I picked the word “Desire” as my 2024 word of the year.

It proved to be tough word, but a one that stuck with me more often than it floated off like past years.

I didn’t indulge every desire. In fact, more of my effort was spent trying to identify my desires than making them come to pass. It’s hard work for an enneagram 9.

Paying attention to my desires is a gift I haven’t given myself for decades. I used to think this was very pious of myself. I wore it like a badge of honor.

“Oh don’t worry about me!” “I’m good with whatever!” “I’m flexible!”

All of these things are true about me. But I have also spent a lot of my life robbing myself of the very human and fulfilling experience of wanting anything out of my life.

When I hit publish on my last article about outrage, I knew there would be more to say here. Mostly because the deep truth is that anger isn’t inherently evil or even altogether bad for you.

Anger is simply an emotion on the emotions chart. It’s one that we feel deep in our bellies, running hot across our foreheads, sending tremors through our fingers.

Anger is not the problem at all. In fact, anger - when properly synthesized - can become a great motivator for change in life, and history has proven this to be true more than once.

There’s an inner process at work when you head down the road of faith deconstruction.

Something triggered dissonance in your very self and the brave will wander inward to see where the disturbance lies.

That journey inward reveals your mis-formation. Over the years you have shut down parts of yourself for love, acceptance, and belonging. You now open the doors to spaces within your being you had locked up tight only to discover that they seem not only ok, but good. You wonder why you set these parts of yourself off limits? You grieve the time you’ve lost embodying these qualities. And then you begin the work of healing and rehabilitation toward wholeness once again.

Now that I’ve shared my passion for people who find themselves in a faith transition (aka deconstructing), I’m having a lot more conversations with people who are asking hard questions about what they believe. It’s most often in one of these processing conversations that I hear “So this must be what your coaching is like, right?”

And my answer is always “Well, not exactly.”

There are many deconstruction/faith coaches and groups out there focused on helping people process the specifics of their beliefs and theologies, but that’s not what I’m interested in doing.

I’m interested in empowering you on your spiritual journey.

Deconstruction is a buzzy word right now. Very hashtagable. But truthfully the idea of deconstruction has been around way longer than the phrase itself.

Faith deconstruction is the process of examining what you believe instead of taking it all at face value. Which quite honestly, is a good practice. Not practicing a posture of examining what you're told to believe is a straight shot to cult life, and we can all agree, cults = no good. So why is deconstruction both such a buzzword and so demonized right now? And what does deconstructing even look like?

Let’s look at 3 reasons for all the buzz and the first 4 common experiences of deconstruction…