T. Justin Comer

How To Navigate Tension Without Losing Truth

There are moments when what you believe stops working.

Not all at once. Not always dramatically. Sometimes it’s quiet. A question that lingers longer than it used to. A passage that doesn’t quite fit the way it once did. A tension you can no longer ignore. At first, it feels small. Until it isn’t. Because once a model begins to strain, you start to notice it everywhere. What once felt stable now feels fragile. What once felt obvious now feels uncertain. And eventually, you’re forced to confront something deeper than a single question:

What happens when the way I understand reality no longer holds together?

Tension Is Not the Same as Collapse

The first and most important distinction to make in this moment is simple, but not easy to live out: Not all strain is failure.

There is a difference between tension and contradiction, and if you don’t learn to tell them apart, you will either abandon things too quickly or cling to them too tightly. Tension is what happens when two things don’t yet fit together, but could. It is localized, specific, and often points to something you don’t yet understand. It creates pressure, but that pressure has direction. It invites deeper work.

Contradiction is different. Contradiction is when two claims cannot both be true in the same sense at the same time. It is not a gap in understanding—it is a breakdown in coherence. And when true contradiction is present, something must give.

The difficulty is that tension and contradiction often feel the same. Both are uncomfortable. Both disrupt your sense of stability. Both demand a response. And in that moment, most people don’t respond with careful distinction.

They respond with relief.

The Tension Curve

There is a pattern that shows up again and again when people encounter strain in their understanding. It doesn’t always look the same on the surface, but the movement is familiar.

At first, everything feels coherent. The model works. It explains what you need it to explain. There are few visible tensions, and the ones that do exist feel manageable. Then something shifts. You begin to notice inconsistencies. Questions arise. Passages don’t align as easily as they once did. What used to feel seamless now requires explanation. This is where tension begins to increase.

If you stay in that space—if you resist the urge to resolve everything immediately—something important can happen. You begin to refine. You ask better questions. You distinguish between what you know and what you assume. You start to see where your model needs adjustment. And if that process is allowed to continue, a deeper coherence can emerge. Not because the tensions were ignored, but because they were worked through.

But most people don’t stay there. The middle of that curve is unstable, and instability is difficult to tolerate for long.

Why We Rush to Resolve

The human nervous system does not like incoherence. When things stop making sense, it doesn’t just feel intellectual—it feels existential. It creates pressure to resolve, to stabilize, to restore some sense of order. And because that pressure is internal, it often goes unnoticed. It feels like urgency, like clarity, like the need to decide.

So we move quickly.

Sometimes we resolve the tension by forcing an answer. We explain things away by importing assumptions we never questioned, redefining terms just enough to make things fit, or favoring one side of a tension without fully accounting for the other. The goal is not clarity—it’s relief. The tension is gone, but the underlying issue often remains.

Other times, the response goes in the opposite direction. Instead of forcing the model to hold together, we abandon it entirely. We conclude that if this doesn’t work, then none of it works. What once felt stable is now rejected, not necessarily because it has been fully examined, but because it no longer feels safe to hold.

Both responses feel different, but they are driven by the same impulse: the need to remove tension as quickly as possible.

The Discipline of “I Don’t Know Yet”

There is a third option. It is slower, less satisfying in the moment, and often harder to maintain. But it is far more stable over time.

“I don’t know yet.”

This is not avoidance. It is not apathy. It is not an unwillingness to think. It is the discipline of allowing tension to remain without forcing it into a conclusion before it is ready. It is the willingness to hold something unresolved while still remaining committed to truth.

This kind of patience is rare, because it requires you to sit in a space where things do not fully make sense, without immediately trying to fix them. But it is also the space where the most meaningful refinement happens.

Guardrails at the Breaking Point

When your model begins to strain, you need more than instinct. You need structure—something that keeps you from drifting into premature certainty or unnecessary collapse.

Not every tension requires immediate resolution. Some tensions are signs that you are seeing something more clearly than before, even if you don’t yet understand it. They should be treated as invitations to explore, not threats to eliminate.

At the same time, not every tension is harmless. When tensions begin to accumulate—when they stack in a way that undermines the coherence of the entire model—you may be approaching something deeper. At that point, you are not just refining a detail; you may need to rethink the structure itself.

It also becomes critical to distinguish between what Scripture claims and what your model claims. When something breaks, it is easy to assume that the text has failed. But often, it is the way the text has been organized that is no longer holding. If you don’t separate those two, you risk discarding what is true because of how it was arranged.

And perhaps most importantly, you have to resist the urge to outsource the process. When your model begins to fail, it is tempting to immediately adopt someone else’s framework—someone who sounds confident, coherent, and certain. But borrowed coherence is still untested coherence. If you do not understand how a model holds together, you have not resolved the tension—you have only replaced it.

Why Deconstruction Happens

When people walk away from their beliefs, it is often not because of a single question.

It is because the system holding everything together began to fail.

Sometimes that failure is real. Sometimes it exposes contradictions that cannot be resolved without letting go of certain assumptions. But other times, what feels like collapse is actually unresolved tension that was never given time to be worked through.

When everything feels unstable, it is easy to assume that nothing is true.

But that does not follow.

A broken model does not mean reality itself is broken. It means your understanding of it needs to be rebuilt.

Reconstruction Without Losing Ground

If you reach the point where your model no longer holds, the question is not whether you should rebuild. It’s how.

You begin with what remains. What still makes sense. What still holds under pressure. What has not been overturned. You don’t try to reconstruct everything at once. You rebuild slowly, carefully, allowing each piece to be tested as it is placed.

This process can feel disorienting, but it is not a loss of truth. It is a refinement of it. You are not starting from nothing—you are starting from what has proven stable.

Why This Matters

How you respond when your model breaks says something deeper than what you believe. It reveals whether you prioritize truth or stability, whether you can tolerate uncertainty, and whether you are willing to be wrong without abandoning the search altogether. Most people don’t lose their way because they encountered something false. They lose their way because they could not hold the tension long enough to find what was true.

When your model breaks, the goal is not to escape the tension. It’s to find out whether what you’ve built can be rebuilt into something that actually holds. Our framework of reality and understanding can grow, adapt, update, coalesce, integrate, and even restabilize, but incoherence and flat out inconsistencies are destabilizing in themselves, and their exposure often feels like we are “losing faith.” In reality, we most likely aren’t losing faith, nor losing truth, but rather losing the pieces that don’t truly fit. While it might be destabilizing, and even challenge our identities and who/where we thought we were in relation to our framework of reality and understanding, but this is how we all learn and grow as human beings in general.