Forgiving God
GETTING HURT BY PEOPLE is hard. Getting hurt by what God allows can feel unbearable. While I might phrase my disillusionment as a question of why or how, when I lay my head on my tear-soaked pillow, questions can turn into bitter feelings. I probably wouldn’t want to raise my hand at Bible study and admit I’m honestly struggling to forgive God, but I have questions around this. I have hurt feelings. Maybe you do too. That’s where I was last week.
I truly believed God would give me some time before another hard thing hit.
We have a large family with lots of people who are very involved in one another’s lives, so it’s only understandable that there’s always some kind of situation. I’m usually able to just roll with all the personalities and different ways of processing. But last week, there was a situation brewing that I couldn’t help reacting to with extra sensitivity. Some of my people were wanting to invest in a new business. Everyone seemed on board but me.
Again, it takes me time to figure out exactly what I am feeling. And though I couldn’t exactly put my finger on it, I knew my fear around this situation was intense. All I could see was disaster ahead. It wasn’t life threatening, but every time my people were discussing it, it felt personally threatening to me because they all assumed I’d willingly invest along with them.
I was certain God was going to take care of handling it and shutting the whole thing down.
I prayed. I built a very solid case with God and all my people. I trusted this was going to go away.
Right from the beginning, I didn’t think this investment was a good idea. I’d shared my concerns and even made a list of all the impossible obstacles that would need to be moved in order for me to agree to participate. There was no doubt in my mind that either God would prevent this or the complications would make it a moot point. Either way, I just knew it would all work out.
But instead of God closing the doors, it seemed one after another were being flung open. It was like a miraculous intervention in reverse. Instead of God preventing it, it looked like He was moving to make it happen. And while my family was more and more thrilled by each passing day, I just got more and more withdrawn. I tried so hard to see the good in what was happening. I tried to remind myself that my family members are smart business people with good track records. I tried to remind myself that not every feeling of fear is an indication of impending doom.
But no matter how I tried to rally, I couldn’t override the main story line in my head. Sometimes worst-case scenarios do happen. Hasn’t this last season of our life made that crystal clear? Why won’t you people listen to me?
I was so incredibly anxious. Then I was just increasingly mad and moody and stewing as every single obstacle was removed, and suddenly this wasn’t just a conversation; it was becoming a reality.
Not only did I want to completely withdraw from my family, but I wanted to get a bit quiet with God too. All I could see was all the chaotic potential. I wish I could tell you I handled this with a mature attitude eager to have calm conversations seeking clarity and common good we could all agree on. But I did not.
I pouted.
I made comments that left no room at all for speculation over where I stood with all of this.
I felt like my concerns didn’t matter to anyone.
I cried so they could hear me. I shut cabinets and doors with extra force. I could feel the bitterness settling in as I planned all the “I told you so” scripts that would make me feel so very justified when this thing bombed.
I sat down in front of my journal and wrote the word confused.
And almost immediately a phrase flashed across my mind: This investment is an answered prayer.
What?!
There was no way that what I was looking at was part of God’s answer to me. I refused to acknowledge the statement. But, I also couldn’t unhear it.
Now, every time the investment was mentioned, I heard that same statement, This is an answered prayer.
I’ve sat with that thought for more than a week now.
It’s messed with me. Mostly in a good way, but it’s also poked me in an area I’m still quite sensitive in—trusting God when I don’t understand what He’s doing. What He’s allowing. I cannot see with my eyes or rationalize with my brain how any of this is God’s answered prayer. But maybe that’s the point. Maybe this is the place where it’s time to start rebuilding trust with God.
It’s not that God did something wrong and broke my trust. It’s that God didn’t do what I expected, or He did something I don’t understand, which makes it harder for me to trust Him. Sometimes when there are trust issues with people, it leaves you in this weird place of suddenly wondering who else in your world is not telling you the complete story. Even the slightest skepticism like this can quickly turn into full-blown suspicions that leak into all your relationships, including your relationship with God.
Maybe this is the part of my healing journey where I take the “what if I’ve been looking at this wrong?” question we ended the last chapter with and try to apply this to my current situation.
For seven days now I’ve been praying, “God, help me to see what is in front of me as my answered prayer.” And I’ll be honest with you, my brain keeps firing alarming statements of resistance to this whole idea. But, as I’ve also looked at what God’s Word teaches us about the way God provides for us and why I might not interpret what I’m seeing correctly, I’ve been quite blown away. In a good way. Too good for me not to share this with you.
Since trust in relationships is built in part with good communication, then more effectively praying has to play a role in my trust with God. I’ve been praying for almost as long as I’ve been living. But I’ve very rarely had the thought to look around at my life and see today, this moment, in this season, as the answered prayer.
When I think about prayer requests, I think of what I “hope” God will do . . . not what “has been done” for today.
The reason I miss seeing what I’m living today as the answer to my prayers is that very often, maybe even always, it’s not what I thought it would be. God’s answers don’t look like what I have pictured so clearly in my mind.
And this is what complicates my prayer life; it all feels so unknown and uncertain.
At times I’ve seen my prayers as wishful requests that feel good to make but deep down I know are not very likely to happen. Like throwing a penny in a fountain or thinking of my deepest desire just before blowing out my birthday candles. I keep doing it but truly expect very little.
Or, I’ve looked at prayers like Amazon Prime deliveries. I want what’s delivered to look like what I expected and to arrive in record time. The answer will be delivered to my front door right away, and I feel so close to God because He did what I wanted! But there’s something too human and predictable about that being the way prayer actually works. Then my prayers become orders I place, the answers as cheap as products, and the sender nothing more than a far-removed entity I give little thought to until I need something else.
With prayer, I’ve expected too little of God and too much of myself. I’ve expected an infinite God to reduce His vast ways of doing things down to only what I can think up and pray for.
I want to change this. I want to come to God with my needs, my desires, my desperate longings, and recognize whatever He places before me is His daily bread. Yes, people may create chaos that’s not from God. And yes, the brokenness of this world may bring brokenness to my reality. But in the midst of this, there is good provision from God! That’s what I must look for and make the choice to see.
When Jesus taught us what to pray each day, His first request was for daily bread. But isn’t it true that bread took on many different forms in the Bible? Sometimes it looks like a loaf from the oven (Leviticus 2:4), other times like manna from heaven (Deuteronomy 8:3), or best of all like Jesus who declared Himself as the bread of life (John 6:35).
But if His provision doesn’t look like what we expect, we might not recognize that what’s in front of us is His bread. As 1 Corinthians points out, “Now we see things imperfectly, like puzzling reflections in a mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely” (13:12 NLT, emphasis mine).
Only God can see what’s missing in our lives as we ask for His provision. We feel the ache of a need and naturally fill in the blank of what we think we need. But our lives are like a jumble of puzzle pieces. We are just slowly putting things together piece by piece, and while we make some connections of how things fit together, we don’t yet see the full picture. Therefore, we can’t possibly know exactly what’s missing.
God sees it all crystal clear. He’s never unsure or afraid or intimidated by the gaps. He allows missing pieces so that we don’t have to do it all on our own. This is where His provision fits in. He always sees the shape of the missing pieces and gives us a portion of Himself, which sometimes looks like a loaf, other times manna, but most of all like Jesus.
All three are God’s perfect provision. But with our human eyes, we would probably only recognize the loaf of bread as good and most fitting, and what a tragedy that would be. We may be crying because nothing looks like a loaf while we have manna all around us or, even better, Jesus Himself.
The loaf of bread may be what I want from God—maybe even what I expect from God—but if it doesn’t look like I think it should, it can make me question His love or maybe even begin to resent Him for not coming through. I want His provision to look the way I think it will. But isn’t the loaf the least miraculous of all the forms of bread? It’s the kind of provision we have to work to receive from the ground. We harvest the wheat and process it and then bake it—all with our own hands. But maybe that’s what I like so much about the loaf of bread. Since I’m working for it, I have a sense of control.
Manna, on the other hand, represents what God simply gives. The manna that fell from heaven for the children of Israel was God’s perfect sustenance for their desert living. It looked more like little seeds or flakes than loaves of bread. And yet it came directly from God day by day, not from nature, and kept more than two million Israelites alive in the desert for the forty years they needed it. It was miraculous. But even with manna, people had some part to play. They had to go outside their tents to pick it up. They didn’t grow it, but they could count on it consistently. So control and consistency make me feel like I’m trusting God when in reality I’m just counting on Him to the level that He comes through for me.
Let’s not forget the best kind of bread, though, which is the bread of life: Jesus Himself. This isn’t provision we work for or provision we simply pick up; this is provision in Christ deposited inside of us that nourishes and sustains us all the way down to our souls. Jesus is the most miraculous provision, and the one already given to us today, but maybe the one least recognized as being everything we need. And the one we struggle to trust because He is the provision we can neither control or consistently demand be delivered on our timetable. Ugh . . . that’s not a fun sentence to read, but it is important to consider.
If we have Jesus today, we are living in answered prayer and perfect provision. The one who brings about good, even from the awful we are seeing with our physical eyes, is actively working on our behalf right now. In 1 John 2:1 Jesus is called our advocate, meaning He sits at the right hand of God and intercedes for us (Romans 8:34). He is talking to the Father about you right now in ways that, if you could hear Him, would make you never afraid of what is in front of you. You wouldn’t question His love for you or His goodness to you. Therefore, we don’t need to forgive God. We need to trust Him.
Now, I know you might be saying, “Look, Lysa, what’s in front of me is awful, so this doesn’t make me want to trust God more. It makes me trust Him less!” I understand that. I’ve thought about my friends I mentioned in the last chapter. One is sitting beside her daughter’s bed in the hospital, hearing heartbreaking news from the doctor. Another will be going to bed alone tonight, because her now ex-husband is with someone else. And the other is still emotionally paralyzed with anxiety. So I could imagine them saying to me, “I just want my daughter healed, my husband to come home, and my anxiety to go away. I just want my loaf of bread to look like the provision from God I expected.”
I know, dear friend. I know. I feel the same way about some of what’s in front of me right now too. Bigger stuff than just this investment situation. Hard stuff that still makes me cry.
But if God isn’t giving His provision to us in the way we expect right now, then we must trust there’s something God knows that we don’t know. We may see it in time, or not until eternity. But until we see it, we can know with certainty that what He gives us truly is His good provision, whether that good is for today or part of a much bigger plan. Even when what we see in front of us feels confusing. Even when what we see in front of us isn’t at all what we thought it would look like. Even when we don’t agree that this is good. We don’t have to understand God to trust Him.
C. S. Lewis created a beautiful word picture I like to think of when I cannot understand what God is doing. He told us to think of ourselves as a house God is renovating. We think we know what work needs to be done—maybe some small repairs here and there—and then He starts knocking down walls. We are confused and feeling the pain of this level of rebuilding. But maybe His vision is much different than ours. “You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.”1
We see a cottage. God sees a palace. We see destruction. God sees construction. We see only what the human mind can imagine. God is building something we cannot even fathom. It’s not what we wanted, but it is so very good. And in the end, maybe it’s not what God is working on but how God is working in us that matters most of all.
So, pray what you know to pray. Pray what you need to pray. Pray all the words and let the tears flow into sobs and demands and frustrations and doubts mixed with hope. But then let the faithfulness of God interpret what you see. Let the faithfulness of God build your trust. Let the faithfulness of God ease the ache of your confusion and bitterness and bewilderment.
God’s faithfulness isn’t demonstrated by His activity aligning with your prayers. It’s your prayers aligning with His faithfulness and His will where you become more and more assured of His activity. Even if, maybe especially if, His activity and His answers don’t look like you thought they would.
I titled this chapter “Forgiving God,” not because God needs to be forgiven. But sometimes, in the middle of deep hurt, our hearts can start to wrongly believe God is at fault. When we truly feel we’ve asked God for something urgently necessary, good, right, and holy, like saving a marriage or a loved one’s life or preventing something horrific from happening, and God doesn’t do it? We wouldn’t say He sinned, but we very much may feel betrayed by Him. Or disillusioned by Him. Or possibly wonder if God even cares about us.
When the evils of this world rage around us and terrible tragedies break our hearts, it is understandable why we weep, bang our fists on the steering wheel, scream out very hard words, feel consumed by the seemingly never-ending unfairness of it all, and wrestle through all the questions berating our grief-filled souls.
The problem is when we form conclusions from that place. Because, as we’ve been talking about, our perspectives—especially while we are here—aren’t complete.
What we see today isn’t all there is to see. Our thinking and our ways are imperfect. If we can’t understand God’s thoughts and His ways on our best days, we certainly will not be able to understand them on our worst days. The apostle Paul was very direct with his instructions that we are to destroy arguments and opinions raised against the knowledge of God:
For though we walk in the flesh, we are not waging war according to the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ. (2 Corinthians 10:3–5 ESV)
No matter what we see, when an argument or opinion enters our mind that speaks against God’s goodness, we don’t entertain it; we destroy it before it starts causing destruction in us.
This is a much bigger deal than what I’d realized. Don’t miss this.
From the very beginning of Scripture, the enemy of our souls has used arguments against God to get us to doubt God and erode our trust in Him. With Eve, the enemy used the lofty opinion that having her eyes opened to good and evil would help her be more like God because she would “know” what God knows.
What a lie that was. She knew a world without evil. What the enemy tricked her into wanting was the “knowledge of good and evil.”
In Genesis, Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit didn’t just allow sin in the world. They traded their perfect, eternal perspective for an imperfect earthly perspective.
I don’t want you to miss this. Adam and Eve had an eternal perspective before sin, a perfect trust in God because they saw everything in light of His good plan and absolute goodness. But when they ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, they traded their eternal perspective for an earthly perspective. And when they received the knowledge of good and evil, confusion set in. Fear of the unknown replaced the assurance and peace they previously had.
They noticed their own nakedness. They felt feelings of shame. They tried to cover themselves and hide. And one of the consequences of their sin was they had to leave the perfection of the garden. Tragically, Genesis 3 ends with them leaving the garden, and then in Genesis 4 they have two sons, one of whom murders the other.
It was such a bad trade. They gave up what we so desperately want—the clarity of seeing everything in light of eternity—for what we now struggle through: the confusion of heartbreak on earth.
We are living with our eyes open to good and evil. The enemy is such a liar. This awareness didn’t help mankind understand more. Sin only makes us think that what we see on earth is all there is to know.
Only God sees both the earthly realm and the heavenly realm from an eternal perspective. So only God sees the full picture with everything we face.
From our vantage point here in this world, we can’t see everything in a complete way. We can’t see the complete story. We can’t see the complete healing. We can’t see the complete restoration. We can’t see the complete redemption. We can only see the part that exists on the earth.
When I was saying God wasn’t answering my prayers, what I was really saying was God wasn’t doing what I wanted Him to do. I know God is in control. But the more I can’t understand what I see, the more I want to take back control for myself. We try to control what we don’t trust. I think I’ve just wrongly assigned to God hurt caused by people. When what I’m praying for is the only evidence I’m using to determine how involved God is or how faithful God is, it’s no wonder I get so disillusioned.
It’s no wonder I cry and ask why and feel so very betrayed at times.
Sometimes people can have hidden agendas and skewed motives. Sometimes people lie. Sometimes people don’t seek a greater good. But none of this is true about God. He is good. He is the only source of making anything good out of everything in front of me. Trusting God with all of this is what my soul was made to do. I guess it just takes time for my battered heart and my prone-to-fear mind to catch up.
As I factor all of this into the situation I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, I’m starting to understand why I need to see what’s in front of me as God’s answered prayer. It’s not that I’m convinced the investment itself is from God. And certainly God did not cause my friend’s daughter to be injured or my other friend’s husband to leave or my other friend’s anxiety to be so intense. God didn’t cause it, but He’s very much aware of it. And He very much sees a bigger picture and has a plan to take all of this and somehow weave it into something that is good.
Again, the opposite of faith isn’t doubt. The opposite of faith is being too certain of the wrong things. Let’s end this chapter with how I now see what I went through with Art. Remember the story I told in the last chapter? The prayer meeting. The church. The absolute certainty I felt that God wasn’t working. Enough time has now passed that I have seen more of the bigger picture unfold.
Here is what I was too certain of:
When I didn’t see Art have an emotional response to the prayer service, I was certain that meant God wasn’t getting through to him.
When Art didn’t respond to my emotions the way I thought he should, I was certain that meant he no longer cared about me.
When Art was knee-deep in choices that broke my heart, I was certain he was absolutely elated and loving his party life.
I was too certain of many wrong things.
God was moving. God was working. Art wasn’t having the time of his life. He now calls that season a nightmare. God was doing His best work in the unseen. And, depending on how Art responded, God would either rescue me out or reconcile us in the relationship. Either way, each day was God’s answered prayer. And though I very rarely got the loaves of bread I kept looking for, I was living a slow-working miracle I just couldn’t see.
I now realize God doesn’t need to be forgiven.
He hasn’t wronged me.
He hasn’t sinned.
I was just looking at the hardest place and thinking it was the end. I missed something so important. Something I now see. What things look like from an earthly perspective God sees differently.
I kept seeing what I’d lost, the damage, the hurt, the pain. I was blinded to the fact that I don’t know all there is, what’s really best and what is not. And though the days were awful, I was not without God.
God does some of His best work in the unseen.
Every day He was providing for me. Every day He was there. And whether I could recognize it or not, I was living in answered prayers.
So today I look at what’s right in front of me through what I know to be true about God. This is a gift. This can be used for good. This is somehow part of a much bigger story. And I can trust Him to also make it beautiful. Now, I just have to keep making the choice to look for the beautiful.