Hello and welcome to another episode of the Almost Awakened podcast. Today I'm just going to,

I'm just going to jump right in because I have been sitting with today's topic for a while

because I've watched it play out in my own life and in the lives of so many other people.

So today's topic, I want to share some of my reflections on the disconnection

that people are feeling from the loss of community. And I'm going to talk about how people have

been impacted by leaving a faith system, how people have been impacted by shifting their beliefs

within a faith system, and how that's created disconnection.

And also I want to talk about and highlight like the impacts of the pandemic and how these are still being felt today

and how this impacts people who are leaving the church today.

Now a lot of people that are going through faith transitions may feel this disconnection and loss acutely after finally

stepping away from the church. When people make that decision, they are forced to leave behind a

network of support, which offered them shared belonging and structured connection. And that structured connection that you get from a religious

support system or a religious system, especially a high demand one, is a really hard thing

to replicate outside of that. Now, this can also be felt even before you step away when you're

still physically in but mentally out. So as your

beliefs are shifting within that system, you can, you can feel a loss of true belonging when

you're no longer believing or subscribing to the same ideas as the people around you. So you can

feel a kind of like invisible

divide in a community that you know would not accept you if they knew what you were really feeling

and thinking. So it's almost like you've lost your community before you stepped away. And it can

feel like you can't really fully show up as yourself, which chips away at that sense of belonging that

you may have taken for granted before. And this feeling of disconnection can be brutal. Nobody really

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