Faith & Values · A Decembers list
The times your faith was tested — and what became of it
There was the diagnosis you prayed over in a hospital corridor. The Sunday you sat in the pew and felt nothing. The night you argued with God and lost, or won, and weren't sure which.
This is the list for those moments. One line each, or a page when the memory asks for it. No sermon required.
Free to start. Private from the first word.
Where this list lives
This is a list in Decembers — the place a life gets written down one question at a time.
Decembers asks the questions no one thought to ask, keeps the answers in one permanent Chronicle, and holds them on one Timeline that reads in order. You answer. Decembers does the writing.
- Lists
- A list for every kind of life, and every turn one takes. Pick one and start answering.
- Timeline
- Your answers arrange themselves in order. Seeing a whole life laid out this way is something else.
- Inner Circle
- Not social media. The few people you name are the only ones it is ever shared with.
Begin with one list. The rest follows.
One line is enough
Write down the one crisis you never told anyone about, and the whole quiet history behind it comes up with it — the church you left, the person who sat with you, the prayer you're still waiting on.
Your church has a record of when you joined and when your children were baptized. It has none of the harder things: the year you couldn't make yourself go, the doctrine you quietly set aside, the answered prayer you never spoke of because it sounded too much like luck. The doubts and the turnings are the most honest part of a spiritual life, and they are exactly the part no register keeps.
A book about your faith would want to resolve into something tidy, and a life of belief rarely does. A list doesn't ask for that. You put down one moment — the funeral, the argument, the unexpected peace on an ordinary Tuesday — and leave it as it was. Come back next week and add another. Over time the entries say more than any statement of faith could, because they show belief being tested and outlasting the test.
How it works
- 01
Pick this list
It’s waiting, already written. There is no blank page to face.
- 02
Fill in what comes
A year, a line, a photograph. Five minutes or an hour.
- 03
Invite who was there
They add what you forgot. You decide what stays.
- 04
Share it, or don’t
One quiet page for your Inner Circle. No link, no feed.
What ends up on this list
The seasons of doubt
The stretch when prayer felt like talking to the ceiling. The service you walked out of. The question a child asked that you couldn't answer and couldn't shake. These are not failures of faith; they are its weather, and worth recording plainly.
The answers you didn't expect
The prayer you'd almost given up on, met in a way you never asked for. The stranger who said the right thing. The door that closed and turned out to be mercy. Write what you prayed for and what actually came — the gap between them is often the whole story.
The people who carried you through
A pastor who didn't flinch at your questions. A grandmother whose steady faith you leaned on before you had your own. The friend who kept a seat for you. Name them. Much of what you believe, you believe because someone showed you it could be borne.
Where you've stood
- Childhood faith
- The tradition you were raised in — the memorized prayers, the smell of the sanctuary, the certainties you inherited before you'd chosen anything.
- Falling away
- The years, if there were any, when you drifted, questioned, or left entirely, and what the distance taught you.
- A crisis
- The illness, loss, or fear that put your belief to the hardest test and forced you to find out what was really underneath it.
- Changing traditions
- A move from one church, denomination, or faith to another, and the reasons — theological, personal, or simply where you found yourself welcomed.
- Coming back
- The return, if you returned, and what it was that finally brought you home — a hymn, a person, a plain need for it.
- Where you stand now
- What you believe today, held more lightly or more firmly than before, and what you'd want the people after you to understand about it.
Other lists you may like
Start with any one of them. Every answer lands on the same Timeline.
Begin
A record of belief that was questioned and did not simply vanish
The whole arc is hard to say at once. Begin with a single moment your faith was tested — the one that comes to mind first — and set it down as it was.