My concrete faith first started turning into cotton candy when I was 18 years old and apparently the only one in the front pew who didn’t see the statue of Mary move.

I was in a small church in Casper, Wyoming at a Catholic youth conference, praying the rosary with a bunch of other fellow puberty-ravaged teenagers. An hour earlier, we’d been at a dance—moving our blooming bodies to the best beats Bobby Brown and C+C Music Factory could come up with. I wasn’t very well-versed in how religious conferences were organized, but it felt strange to go from shouting “Mony! Mony!” with the always-randy Billy Idol to murmuring “Hail Mary” in such a short period of time.

This may out me as a terrible Catholic, but I never could click with repetitive prayers, which is kind of a prerequisite for praying the rosary. Saying “blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus” over and over made me uncomfortable. Sometimes I would mutter “blessed is the fruit of the loom” instead. Maybe it was intentional. Back then, I was a rascal like that.

We were on our second decade of the rosary when I noticed everyone in my pew~adults included~had started crying. Not just crying. Sobbing.

“What’s going on?” I asked the girl next to me, her face now flushing like a Honeycrisp apple.

She didn’t turn her head. She kept staring straight ahead. “You don’t see it?” Her hand rose like a phantom and her finger pointed toward the statues of Mary and Joseph. “Mary is breathing,” she whispered.

I whipped my neck so fast my ears popped. All those X-Files episodes I had watched were about to pay off. I began my investigation immediately. I stared at that statue of Mary, waiting for the tiniest sign of life–an eyelid twitch, a robe ripple, the faintest puff of a sigh. Like Fox Mulder…I wanted to believe.

But she just stood there like… well… um…like a statue.

My eyes turned into deserts as I obsessed. Parched. Cracked. Desperate for even a drop of holy motion. I squinted so intensely I started to see things that weren’t there— a shimmer, a glow, maybe even a wiggle— but I couldn’t trust any of it. It wasn’t her moving. It was my own hope turning into a heat mirage.

If Mary wouldn’t move for me, maybe I could find some sense of her in everyone else. The girl beside me had mascara sliding down her cheeks like a slow landslide. The kids behind me, who’d been joking about armpit smells on the bus, now whispered prayers like they’d been touched by fire. One boy’s knuckles were clenched in prayer so tight they looked like polished tombstones. All around me, something was happening. The air felt charged. Like God had decided to throw a surprise party and forgot to invite me.

So I closed my eyes. Tried again. Come on, Mary.

A breath.

A blink.

A breeze.

Still nothing. Just the silence I always carried with me every time I tried to believe too hard.

I shifted strategies—like I was cracking a holy safe. I remembered those ’90s 3-D paintings that looked like TV static until you softened your gaze, and suddenly a unicorn leapt from a fountain. Maybe Mary was like that—shy, only appearing to those who looked sideways at the world.

I stared again.

Nothinggg. Just fiberglass and chipped paint.

Eventually the prayer ended. I could feel before I opened my eyes that an invisible line had been drawn. There were now two groups in that little Casper church: the ones who saw her move….and the ones who didn’t. Guess which one I was in.

After the rosary, there was no official announcement. No shrine. No Rome investigation. Just clusters of people whispering like eyewitnesses to the same car accident, each detail slightly different, but none doubting it happened.

“She blinked.”

“Her chest was rising and falling.”

“Her lips moved.”

And me? I nodded when appropriate, smiled in support, pretended I might’ve caught it out of the corner of my eye. But the truth was: all I saw was plaster and paint and a lot of tears that didn’t belong to me. It was the ultimate FOMO. What was I doing wrong? Had God blacklisted me for “Fruit of the Loom”?

I felt like the kid who missed the magic trick and didn’t want to admit it. No confession booth for non-experiences. No guidance for how to hold your rosary when everyone else just met the mother of God and you were still trying to figure out the beads. I waited for one kid—just one—to shrug and say, “I think I missed it,” so I wouldn’t feel like the only spiritual dud. Nobody did.

If anyone else had doubts, they kept them folded tight inside, like love notes they didn’t have the guts to pass. Even the adults were glowing, saying Mary had chosen to appear to “us.” That word stung.

I didn’t feel part of us. I felt like a lowercase letter in a sentence full of uppercase faith. It was my first taste of how belonging in the pews could feel like an audition — and how easily you could be left out of the cast. So I memorized the story everyone else was telling, in case I needed to repeat it. Maybe, with enough retellings, it would feel like mine. It never did.

I spent years trying to resurrect a moment I never had. I learned to fake awe before I learned how to find it.

This was the beginning of my untethering. Not a dramatic break, just the slow fray of a thread that couldn’t hold my weight anymore. If everyone else saw something and I didn’t, did that mean I wasn’t worthy? Was the divine playing favorites? Or was I simply unable to be party to a beautiful, well-meaning hallucination?There were so many people certain. And there I was—covered in question marks. Hail Mary full of doubts, pray for me.

My faith became that of a spectator, waiting for God to dazzle me with something loud and undeniable… and in doing so, I missed how the sky had already turned pink behind me. For a long time, that doubt felt like poison—something leaking inside me, ruining any chance at real faith.

But now I see it differently. That doubt—the one that once made me feel defective—has become a doorway. Not away from the sacred, but deeper into it.

I no longer need statues to breathe. I’ve found proof of the divine in far quieter places:

In the way flowers bloom through sidewalk cracks.

In how the seasons slip one into another like old friends trading secrets.

In strangers reaching for each other in hard moments, asking nothing in return.

In how rain falls on my wrinkling skin as if it’s telling me a story I forgot how to hear.

These quiet things don’t ask to be worshiped.

They just keep happening.

And now, after all these years, I believe— not because something impossible happened in front of me, but because of the millions of beautiful, ordinary things that kept happening, whether I noticed or not. Yes, maybe the statue never moved— but something else did: Me.

Now I see wonder in every sunbeam peeking through the tree line.

Now I listen to birds and hear angels.

Now I hold hands with my beloved and I feel holy.

Now I no longer seek out big miracles ~ because there are a million little ones taking place all around.