“When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.” 1 Corinthians 13:11
I was twelve. Too old to still be all in, and still trusting enough that when the Santa story unraveled, it landed harder than it should have. It happened on Christmas Eve, in that quiet tension between suspecting something and not wanting to confirm it. People call it a rite of passage. For me, it felt like something broke.
It was not just the loss of magic. It was the question that followed.
If this was a fiction dressed up in joy, what else might be built the same way?
I had been taught to believe in someone I could not see. Someone who knew me, watched me, rewarded goodness, and punished disobedience. The parallels were obvious once I saw them. And that is where the fear hit. If Santa was not real, why should I believe God is, when I cannot see, touch, or hear Him either?
Had I confused myth with theology. Had I mistaken sentiment for substance.
The collapse of the imagined and the rise of skepticism
When Santa fell apart, my easy faith went with it. I started to suspect that belief itself was just a kind of coping mechanism. A comforting story for people who needed the world to mean more than it did. I slid, without even knowing the word for it, toward naturalism. If I could not observe it, measure it, prove it, then it did not exist. And beyond this life there was nothing.
It is not an accident that Paul warns the Colossians about being taken captive through “philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition” (Colossians 2:8). Tradition is not the problem. But traditions that borrow the shape of divine attributes without any divine reality behind them can confuse a young mind. Santa had become, in my eyes, omniscient and invisible and reward giving. Then he was exposed as not real.
What I did not understand at twelve was that my disappointment was not actually with God. It was with a counterfeit I had placed beside Him without realizing it. My heart had fused the two. So when one collapsed, it felt like both did.
Faith after fiction
It took years to untangle fantasy from faith. I had to learn that Christianity is not a sentimental construct. It is a response to revelation that is rooted in history. The Incarnation is not folklore. It is flesh and blood, witnessed and recorded, planted in time and place (John 1:14; Luke 2:1–7). God is not a magical benefactor. He is the Creator and Sustainer of all things (Colossians 1:16–17). He reveals Himself in Scripture, in Christ, and through the Spirit.
Santa rewarded moral behavior with material gifts. God does something entirely different. “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). That is not transactional. It is sacrificial. Not a system to manipulate outcomes, but mercy. Not myth, but majesty.
What eventually replaced my skepticism was not a return to childish thinking. It was conviction that had been tested. My mind was engaged, but so was my soul. I came to see that childlike faith is not childish faith. It is not belief without reason. It is trust that does not pretend to have full comprehension. It is what Jesus points to when He says, “Unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:3).
Trust in an age of disillusionment
We live in a generation trained to suspect. Faith is often treated like weakness, and trust like gullibility. But Christian belief calls us to something braver than cynicism. Not abandoning reason, and not embracing fairy tales, but believing in a God who stepped into history and offers a covenant built on grace, not performance.
As I rediscovered the sovereignty of God, something in me healed. I could let go of the bitterness that disillusionment leaves behind and come back to a God who is not a projection of my hopes, but the anchor of my being. My faith does not rest on childhood stories anymore. It rests on a Person who defeated death, who reigns, and who will return.
From father wounds to fatherhood
Now that I am a father, I feel the weight of it in a different way. I want to give my kids imagination, joy, and wonder. But I also want them to know the difference between make believe and truth. I do not want them to grow up thinking God works like Santa. I do not tell them God brings gifts if they behave. I tell them God gave the greatest gift before we could ever deserve it. Himself, in Jesus, given for us.
Childlike faith is not about believing what is easy. It is about holding on to trust when the world gives you reasons to let go. It is choosing to say Abba, Father, even when fathers fail and stories disappoint.
This is not the story of how I lost my faith. It is the story of how I found it again. Not in a red suited figure who climbs down chimneys, but in a crucified King who climbed a hill.
From Santa to Sovereign, the journey was not from joy to rigidity. It was from illusion to incarnation.
And that is a story worth believing.
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