Every life begins inside a story, a place that tells us what matters and why. That’s what I tried to capture in A Place to Stand, the way we all start by inheriting meaning before we ever learn to make it our own. For me, that inherited meaning came through the goodness of my parents’ faith.
In the world of my childhood, certainty was the weather. Some days it thundered, loud, bright, and sure of itself, but at home it was softer, more like a clear morning after the rain. My parents made the stormy skies look calm. Their faith was steady and kind, and through them the whole system seemed gentle. They were good people, and I wanted to be good in the way they were.
At church, certainty could sound sharp and dividing. People drew lines around who belonged, who measured up, and who didn’t. But in my parents, I saw something worth wanting, a way of life that promised coherence and purpose. So I tried to believe as they believed. I thought that if I could just understand the truth the way they did, everything in me would settle and my real life would finally begin.
It didn’t. No matter how much I prayed, read, or performed the right moves, I never felt what they seemed to feel. Their confidence only deepened my doubt. I decided the problem must be me, I had some defect of faith or character. If I could only think better, believe harder, find the missing piece, I’d be good.
That search became a pattern in my life. In high school I tried to fit the mold, but became the black sheep in my family (at least in my own mind.) In my twenties I returned to church, eager to start again. I built a new story to live inside, but it eventually cracked. I stayed anyway, pretending for a while, growing cynical and sarcastic, reading my way through “post-modern” Christian writers who seemed to offer a more generous faith. I left and moved across the country. My wife wanted to try church again, and somehow we landed in a Dallas megachurch. I remember thinking, I’m going to hate this place. But I didn’t. It felt good, familiar in a way I hadn’t expected. I found another story to inhabit, and for nearly a decade it held.
During the pandemic, the clouds began to form again. The same sky that once felt open grew heavy. Politics fractured communities I loved; people I respected spoke with a contempt that shocked me. The certainty that once looked like good weather turned stormy again. Everything that had held me together began to shift.
In another essay, I wrote about the posture that makes healing possible, how curiosity opens space between people. That same posture matters inside us, too. When an old story collapses, what saves us isn’t a new answer; it’s the posture we bring to our own uncertainty. It’s the willingness to keep walking through the storm.
Looking back, I can see the pattern repeating: identification giving way to disillusionment, disillusionment to deconstruction, deconstruction to a fragile kind of integration. Each time through breaks something open, then teaches me how to live with what remains. I used to think these periods of disillusionment were failures, but maybe they're something else. Maybe this is the mind’s way of shedding what no longer fits, a strange attractor pulling me toward an honesty I couldn’t yet enter into.
It reminds me of the Ship of Theseus, the thought experiment that asks whether a ship whose planks have all been replaced is still the same ship. Biologically, we live that paradox. Nearly every part of us renews itself over time, and yet the sense of self remains. Every seven years our bodies are almost entirely new, yet somehow we remain ourselves. What continues isn’t the raw material but the pattern, the way the parts stay in relationship even as they change.
Maybe that’s what identity really is: a pattern in motion. We keep replacing parts of ourselves but we have continuity. And the continuity comes not from what stays the same, but from how the pieces keep relating. Maybe we’re more like weather patterns than sculptures, more like verbs than nouns. We’re constantly changing, but still recognizably ourselves.
I see my parents differently now. Their faith still colors the light I see by, but in a new way. As a child, I thought I needed to become what they were. Now I see that what shaped me most wasn’t their certainty, but their love, and their quiet trust that life was meaningful even when it was hard to explain. That trust is still in me, only now it rests on something different, not on certainty, but on the realization that change is part of what makes life meaningful.
Each piece I’ve written lately has circled around the same question from a different angle: what remains when the ground shifts beneath our feet and everything seems to fall apart? Sometimes it’s the meaning we inherit (A Place to Stand). Sometimes it’s the way we meet one another (The Posture of Presence). And sometimes it’s the slow, private work of learning to live within our own unfolding.
I never did find the grand, coherent story I was searching for. But I’m learning to live inside the questions instead of demanding answers. Every season replaces the last, and somehow the pattern holds. Maybe that’s all a self ever is—a story still unfolding, held together by the willingness to keep becoming.
Ryan Denney is an associate marriage and family therapist, writer, and software developer AMFT #155800, supervised by Rachel Daggett, MS, LMFT #107858