09/20/2026
TODAY’S ONE HONEST STORY
THE SUNDAY SHE LET THE QUESTION STAY
Rebecca came to West Hollow because she was tired.
During a full day beside The Meadow, she began to recognize that she was not only tired from doing too much. She was tired from concealing questions she believed a faithful person was not supposed to have.
This fictional story from The Pencil-Driven Life imagines one way a quiet day at West Hollow might give an unanswered question room to exist.
West Hollow does not tell anyone what to believe or what conclusion to reach. It simply offers time, privacy, and a place to pay attention.
Read today’s complete One Honest Story on The Pencil-Driven Life page:
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ONE HONEST STORY
THE SUNDAY SHE LET THE QUESTION STAY
Rebecca reserved West Hollow for the full day because she was tired.
That was how she explained it to herself, and it was not untrue.
For nineteen years, Sunday morning had begun before daylight. She made coffee, reviewed her lesson, dressed, and drove to church early enough to unlock the classroom before the first woman arrived. She taught for forty-five minutes, attended worship, spoke to whoever lingered afterward, and usually carried something to someone who was sick, grieving, or recovering from surgery.
She had arranged for another woman to teach this morning. When asked why, Rebecca said she needed a Sunday off.
No one objected.
That surprised her.
She arrived at West Hollow shortly after eight carrying a lunch bag, a thermos, her Bible, and The Pencil-Driven Life Reset Guide. The Bible came because she had placed it in the canvas tote she carried every Sunday. She had not thought about removing it.
The morning was cool enough that she kept her light jacket on as she walked into The Meadow. Dew darkened the toes of her shoes. Somewhere beyond the trees, a vehicle moved along a road she could not see.
By now, she thought, the women would be entering her classroom.
She could picture where each one would sit. Helen near the door because of her knee. Marie beside the window. Joyce in the second chair from the front, prepared to answer the first question before Rebecca finished asking it.
The thought made Rebecca smile.
Then she noticed something else.
Relief.
She was relieved not to be there.
The feeling arrived so plainly that she stopped walking.
Her first response was guilt. The church had been good to her. Its people had brought food when her husband underwent heart surgery. They had filled the funeral home when her mother died. Women she had taught for years had become friends whose kindness she did not question.
Rebecca resumed walking.
She told herself that gratitude and exhaustion could exist together. Needing a Sunday away did not mean she had rejected anyone.
That explanation worked until she reached the far end of The Meadow.
There, standing beneath the morning sky with no lesson waiting to be delivered, she remembered the sentence she had said the previous Wednesday evening.
A woman in the class had been describing her grandson’s death. Twenty-three years old. A wreck on his way home from work.
“I know God has a reason,” the woman had said. “We may not understand it now, but one day we will.”
Rebecca had reached across the table and held her hand.
“Yes,” she had said. “We have to trust God’s plan.”
Everyone around the table had nodded.
Rebecca had nodded too.
For four days, the words had remained with her—not because she found them comforting, but because she did not know whether she believed them.
She had taught that God possessed a purpose for every life. She had said suffering could be used for good. She had assured grieving people that nothing happened outside God’s knowledge and will.
But when she pictured that young man’s damaged truck, she could not understand what kind of plan required his death.
The question frightened her less than what she had done with it.
She had concealed it.
Rebecca returned slowly toward the cabin. She did not take another lap. Instead, she sat in an outdoor chair near the porch and poured coffee from the thermos.
At ten-thirty, when worship would have been beginning, she opened her Bible. A folded sheet of paper marked the place where she had stopped preparing next Sunday’s lesson.
Across the top she had written:
FAITH IN TIMES OF UNCERTAINTY
Beneath it were three Scripture references and the sentence she had intended to repeat during the lesson:
We may not understand, but a faithful Christian continues to trust.
Rebecca read it twice.
The sentence was not cruel. She had heard variations of it all her life, often from people who meant well and had endured terrible things themselves.
Still, she could see what the sentence required.
A faithful Christian continues to trust.
Therefore, a person who admitted uncertainty might not be faithful.
She closed the Bible and placed it beside her chair.
For the first time that morning, Rebecca wondered whether she was tired of Sundays—or tired of spending Sundays sounding more certain than she felt.
The distinction stayed with her through lunch.
She ate a sandwich on the porch and watched sunlight move across the cabin floor. She did not pray before eating. Halfway through the sandwich, she realized she had forgotten.
She waited for guilt.
What came instead was another question:
Had she forgotten—or had she been relieved not to perform even a private prayer?
Rebecca set the unfinished sandwich inside its wrapper.
She did not say that prayer was false. She did not say God was absent. She did not say everything she had believed was wrong.
She simply allowed herself to admit that some prayers had begun to feel like lines she knew how to deliver.
In the afternoon, she opened the Reset Guide while sitting on the porch. She read its central question:
What part of my life did I inherit, and what part am I ready to examine?
Until then, Rebecca had thought of inheritance as the Baptist church, the Bible on her lap, the hymns she knew from memory, and the beliefs she had been taught as a child.
But something more specific had been handed to her:
Faithful people possess answers.
Faithful people trust.
Faithful people do not let doubt remain unanswered.
She had inherited the belief that an honest question was dangerous because real faith should produce certainty.
Rebecca picked up her pencil.
For several minutes, she wrote nothing. Wind moved along The Meadow, bending the grass in uneven sections before passing into the trees.
She finally placed the pencil against the page.
I do not know whether I am losing my faith.
She stopped there. The sentence looked more frightening on paper than it had sounded inside her.
She did not erase it.
Beneath it, she wrote:
I know I am tired of pretending I have no questions.
Rebecca leaned back in the chair.
She had not decided whether God existed. She had not abandoned her church, rejected the people she loved, or answered what she believed about the young man who died.
She had done something smaller.
She had allowed the question to exist without treating it as evidence that something was wrong with her.
Late in the afternoon, Rebecca returned to her lesson notes.
Beneath the title, FAITH IN TIMES OF UNCERTAINTY, she wrote:
What if uncertainty is not the opposite of faith?
She did not know whether she would teach that lesson next Sunday. She did not know whether she would tell anyone what she had written.
Before leaving West Hollow, Rebecca folded the page and placed it inside her Bible.
She carried both the Bible and the unanswered question home.
THE PENCIL PRACTICE
Pick up a pencil and complete these sentences:
A question I have been afraid to admit is…
I learned that I was not supposed to ask it because…
If I allowed the question to exist without answering it today, I might…
Do not force a conclusion.
Do not write what you think you are supposed to believe.
Write one honest sentence.
A question does not become dangerous merely because it has been named. Sometimes naming it is the first honest mark.
