17 Oct
2026
Many people hope faith will work like a detour sign, steering them around trouble. Jonathan Anthony Burkett learned something different. In the “My Quotes” section of his memoir Neglected But Undefeated, he put it this way:
“Faith doesn’t get you around problems in life and relationships; it gets you through them.”
— Jonathan Anthony Burkett, Neglected But Undefeated (2012)
That sentence came out of a life that had plenty of problems. Here is how faith showed up along the way, and what you can take from it, whatever you believe.
Jonathan spent his first six years with his grandparents in Westmoreland, Jamaica. At church there he learned about heaven and hell, and his grandfather, whom everyone called “Doctor,” taught him to put Father God first. When he was sent back to South Florida to live with a mother who neglected and abused him, that early faith went with him, even though he was too young to fully understand it.
Later, a churchwoman who visited his family took him to church on weekend nights and studied the Bible with him. He wrote that through that Bible study he changed his mind about harming himself or his mother, and that “I still had faith in my Father, and I knew that he was watching over me night and day.”
Jonathan’s faith was not always calm. As a teenager, after his mother told him she had never loved him, he went outside angry and hurting and challenged God directly. Even then, he did not walk away completely. He wrote, “I still believe in you and in spirits, though, but I do not know if I can ever believe in your love for your children again.”
That kind of honesty can be comforting. Faith does not require pretending you are fine. In the front of his book, Jonathan says he apologizes to God every night for the times he did not believe because of what he was going through. Doubt was part of his journey, not the end of it.
Some of his biggest shifts came in the hardest places. A girlfriend’s grandmother, a pastor, prayed for him whenever she saw him and told him never to give up. He summed up her message like this: “if God brought me to it, he’d bring me through it.”
Later, while he was in jail and facing brain surgery, he made peace with God and came to a new understanding: “now I understand much more about one’s trials—they are all just tests.” The night before his surgery in January 2006, a friend and a neighbor went to church with him to pray. After he woke up, he told himself he would keep his promise to change.
One of the most important parts of Jonathan’s faith is that it never stayed only between him and God. He saw it working through people: grandparents, teachers, counselors, nurses, friends’ parents and strangers who fed him when he was on the streets. In his epilogue he wrote, “If I couldn’t get up, God had someone else come into my life to hold my hand and help me back up.”
That is worth remembering whether you are religious or not. Help often comes with a human face. Letting people in is part of getting through.
Your beliefs may look very different from Jonathan’s, and that is fine. Here are a few ways to draw strength from faith, hope or meaning in a hard season:
If you are going through something that feels unbearable, please reach out. If you are thinking about suicide, call or text 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, U.S.). If a child is being hurt or neglected, call 911 in an emergency, or the Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline at 1-800-422-4453.
Faith did not take Jonathan around homelessness, seizures or heartbreak. It took him through them, often with someone holding his hand. Today he writes that “life is an adventure to be enjoyed.” Whatever you are facing, you do not have to find a way around it. You only have to get through today.
You can read more of Jonathan’s words on the quotes page, or find his full story on the books page.
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