Missing pieces, honest questions

My older brother, who had also grown up in the same strict religious environment I did, had spent nearly twenty years studying something called The Urantia Book. He had found peace in it, but I had always resisted hearing much about it because fear-based religion had trained me to believe that asking questions was dangerous. I had been taught to obey, to trust authority, and to stop digging once I reached the approved answer. As a woman especially, questioning things often felt unwelcome. But questioning was part of who I was. I have always been curious. I have always wanted to understand the deeper why behind things. Intellectually, I was hungry for truth in a way that never fit neatly inside rigid systems.

Shortly after I finished reading the Bible cover to cover, my brother came to visit. We sat outside on a warm evening talking about my experience reading it all the way through. I told him how much I had struggled with the angry version of God I kept encountering in parts of the Old Testament. I told him how difficult it was for me to reconcile love with violence, slaughter, jealousy, sacrifice, punishment, and fear. I explained how emotionally exhausting it had been to read page after page knowing the story was moving toward the crucifixion of Jesus, and how much of my childhood fear still lingered underneath it all.

Then he said something that completely stunned me.

He looked at me and quietly said, “A lot of it isn’t true.”

I remember feeling almost offended and relieved at the same time. Part of me immediately thought, That’s blasphemy. But another part of me felt this strange release because deep down I knew there were things I simply could not make sense of no matter how hard I tried.

When I asked him what he meant, he said there were missing pieces.

That phrase landed hard in my heart because that was exactly how reading the Bible had felt to me. Like I was trying to assemble a puzzle with major sections missing. So many stories raised questions nobody seemed willing to discuss openly. If Adam and Eve were the first people, where did Cain’s wife come from? What exactly was the land of Nod? Why was it mentioned so casually and then never really explained? Where were the dinosaurs in the creation story? Did evolution exist? Why did ancient civilizations across the world share flood stories and similar spiritual themes? Why were traditions like Christmas trees and Easter bunnies so deeply tied to Christianity when they were nowhere in scripture?

For the first time in my life, I let myself sit with those questions without immediately trying to silence them.

My brother never pushed beliefs on me. He simply opened the door to possibility. He asked me to consider whether religion, as we know it today, may have been shaped over time by human interpretation, politics, fear, control, culture, and tradition. I had already begun realizing that people selected which writings became canon and which writings did not. Human beings translated scripture. Human beings debated doctrine. Human beings carried their own upbringing, worldview, trauma, and biases into what they wrote and taught. Suddenly, that became impossible for me to ignore.

I started looking differently at many of the writings in scripture, especially after the death of Jesus. Some passages no longer felt like the direct voice of God to me. They felt human. They felt filtered through the lens of people trying to make sense of spiritual experiences inside the cultures they lived in. Statements about women being silent or submissive no longer sat in my spirit as eternal divine truth. They sounded like the opinions and perspectives of men living in a very different time.

That realization did not pull me away from God like I once feared it would. It actually brought me closer.

I also watched The Chosen around that time, and strangely enough, that series impacted me deeply. I remember hearing criticism that it was not strict scripture and that it added interpretation, but for me, it made Jesus feel real in a way he never had before. He felt warm. Compassionate. Human. Loving. He no longer felt like the terrifying religious figure attached to fear and punishment from my childhood. He felt like someone trying to wake humanity up from fear-based religion altogether.

For the first time, I began seeing many parts of scripture through a completely different lens. Jesus did not look like someone obsessed with rules, shame, and control. He looked like someone confronting systems that had distorted God into something harsh and transactional. Even the story of him becoming angry in the temple suddenly made more sense to me because they were selling animals for sacrifice inside a sacred place. Religion had become commercialized and fear-driven, and his reaction no longer felt violent to me. It felt protective. It felt like grief over what spirituality had become.

The deeper I explored, the more things started connecting in ways they never had before. Evolution no longer threatened my belief in God. It became part of a much bigger process of creation. Ancient religions, mythology, symbolism, consciousness, spirituality, science, and human history all began weaving together into something that felt larger and more alive than the rigid framework I had inherited growing up.

And somewhere in the middle of all of it, I found peace.

Not because every question was answered perfectly, but because I stopped being afraid of asking them.

That is why this website exists.

Missing Peace is not about telling people what they must believe. It is not about replacing one rigid system with another. It is not about pretending I have everything figured out. It is about curiosity. It is about honesty. It is about exploring the questions many people carry quietly inside themselves but are often too afraid to say out loud.

I want this space to feel safe for people who have wrestled with faith, struggled with fear, questioned religion, or felt disconnected from God because the version they were given never fully made sense to them. I want people to understand that asking questions does not make them broken, rebellious, or bad. Sometimes questions are what lead us closer to truth.

My hope is simply to open the conversation.

As this journey continues, I’ll be exploring many of these questions through articles, conversations, videos, and shared perspectives. Some ideas may resonate deeply with you. Some may not. But I hope this space encourages you to think for yourself, to stay open, and to never stop searching for deeper understanding.

One phrase changed my life more than any other:

“Is it possible?”

Because the moment we allow ourselves to ask that question honestly, something begins to open inside us.