Losing her knocked out something I thought was solid. I still turn up to church and I am not sure I believe any of it now. Is that my faith over?

“Will the Lord cast off for ever? and will he be favourable no more? Is his mercy clean gone for ever? doth his promise fail for evermore? Hath God forgotten to be gracious? hath he in anger shut up his tender mercies? Selah.”

Asaph writes this psalm awake in the middle of the night, and he puts three questions to God that most people only think: whether the silence is permanent, whether the kindness has run out, whether he has simply been forgotten. They are not rhetorical. They were placed in Israel's public songbook to be sung by the whole congregation. Their worship material included the words of a man whose confidence had collapsed.

“And straightway the father of the child cried out, and said with tears, Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.”

A father brings his son to Jesus after the disciples have already failed to help, and when belief comes up he answers with a sentence that holds belief and unbelief together in the same breath. Jesus does not send him away to resolve the contradiction first. Mark keeps the line in his Gospel, which suggests the early church needed it about as much as you do.