How can I believe in God if sometimes I feel like I don’t? Can I make myself believe in God?
Maybe this is similar to the thread on what to do if you’ve lost your faith… I don’t know. I want to have faith in God and Jesus. I really do. But every time I try, my mind starts pulling apart everything I’ve been taught over the years, especially the stuff I’m learning now in my degree. The more I study, the further I drift from being able to just believe.
Part of what makes this harder is that I lost someone very close to me as a child. I watched people pray harder than anyone should ever have to pray. Nothing changed. So how am I supposed to trust that prayer works for the smaller stuff in my daily life when it didn’t work when it mattered most?
Edit: I should probably add that I’m not looking to be “converted” or preached at. I’m genuinely curious about people’s real experiences with this kind of change.
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You can’t force yourself to believe in God. It’s like trying to fall asleep by trying harder. What you can do is put yourself somewhere belief has room to grow.
For me that meant dropping the pressure to feel certain. I’d just say “I don’t know if anyone’s listening, but here I am.” It felt awkward at first, but over time it became something real.
I’m sorry about what you went through as a kid. Watching desperate prayers go unanswered leaves a mark, and I don’t think any tidy explanation fixes that. Only time, and sitting with the question.
You don’t have to believe today or manufacture anything. Try the no-pressure version for a few months and see.
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You can’t make yourself believe in God directly.
Belief is a conclusion you arrive at. What helped me was separating the questions: whether God exists, whether Jesus is trustworthy, whether suffering counts against either claim, or whether your degree contradicts faith or just the version you were taught. One at a time. My brain likes to convene an entire Supreme Court hearing before breakfast, so this helped a lot. Read the strongest arguments on both sides and see where you end up.
What happened in your childhood taught you that desperate prayer may not prevent catastrophe, and no neat answer should minimize that. Christianity doesn’t promise that praying enough gets us the outcome we ask for. Even Jesus prayed for His suffering to pass and still went through it.
I used to treat prayer like heavenly customer service, only to wonder why the complaints department seemed so understaffed. These days I see it more as part of learning whether God can be trusted in a world where terrible losses stay terribly real.
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Trying to convince yourself that God exists usually backfires. Your mind can tell when you’re pushing toward an answer you picked in advance, and all the studying you described just makes that detector sharper. I hit the same wall in my coursework. The further I got, the more ‘just believe’ sounded like a demand to ignore what I was learning, and I wasn’t willing to call that faith.
The real snag is prayer, though. If the hardest prayers you ever watched changed nothing, asking about ordinary things can feel like playacting or like shrinking the loss so your faith can survive it. You don’t have to feel trust about the small stuff before you’re allowed to speak. Name the unanswered prayer first, say you still don’t know what to do with it, then bring up the daily thing.
What shifted for me was reading about Jesus in small pieces for a few weeks and writing down in plain words where I still couldn’t accept it. Slowly, the wanting stopped feeling like a line I was rehearsing. If there’s a way to move toward belief on purpose, that kind of honesty was it for me.
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