Moving On Without Losing God

Lately, I’ve been dwelling on the idea of moving on in my own faith. Not walking away in anger or indifference but moving forward with honesty. I feel tired of the stagnation I experience around Christianity, God, science, culture, and belief itself. Too often, faith feels frozen, locked into exacting theologies that no longer serve the world we actually live in.

Trying to preserve a precise, airtight belief system seems to be doing more harm than good. We live in a culture where God is casually invoked for winning sports games or finding a good parking space, while the divine image in our neighbor goes unnoticed. Much of what passes for Christianity has become an individualized ego-support system: faith as reassurance, rather than transformation.

I recently had a conversation with a friend about how living in Texas (or anywhere in the Bible Belt) can create the illusion that Christianity (and other religion) is thriving. Churches are everywhere. Massive campuses sit across the street from one another, celebrating attendance, expansion, and visibility. I live in Dallas; monuments to Sunday morning dominate the landscape.

What we don’t see are the invisible campuses; the countless people who don’t attend faith gatherins at all.

And here’s the part many churchgoers don’t realize: they are significantly outnumbered.

Many people have already moved on. Most of them will tell you they haven’t moved on from God, but from a specific belief system. Still, what lingers, both in their imaginations and in the cultural air of the Bible Belt, is a thin, inherited theology centered on heaven and hell, reward and punishment, right belief and eternal consequence.

Which raises the real question:
Can we move on from that without losing God?
Can your faith change—and can faith itself change with you?

Faith change is a transition. It often begins quietly, almost imperceptibly, until one day we realize we have enough agency to name it and enough courage to step into it.

Moving On from Heaven and Hell

Meister Eckhart, the Christian mystic, once wrote, “God is at home; we are in the far country.”

When I first encountered that line years ago, I heard it through the lens I had been given: God was “at home” in heaven, and we were far away here on earth; separated by a cosmic distance between a sky God and limited humanity.

But now I hear it differently.

Yes, Christianity has spent enormous energy debating heaven, hell, and the afterlife. At the same time, it also insists, again and again, that God is love, and that this love is beyond our capacity to measure or control. Scripture itself holds competing images: a God who demands repayment and a God who clothes us in our shame. You can make the Bible say nearly anything you want if you try hard enough.

What’s telling is this: as Americans move on from Christianity, what they don’t move on from is love. They don’t abandon the intuition that love matters, that compassion matters, that something sacred binds us together.

In the end, love remains.

So perhaps the work isn’t deciding who’s right about heaven or hell, but asking a deeper question:
“How do we reframe the love of God so it is less about individual reward and more about collective healing of one another and of the earth itself?”

The Far Country Is Within

To me, moving on requires acceptance. Not resignation, but a deeper consent to reality. The “far country” Eckhart names isn’t about geography or cosmology, it’s about how we limit our capacity to receive God and to participate in love.

In the somatic work I practice and accompany others through, we pay close attention to one simple, profound reality: the breath.

Breath creates space.
Breath creates freedom.
Breath reminds us that we are already being held.

Imagine a hula hoop floating around you - a circle that represents how you perceive what’s available to you. Inside the hoop is what feels accessible, safe, possible. Outside the hoop feels distant, risky, or unavailable. Yet the larger truth is this: the circle is not reality—it’s perception.

Drawing on somatic and Enneagram wisdom, our bodies tend to manage this inside–outside dynamic in different ways:

• Heart-centered types often seek connection outside the circle, neglecting themselves in hopes that love exists somewhere else.

• Head-centered types, driven by fear, stay inside the circle, prioritizing safety and thinking over connection.

• Body-centered types build energy inside and bring it outward, often meeting conflict at the boundary itself.

This is our true individualism, not independence, but egoic strategy. Our nervous systems learn how to seek belonging, safety, and love, and we confuse those strategies with truth.

This is the same move we make with God.

A “near God” and a “far God.”
Heaven as reward. Hell as punishment.
Love as something earned.

To truly move on, we have to release this way of being.

God Is Not a Reward System

God is not waiting to reward us for being right or punish us for being wrong. Love is not a transaction. The love of God is not something we achieve. The love of God is something we consent to receive.

Moving on means loosening our grip on the belief that we must secure our worth, our safety, or our salvation. It means trusting that love is already present and already sufficient.

In embodied practice, breath always seeks open space. It reveals where we are blocked and where we are free. Transition work requires the same attentiveness. When we notice frustration, tension, or exhaustion, we can pause and ask: Am I pushing into what is blocked, or am I responding to what is open?

Often, it is in the openness that we encounter God.

This is alignment work.

Prayer and mindfulness function this way, not as techniques to get God’s attention, but as practices that align us with what God is already doing. They loosen our clinging and open our hands to receive what is already here.

If God is present, then love creates space.
And where there is love, we find signs of nearness: joy, peace, patience, kindness, self-control—not as achievements, but as byproducts of alignment.

Beginning the Work

So how do you begin?

For some, it starts with honest conversation about faith formation.
For others, it requires experiential work: embodied, relational, therapeutic.
For many, it includes counseling, spiritual direction, or other healing modalities that help untangle what was inherited from what is true.

There are many paths forward.

But moving on does not mean leaving God behind.
It may be the very way we finally come home.