If you’re a Christian, you’ve probably heard a lot of neat, narratively convenient testimonies. Something terrible happens, and then something amazing happens that never could have taken place without the tragedy, resolving it beautifully in a bow-wrapped box. It’s satisfying, and almost seems like it was conceived in a studio.
Those stories can be inspiring, but when yours doesn’t look like that, or fit perfectly into a 90-second Instagram reel, they can be more frustrating than anything.
When you go through something awful, and you can’t rationalize it, you don’t understand why it happened, and time marches on with no miracle, no obvious redemption, no cosmic reward for what you’ve endured, it’s easy to compare your life to others’ and wonder where God is, what He’s doing, and if He is who He says He is.
It can be especially difficult to deal with when you’ve made significant progress in your walk with God, and reached what you thought was some kind of turning point or breakthrough. When you feel like you’ve achieved a new level of intimacy with the Lord and grown substantially as a Christian, and you thought you’d developed an immunity to certain habits, only to realize how fallible you are and how fragile it all is.
You may think you’ve come too far in your walk with God for your life’s circumstances to make you question His goodness, His plan, His presence or even His existence. Or you may think you’ve gotten too strong to revert to your vices. And then you do.
It’s disorienting when you look around, and everyone else’s progress seems linear, and yours looks like a rollercoaster blueprint or a doctor’s signature.
You might be upset with yourself. You might be upset with the world. You might be upset with God, wondering why what seems like a season for other people feels like a life sentence for you, or why the relief you’ve been waiting for never seems to come.
It’s easy to feel like God has favorites and you aren’t one of them. It’s easy to feel like He wrote other people’s lives to be cinematic masterpieces, while your life was an unfinished script He discarded and forgot about.
I understand where you’re coming from, and I empathize with it.
But as natural as it is to feel envy and resentment when your story isn’t unfolding the way you believe it should, the truth is that God will always be a better creative director than you.
God knows you better than you’ve ever known yourself or ever will. He knows what you can’t remember, what you haven’t realized, and what you’re trying to bury.
He’s smarter than you, He’s wiser than you, and He wants better for you than you want for yourself – even when it doesn’t feel like it.
Your story may be slower paced, less predictable and messier than you would have liked.
Maybe you’re unlucky. Maybe it’s your fault. But maybe it’s for a reason.
Maybe He isn’t withholding the fairy tale ending you want because He loves you less than anyone else, but because He loves you enough to prioritize what He knows you need over what you think you want.
As isolating as it can feel as you’re living it, there’s nothing new about it. The Bible is filled with lives “off schedule,” dreams dashed and deferred, prayers seemingly ignored and people struggling to reconcile what they thought their story should be with what it actually is. It seems like some people’s problems last for days, and others last for decades, usually with no explanation.
We never get a detailed timeline of how long Hannah struggled with infertility, but I think it’s a safe guess that it was a small fraction of what Sarah experienced. And only God knows why. But what we can see clearly – centuries later – is that it all served a purpose.
Joseph was enslaved for over a decade and spent two years in prison.
The Bible never explicitly mentions how long Job was afflicted, but we know that by the seventh chapter in a book that had 42, it had already been going on for months.
And Jesus, who suffered more than anyone who ever lived or ever will, was on the cross for six hours.
Maybe God packages our pain differently — not because He cares less for some, but because He designed us with such intention and specificity that He refuses to waste a single detail as He writes our lives.
We have an instinct to look around us, and compare our predicaments, but only God can see the full picture. What looks like His cruelty, injustice or indifference from our limited individual perspectives never turns out to be what we thought it was in the grand scheme of things.
When I look back on the disappointments and devastations from my adolescence well into my adulthood, there’s a lot that makes perfect sense in hindsight – but there’s a lot that doesn’t. And I don’t know that it ever will.
It’s hard to accept this when you’re naturally curious, when you’re intellectual, when you’re hungry for clarity and appreciate closure. But one of the most humbling aspects of walking with God is accepting your limits as the creation and not the Creator.
There are things we may never understand, but understanding isn’t our job.
Our job is to trust.
Trust doesn’t mean pretending everything is fine. It doesn’t mean muzzling your questions or masking your emotions. It means choosing to believe that even when you can’t feel Him, you can’t see Him and you have no idea what He’s doing or why, God is still who He says He is — still good, still present, still working.
God never promised us lives without hardship. But the more time you spend with Him and in His Word, the clearer it becomes that He doesn’t let it go to waste.
So if your story doesn’t look like the ones you’ve heard, take heart — it’s still being written, and the Author hasn’t lost the plot.
what do you think?