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“I searched for God and found only myself. I searched for myself and found only God.” ~Rumi
There’s a particular kind of heartbreak that happens when you realize some of your prayers are going nowhere.
There’s a painful silence that follows unanswered calls. Yet, despite the ache, I can still feel the pull to pray to the God outside of myself—that old reflex to place faith in something bigger, some invisible force in the sky, who, apparently, can make things happen magically here on Earth.
But it doesn’t always go that way, does it?
I prayed my cancer would go away. It didn’t.
I prayed the world would heal from climate change. It didn’t.
I prayed my business would make enough to live on. It didn’t.
I prayed my book would reach thousands. Still hasn’t.
I prayed for peace in the world. It’s getting worse.
So, I stopped. Stopped praying. Stopped hoping in that way where my heart is wide open and a little desperate.
It didn’t feel brave. It felt hollow. But in the silence that followed, something shifted within me. When the noise of asking subsided, a quieter truth emerged.
For a long time, I thought my discomfort came from out there. From God. From other people. From difficult situations. Blaming something outside myself gave me a sense of control—a story to hold onto. But no matter how convincing that story was, the ache inside remained.
It took time, but eventually I saw it: the root of my suffering wasn’t external at all. It was internal.
When I finally stopped waiting for life to bend to my will and turned inward, I came face-to-face with something uncomfortable—my attachment to control.
What I discovered was a mind conditioned to grasp, to fix, to be right, to judge, to compare, to push. And most of the time, that’s where the struggle began—when reality didn’t match my expectations. I’d get caught in loops of thought, unable to see clearly, tangled in ego and forgetting the essence of my being—my heart.
The heart is where our whole, compassionate selves live. We feel it. We recognize what Howard Thurman called the sound of the genuine. That’s who we are—at our core.
So, it’s not that I lost faith entirely. It’s that I relocated it. I remembered the genuine within.
Now, I have faith that life will unfold as it will, and sometimes, that’s painful. Life doesn’t often match the visions we hold. It burns plans to the ground. It humbles. It disappoints.
And still, I have faith.
I have faith in the goodness of the human heart. I have faith that we can hold grief in one hand—the image of the life we imagined—and, with the other, steady ourselves enough to rise and take the next step forward.
I have faith in our ability to choose compassion over entitlement. To sit with discomfort and still reach for the just response. To place our hand on our chest, close our eyes and choose to respond—not from the head, but from the heart.
And maybe, just maybe, that’s what God actually is.
Not some white-bearded man in the sky. Not a distant savior. But the part of us that knows how to return—not to the mind’s spirals, but to the body. To the breath. To the quiet pulse of the heart.
What if we—all of us, even world leaders—stopped looking to the God outside and, instead, returned to the one within?
Because the God within doesn’t need to be right. The God within doesn’t dominate or divide. The God within creates peace. Is peace.
And maybe that’s the kind of faith we need now.
Because when faith in something outside of us falls away, what’s left?
We are.
About Lara Charles
Lara Charles is an Australian writer exploring the deeper threads of life through thought-provoking personal essays and memoir. Her work has appeared in national and international publications. She is the author of the Substack newsletter Deeper Threads and a teacher on the global cancer support platform Thrivers Ark. Her debut memoir, Joy, Regardless, is a powerful reflection on illness, identity and self-discovery. Discover more about her work at laracharles.com.
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