the words you desperately needed is part of a miracle. Maybe finding courage on a morning when you were certain you had none left is one. Maybe returning to prayer after believing you would never pray again is itself something miraculous. Maybe the miracle is not always that God changes the circumstance; sometimes it is that something changes inside us while the circumstance remains.

That distinction matters because not every prayer receives the answer we desperately want. I do not want to build a faith that only makes sense when everything ends well, because life has already shown me that it does not always work that way. There will be prayers followed by beautiful answers, but there will also be prayers followed by waiting, disappointment and silence. There may even be moments when what happens seems completely incompatible with everything we begged God to do. Faith cannot mean pretending those moments do not hurt. Trusting God does not require us to call every painful thing good; sometimes it means believing that His goodness remains even when what has happened is something we would never have chosen.

I used to think unanswered prayers meant God had not heard me. Now I wonder whether I had confused being heard with being given the answer I wanted. There is an important difference between the two. A child may ask for something sincerely and still not understand everything a parent can see beyond that request. Perhaps our relationship with God sometimes contains that same limitation of perspective. We see the immediate moment and the future we desperately want; God sees what remains invisible to us. I cannot pretend to understand why some prayers are answered and others seem not to be, and I do not think faith requires me to manufacture explanations for every disappointment. But I am learning that God’s silence and God’s absence are not necessarily the same thing. Sometimes silence may be preparation, sometimes protection, sometimes redirection, and sometimes it may remain a mystery we are simply asked to carry.

That morning’s Gospel brought me back to the meaning of surrender. I used to hear that word and imagine defeat, as though surrendering to God meant becoming passive and simply allowing life to happen. I understand it differently now. Surrender is doing what is mine to do while admitting that I am not sovereign over every outcome. It is praying while accepting that prayer is not a transaction in which enough faith guarantees the result I requested. It is planning while leaving room for providence, working while knowing that effort cannot control everything, and loving while accepting that love itself does not make us immune to loss.

Surrender is not abandoning hope; it is releasing the belief that hope can survive only if life unfolds according to our instructions.

Perhaps that is why hearing When You Believe during the novena affected me so deeply. It brought together different versions of myself: the girl who believed easily, the woman who became angry with God, the person who walked away, the person who wandered into a bookstore, the person who found a Bible waiting unexpectedly outside a store and the person who eventually returned to confession exhausted enough to say, “I surrender.” None of those versions disappeared completely. They are all part of the same journey. Faith, I am discovering, is not a straight road from certainty to greater certainty. Sometimes it contains detours, arguments, silence, tears and long stretches where we walk without knowing whether we are getting anywhere at all. Maybe mature faith is not never losing sight of God; maybe sometimes it is discovering that even when we lost sight of Him, He had not lost sight of us.

There is something about Señor Sto. Niño that makes this reflection particularly meaningful to me. We approach God through the image of a Child, and perhaps there is something profound in that apparent contradiction: divinity presented not through intimidation but through vulnerability. A child invites us to come closer. A child reminds us of dependence, trust and simplicity—the very things adulthood gradually teaches us to resist because we become accustomed to controlling, planning and understanding. Yet faith repeatedly asks us to return to that posture, not by becoming naïve, but by admitting that there are limits to what we can know and command.

Perhaps childlike faith is not believing without thinking; perhaps it is thinking deeply and still recognising that some mysteries are larger than our understanding.

If you are reading this while struggling with your own faith, I do not want to tell you simply to believe harder. I remember what it feels like when words like that sound almost impossible. I do not want to promise that the thing you are praying for will arrive tomorrow, because I cannot know that, and neither can anyone else. I cannot promise that every painful chapter will eventually make perfect sense. What I can tell you from my own small journey is that doubt does not necessarily mean your relationship with God has ended. Anger does not automatically make you faithless. Exhaustion does not make your prayers less worthy of being heard. Sometimes the most honest prayer we can offer is not eloquent at all. Sometimes it is simply, God, I don’t understand.

And perhaps miracles do not always announce themselves when they arrive. Some enter quietly through a conversation, a verse encountered at exactly the right time, a stranger’s kindness, an unexpected opportunity, a reconciliation, a strength we did not know we possessed or even a Bible left mysteriously outside a store. Others may be recognised only much later, when we look backwards and notice that something had been carrying us through a season we once believed we were surviving entirely alone. Grace is often easier to recognise in retrospect because while we are living through the storm, we are usually too busy trying to stay afloat to notice what has been keeping our head above the water.

I still have questions. I still pray for things I cannot control, and I still have moments when waiting feels heavier than trusting. But perhaps faith was never supposed to eliminate the tension between what I hope for and what God allows. Maybe it is meant to teach me how to live inside that tension without allowing uncertainty to become despair. I am learning that I can ask and surrender at the same time, hope without demanding, grieve without abandoning faith and trust God without pretending I understand Him completely. There is freedom in admitting that I do not need to decipher every chapter before I am allowed to continue reading the story.

So today, after that early morning novena, the tears and the song that somehow found the exact place inside me that needed remembering, I return to one simple truth: God has not forgotten me. He did not forget the version of me who stopped going to church. He did not forget the person standing inside a bookstore longing for something she could not buy. He did not forget me during the silence, the questioning or the long road back. And perhaps somebody reading this needs to hear the same thing—not as a guarantee that tomorrow will bring the answer you have requested, but as an invitation to believe that silence does not erase your existence from God’s sight.

God has not forgotten you. Perhaps the miracle you are waiting for will arrive in the form you have been praying for, or perhaps grace will meet you in a way you could never have anticipated. I cannot promise which, and I think faith becomes more truthful when we stop pretending that we can. What I believe is that our unanswered questions do not frighten God, our wandering does not place us beyond His reach, and our inability to see what He is doing does not mean that nothing is being done. Sometimes the road back to faith begins with certainty, but sometimes it begins with nothing more than a tired person whispering, “I surrender,” and discovering that the God they thought they had abandoned had been patiently waiting beside them all along.

With grace,
Anj ❤️