Hi!
I felt a lot of “me too” in what you wrote. My details are different, but my journey through discarding old beliefs about God and the way the bible works was also dark and and painful. I know you didn’t use those words, and maybe I’m reading it into your words because of my experience. But I “get” it in some measure.
My journey also started through homeschooling. My son was reading a library book. I think he was around 2nd grade (I’m not sure–years ago anyway). He asked me about how we evolved from monkeys. I told him we didn’t, and I would get back to him to explain the whole thing. I was raised old earth, and I’m good at research so I began to learn so I could teach him. Long story intentionally short–I couldn’t merge even old earth teachings on Genesis with what I was learning about science.
It felt like my world fell apart honestly. The whole of scripture felt tenuous.
Finally I found Biologos and then Peter Enns, and it was like your experienced with the Language of God. It was both a relief and led to more questions and adjustments in my views of God and the bible. I did more reading, and still more letting go and adjusting. This went on for a long time for me–my kids are 12 now, and I think I’m in a brighter place of rebuilding spiritually but had some bumpy stuff bubble up to still process even late this spring.
The whole thing was a mix of pain and loss and joy and discovery to be honest. I do still grieve, at least a little, the simplicity and, well, certainty in my prior belief systems. But those things are sort of, well, you know where in scripture it talks about seeing through a glass darkly–knowing God but not being able to really know him in our humanity? I know I’m still seeing darkly, but I’m less so now I think. And I have more awareness of just how dark my glass was and is as a human. I’ve kind of become ok, or more ok, with the lack of certainty. You mentioned holding evolution with a loose grip–I hold a lot of stuff with a loose grip now!
I’m glad your husband is on the journey with you. That will help you feel less alone I think, and so lovely is your questions box! I have always been a questioning type person. It was painful growing up. There were questions I was afraid to even explore on my own, let alone ask my parents. It didn’t help that I got apologetic books and similar–the message I received or believed was that doubts needed to be answered and put away so that you could have right beliefs, and so be ok with God. I am trying to walk a fine line of giving my kids answers (because I see them looking for certainty and having security in that, and developmentally I think that’s probably important) and trying to communicate that we don’t have perfect understanding and can’t have certainty about many things.