Between Sundays
Award-winning journalist Diana Keough on how faith transforms as life unfolds—becoming less about certainty and more about showing up, holding space, and finding meaning in the everyday messiness that falls between Sundays.
faith between Sundays | Diana Keough column | finding meaning in the everyday
Faith is easy on Sundays.
It fits neatly inside the stained glass and the hymnals, in the way we bow our heads, in the way we shake hands with people we barely know, wishing them peace, calling them brother or sister. But come Monday morning, faith has to ride shotgun in traffic jams, the dog throwing up on the rug and too many bills marked “urgent.”
Faith has to stretch—across years, across disappointments, across the sharp edges of aging and parenting four grown sons who are too old for me to take away their Xbox but not too old to break my heart.
Faith is necessary in marriage—at least it has been in mine.
I’ve been married for forty years. That’s 14,600 days, give or take. Long enough to know that love is both a soft place to land and a place that sometimes feels like standing barefoot on broken glass. The early years felt so chaotic, unforgiving—babies in diapers, countless loads of laundry, mortgage payments we could barely afford, road trips where we nearly left each other at a gas station, exhaustion threaded through every angry sigh. These days, though, the house is quieter. The edges have been worn smooth. Those habits of his that used to wear on me, now, more often than not, make me smile. What’s left is something softer, more lived in. Like an old quilt: a little faded, but still warm.
The future feels like a different kind of unknown. It comes with reading glasses, Medicare brochures, with joint stiffness and names that hang just out of reach. Some mornings it comes disguised as a headline— someone my age, gone too soon. Sometimes it sneaks in while I’m brushing my teeth, whispering questions I’d rather not ask: How much time? Am I ready? Is this all there is?
Faith is needed when aging begins to feel like a slow unraveling. I see it in my reflection, in the softening of my jawline, in how I watch my four children and their growing families from the wings, no longer center stage. I am still deeply invested in the scene, just no longer directing it.
But I’ve learned parenting doesn’t end—it just changes costumes. These days, it’s more about holding space than holding hands. It’s learning when to speak and when to let silence do the heavy lifting. It’s praying instead of problem-solving. Trusting they’ll find their way, just like I had to.
I’m learning to be still. Slowly. Stubbornly. I fight it more than I’d like to admit. Stillness sounds lovely in theory. But in practice, it feels like waiting with empty hands—learning to sit with questions, to listen without reacting, to rest. It’s anything but simple.
I used to think faith was certainty, a named religious denomination.. These days, it feels more like a compass than a map. It doesn’t hand me directions, but it keeps nudging me true north.
I used to think faith was certainty, a named religious denomination.. These days, it feels more like a compass than a map. It doesn’t hand me directions, but it keeps nudging me true north. I lean on it at 3 a.m, when sleep won’t come and the questions start stacking up: Have I done enough? Loved well? Will I live long enough to know all of my grandchildren?
That’s what I want to explore here, in this space I’m calling “Between Sundays”—a column about fear, about the gritty, sacred work of living out faith between grocery runs and gut punches. In marriage and misunderstandings. In aging bodies and aching hearts. In forgiveness, in staying, in trying again.
Because maybe faith doesn’t live just in the light. Maybe it lives in showing up, in deciding to choose it. In the belief that love—whether in marriage, in friendships, in parenting, or in simply growing older—is always worth it.
Even when it’s hard.
faith between Sundays | Diana Keough column | finding meaning in the everyday
Read Diana Keough's 2024 story, "The Faithful Servant”
Diana Keough is an award-winning journalist and professor of journalism at the University of Georgia. She is currently working on a multimedia memoir project titled Not From a Nice Family.
