Shayla Mays
I’ve sat in pews carved from silence, hearing sermons that broke my spirit,
Shadows of certainty whispering,
“This is the way—walk in it.”
But my feet faltered, weighted by questions I was told not to ask.
I stretched my hands toward heaven, hoping the sky would open, but silence
sat heavy, a quiet I feared was indifference.
What does it mean to belong when the God you were told to love feels like a
stranger, and the people who claim Him refuse to know you?
I carry a faith splintered by time, passed down by ancestors who sang hymns
while their hands bled in fields. I hold their hope in one hand, my doubt
in the other, a tension I’m learning to live in.
To belong …
Is it to fit the mold they handed me?
To silence the parts of myself they warned would be my undoing?
Or is it to stand bare before the Divine, no mask, and whisper, “Here I am”?
Belonging is not the absence of doubt, but the courage to believe there is
room at the table for those of us still learning to sit in our own skin.
I will show up, fractured and questioning, and dare to believe that God
meets me in the in-between, in the shadow of what was and the light of
what could be.
