I learned the hymn before I learned my own name,
faith handed down like heirloom silver, worn but holy.
My mouth shaped hallelujah the way elders taught me—
soft knees, bowed head, belief pressed into bone.
Back then, heaven answered quickly,
or maybe I didn’t yet know how to hear the silence.
Now my hallelujah limps.
It arrives bruised, breathless, missing notes.
It rises from a chest tight with unanswered prayers,
from nights where God feels like a closed door
and I am knocking with hands already bleeding.
Still, I knock.
There is steam in my prayers—
not desire of the body, but the heat of longing,
the ache of wanting God to be near now,
to touch the wound, to say my name again.
Faith sweats when it’s worked hard.
Mine has labored in the dark.
I have cried into scriptures until the ink blurred,
tears baptizing verses I no longer understood.
Purity became a question instead of a crown,
obedience a heavy garment in a burning room.
I stayed.
I always stayed.
Silence became my sanctuary and my trial.
No thunder. No choir. No rushing wind.
Just the slow drip of hope refusing to die,
and a trust so old it creaks when it stands.
The faith of ages whispered,
Even this has a place.
My hallelujah cracked under the weight of truth—
that belief is not clean,
that saints doubt,
that devotion sometimes looks like exhaustion.
I sang anyway, voice shaking,
because praise is not praise if it costs nothing.
Some nights I feel God closer in the tears
than I ever did in the songs.
There is intimacy in being seen undone,
holy ground in collapsing honestly.
If God counts every tear,
then mine are prayers too.
So here I am; still believing, still broken,
offering a hallelujah stitched with pain and trust.
Not polished. Not proud. But real.
If heaven wants perfection, it won’t be my song—
but if it wants truth,
this broken hallelujah is all I have.
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