My friend Gardilia passed away this week.

Despite her prolonged, intense suffering, she was one of the most joyful, positive people I’ve ever met. I think about her and her faithful heart every time I have a rough day.

She shared her story with us two years ago. I’m sharing it again today because it’s worth reading twice.

One quick update before we get to Gardilia: My PET scan came back clear. My cancer has not returned. After taking you along through these past few weeks of waiting, I didn’t want to leave you waiting too.

Now I want you to hear from my friend. This post belongs to Gardilia.

By Gardilia Rivas

“I know exactly what you have,” my rheumatologist told me after squeezing my forearms. I noticed the excitement in his voice as he moved his examination to my shins and ankles.

It was early fall of 2007, and in a previous visit to his office, he had diagnosed me with fibromyalgia. Rheumatoid arthritis was mentioned as a definite possibility. This would explain the persistent pain I had been recently experiencing in both knees whenever I descended a flight of stairs. However, my symptoms were progressing beyond what I had read about R.A. and fibromyalgia. I informed him that my fingers were becoming stiff and puffy while the skin of my knuckles was taking on an unusually dark tone.

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“You have what’s called scleroderma.” My doctor explained that scleroderma is a relatively rare condition in the autoimmune family and manifests itself in the overproduction of collagen in various organs. Its effect on the skin is most noticeable as it tightens up and gives off a shiny appearance.

After setting up my next appointment, I left the doctor’s office feeling relieved. I was no longer in the dark. I hoped that some extensive research would provide the leverage I needed to manage this relatively unknown condition. Curiosity and acceptance outweighed any real concerns I had at the time. I took the news as something God would use however he saw fit.

Scleroderma is considered a terminal illness

As time went on, it was discovered that this strange illness impacted not only my skin but also my heart, kidneys, and lungs as well. Once this realization occurred to the specialist, my diagnosis officially became systemic scleroderma. I was placed on a regimen of eleven prescriptions and visited my rheumatologist regularly.

Scleroderma is considered a terminal illness. It afflicts approximately 300,000 individuals per year in the United States and has a life expectancy of up to ten years. The debilitation can happen quickly or take many years to progress completely.

When I searched online for others who suffered from this disorder, I discovered that Bob Saget of “Fuller House” was a huge advocate for scleroderma research. His sister passed away from it in 1994. Seinfeld’s Jason Alexander’s sister and Queen Latifah’s mother also lost their lives to scleroderma.

The impact on my life was minimal at first. At the time, I was a working mother of a one-year-old toddler and three teen stepdaughters with Juan, my husband of three years. Juan was as supportive as he could be. He came with me to my appointments to acquire more information about my condition and its prognosis. The two of us maintained normalcy as I worked full-time in the corporate office of an insurance carrier and my husband at a financial services firm.

Serving was a way to keep my mind outward-focused

Though there were many moments I wanted to discontinue volunteering in children’s ministry at church, I decided to push through the physical pain. It was a way for me to keep my mind outward-focused. This service contributed to my quality of life and made me feel fortunate to be given the life that I had. Despite life’s disappointments and adversity, I had learned God always has a plan that would reveal His glory. I wanted to see and be part of what He could do.

However, no positive outlook was able to soften the effect of my illness, and I moved through life automatically. Work and home responsibilities kept me moving at my usual pace while I asked God for help.

Help arrived in a new way of focusing on prayer

The first significant opportunity to see God work came several years after my diagnosis. Fortunately, help arrived in a new way of focusing on prayer. A series of books by Mark Batterson encouraged me to tap deeper into my faith while communicating with God. This focus energized my walk with Him as I learned to leave my concerns in His hands.

Despite asking for miraculous healing throughout my forties, I saw my physical health deteriorate. I was experiencing massive sadness as my condition changed. On the other hand, I think of the many lessons I needed to learn and how I was forced to set aside my pride to ask for help. As much as I did not want this condition, some insights came with it that I didn’t want to give back.

This disease has taken away my ability to walk without a substantial amount of pain

Almost two decades later, this disease has taken away my ability to walk without a substantial amount of pain. My 5’3” frame weighs a little over 90 pounds. With calcium overtaking every joint, I am disfigured, most visibly in the hands. Our family practitioner diagnosed me with Stage C congestive heart failure. My scarred kidneys have ceased functioning, leaving me to rely on dialysis to remove excess body fluid. Because of my overall fragility, I was deemed ineligible for the kidney transplant waitlist.

As you can imagine, I no longer look like the vibrant woman my husband was introduced to at our church’s singles conference 22 years ago. He and my youngest daughter have graciously taken on the role of caregivers by bringing me meals and helping me get dressed.

Whining about my situation was an expression of entitlement

Every so often, I experience frustrations over my disability. Some years ago, I realized that whining about my situation was an expression of entitlement. During a morning devotion, I read Jesus’ words in the book of Luke (NIV): “Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will but your will be done.” It dawned on me that I was placing myself in a position above Christ, who suffered in agony until his last breath. He did so to glorify God. Am I better than Christ that I should not suffer for the glory of God?

Suffering can affect my mood and impair my cheerful perspective. To remedy this, I recite Psalm 51:12 (NIV) in a prayer: “Restore to me the joy of your salvation and grant me a willing spirit to sustain me.” Doing this has never failed to pull me out of discontentment. It also reminds me that my spiritual walk with the Father is what matters.

This would take my focus off of myself and place it firmly on God

I am beginning to grasp the meaning of Philippians 4:4-8 (NIV): “Rejoice in the Lord always…Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”

During my hospitalizations in 2020, I decided to read a scripture aloud each day in Psalms. I knew this would take all focus off of myself and place it firmly on God. Since then, I have been rewarded with a peace that guards my joy to this very day.

I hope these thoughts will encourage you and help you understand how God can get us through adversity.

Thank you for reading my story.

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Gardilia will be deeply missed.

I sat in the doctor’s office, trying to look cool and relaxed as I waited to see my oncologist. I had to fake it for a while because the wait was longer than usual.

My doctor finally breezed in, looked at my second MRI results, and said, “Oh no.”

That wasn’t the response I wanted.

She explained that my kind of cancer usually metastasizes to the spine. The suspicious spot is on the back of my pelvis, on the sacrum—which is part of the spine.

I had to Google it.

Yet the MRI was still inconclusive. So she ordered a PET scan.

And that might be inconclusive, too.

Basically, I still don’t have answers and probably won’t for weeks.

But something has changed.

I’m not as consumed by the uncertainty as I was last week.

Even though I’d prefer knowing the spot is benign, I’m beginning to realize I can be okay without knowing.

The book of Habakkuk has helped my life make a little more sense.

God Finally Answered. It Didn’t Help.

During Habakkuk’s days, the northern kingdom of Israel had already fallen. When Habakkuk looked around Judah, he saw violence, injustice, conflict, and a justice system that wasn’t working.

In his anguish, he cried to God, “How long shall I cry for help, and you will not hear?” (Habakkuk 1:2 ESV)

God finally answered.

Essentially, He said, “I am doing something. I’m sending the Chaldeans to conquer your country.”

That sounds like an answer until you know who the Chaldeans were.

They were even more violent and cruel than the people Habakkuk was complaining about.

Habakkuk didn’t like the answer, and I wouldn’t have either.

He had lamented to God about how bad things were, and God basically said, “Yes, and things are going to get even worse.”

I would have thought, “God, I liked it better when you were silent.”

Habakkuk went back to God and questioned how a holy God could use people even more wicked than Judah to carry out His purposes.

Then Habakkuk did something I’d missed in the past.

He waited.

He Waited, But He Didn’t Do It Alone

“I will stand at my watch post,” he said. “I will station myself on the rampart; I will keep watch to see what he will say to me.”

Habakkuk couldn’t stop the Chaldeans. Nor could he make the people around him change.

So he waited.

But he didn’t do it alone.

He stayed in conversation with God.

He questioned Him. He listened. He protested. He waited. And eventually, he began remembering God’s mercy, His power, and what He had done in the past.

By chapter three, Habakkuk’s situation hadn’t improved.

In fact, Habakkuk was still afraid. He described his heart pounding, his lips quivering, and his legs trembling.

What changed wasn’t his circumstances.

It was where he was looking.

He had begun the book looking at everything going wrong around him and asking God, “How long?”

Now he was looking at God.

And at the end of the book, Habakkuk says:

“He makes my feet like the deer’s; He makes me tread on high places.” (Habakkuk 3:19 ESV)

God didn’t level the mountain for Habakkuk.

He gave him the feet for it.

My Field of Vision Is Getting Bigger

That’s what I’m beginning to find in Habakkuk.

When I read it, I find companionship.

Right now, it’s easy for my field of vision to fill with MRI, sacrum, spine, PET scan, and cancer.

Habakkuk was surrounded by violence, injustice, the Chaldeans, and destruction.

Neither of us could make those things disappear by thinking more spiritual thoughts.

But my problems don’t have to fill the entire frame. My field of vision can expand.

Habakkuk reminds me that I don’t have to understand God to keep talking to Him. I can ask questions. I can tell Him when I don’t like the answer. I can wait. I can remember what He’s done before. I can notice Him more.

And that’s part of what’s happening to me now.

I feel closer to God.

I almost hate writing that because it sounds like I’m about to tell you to “Trust God in the Waiting.”

I could embroider that on every pillow in my living room and it wouldn’t help.

Statements like that don’t tell us how to get there.

I needed my attention pulled back to God.

And that’s what Habakkuk is doing for me.

I Still Want the Answer

I don’t understand why we sometimes have to wait so long for life-altering answers. I’d still like for the radiologist to say, “Patty, this is nothing. Go home and quit Googling your sacrum.”

I want the answer.

But I don’t want to miss what’s happening while I wait for it.

I’m learning things about God that I don’t seem to learn when everything is fine. I’m talking to Him differently. I’m paying closer attention. And somehow, in the middle of something I would never have chosen, I feel closer to Him.

God isn’t any closer than He was before, but uncertainty has made me more aware of how close He already is.

Your Turn

What are you learning about God in a situation you wish He would hurry up and resolve?

I’m sitting on the couch with my laptop, checking my email every few minutes. A notification pops up from my primary care physician’s office, and I rush to open it. Maybe the results are in.

They aren’t. But the email says my doctor is referring me back to my oncologist.

Did she know something? I called her office to ask when she’d sent the referral. Of course, when I called, we had a bad connection, and I had to call back multiple times to get my answer.

She had sent the referral before I’d even had my second MRI. She was just practicing standard protocol. A few weeks ago, I had severe hip pain. The first MRI showed spots on my pelvis and femur. Probably nothing, but my history of cancer bought me a second, more detailed scan.

A woman with my history and spots on her bones belongs to oncology no matter what the scan says.

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So, I spent an afternoon agonizing over an email that told me nothing.

And now I’m here, refreshing my email. Over and over.

Three of me on one couch

Part of me is planning how to organize Charlotte’s care while I’m on chemo.

Part of me keeps saying it’s nothing, stop thinking about it, you’re overreacting.

And part of me is standing over both of them with a clipboard, grading me on how I’m handling this.

What do I do when I don’t know enough to be afraid, but know too much not to be?

I thought about looking up what the Bible says about waiting, so I could get better at it. If I’m close enough to God, I should be able to glide through uncertainty.

That thought came from Clipboard Lady. So naturally, I obeyed her. I opened a new tab and typed Bible verses on waiting. I probably could have found them on my own, but I was too grumpy to put in the effort.

I saw Psalmists complain. They cried out for answers and asked God to stop taking so long. Habakkuk flat-out accused God of idly watching injustice (Habakkuk 1:3, 1:13 ESV). But they all stayed in the conversation.

Then I got to the word itself. The Hebrew word often translated as “wait” is qavah. Its root has been associated with a cord drawn tight—with tension and expectancy. I sit here with my hip aching, staring at my inbox. That doesn’t look much like serenity.

I used to have handouts

I’ve taught entire classes on worry. I’ve had handouts. I’ve stood in front of women who were waiting on biopsies and prodigals and husbands who hadn’t decided yet whether they were staying, and I’ve implied their fear was a spiritual failure with a scripture reference attached.

I thought I was helping.

Now when I read, “Do not worry” (Matthew 6:25), I hear an invitation into a different way of living, not Jesus standing over me with Clipboard Lady’s citation book.

Clipboard Lady doesn’t like any of this. She wants waiting to have rules. A spiritual person should handle this better. A spiritual person should always be at peace.

Writing from the middle

I almost didn’t write this post because the spots are probably benign, and I didn’t want to make a big deal about it. But then I realized my bigger concern was for me. I didn’t want to feel silly when I got the benign results, like I’d sounded an alarm over nothing.

I’m writing this before I have the results because once I know, I’ll remember this waiting differently.

Somewhere, a woman from one of those classes is still waiting for her son to call. She’s been in the middle of it for twenty years. I’d like to tell her I’ve since revised my position.

I have to go now—it’s time to refresh my email again. And to fire Clipboard Lady, who has already started critiquing this article.

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Dear Friends,

We traveled to California this week to visit my older son, Blake, and his family.

Last fall, Blake talked me into trying a procedure he’d heard might help my lupus. An integrative dentist would clean out cavitations left in my jaw from having my wisdom teeth removed when I was 17. His theory was that for decades, those areas could have been contributing to inflammation in my body.

It sounded ridiculous to me. I didn’t want someone opening up my jaw based on a theory. I was also resistant because I’d tried so-called cures over the years that did nothing but take my money, and sometimes made me feel worse.

In my mind, it was time for me to stop looking for a cure, and focus on coping.

But I love my son dearly, and he wouldn’t give up. So last October, I finally agreed to have the procedure.

The doctor told me it could take a few months before I saw a change. By March, I still hadn’t noticed a difference.

Then, suddenly, in May, I realized I’d gone a couple of weeks without a sick day. I was afraid to say anything. I didn’t want to jinx it (I know, real spiritual). But I’ve been feeling better ever since.

It might be because of that procedure. I don’t know. But I do know I’m feeling better than I have in decades.

So, me being me, I pushed it. Blake got his stubbornness from somewhere.

While we were in California, I went on long walks by the beach with Blake. I spent time in the sunshine, which usually makes my lupus flare. I kept doing more and more.

I wanted to show off. “Look at me, everyone! I’m better!”

Then I hit the wall. That night I could barely sit up through dinner and went to bed at 7 p.m.

I spent most of the next day in bed.

I still haven’t learned my limitations. Apparently I have to keep finding them the hard way.

And I don’t have some great new insight about how to do that. Just the same old ones that I need to go back and read.

So instead of finding a new way to say the same thing, I want to hear from you.

What have you learned lately that the rest of us might need to hear? Or what haven’t you figured out at all?

That’s really what I want these Dear Friends letters to be—a place where we can say some of the ugly stuff out loud. You don’t have to have an answer before you talk about it.

Maybe you’ve been wrestling with something you think you’re the only person in the world dumb enough to struggle with. Trust me, you’re not.

When I was angry at God and thought, “Why bother to pray?” I was so ashamed of myself. I thought I was the only one. When I got open about it, so many people said, “Thank you! I’ve felt that way, too.”

So tell us.

I’ll be reading the comments, and I hope you’ll read each other’s too.

Love,
Patty

This article perfectly describes how my own view of God has evolved. I thought you might relate to it too, so I asked Dan if I could share it here.

I’ve been reading Dan’s work on Medium for a while. His writing about life and God has helped me work through my own doubts and rethink my understanding of God. He has a gift for digging beneath the easy answers and exploring the harder questions with thoughtfulness and depth.

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The 7 Versions of God We Believe In Before We Grow Up

By Dan Foster

The very first prayer I remember learning as a child was really a prayer that God wouldn’t kill me in my sleep. And, if God did not see fit to grant that simple request, that he would at least give me the consolation of entering Heaven instead.

Perhaps you have heard this prayer before. If you grew up in the evangelical church bubble, you might have even prayed it yourself. Here is how it goes:

Now I lay me down to sleep
I pray the Lord, my soul to keep
But if at morn I do not wake
I pray the Lord, my soul to take.

Now, it might seem like a nice little prayer, but I can assure you that when I was praying it, in my childlike mind, it felt like I had a 50–50 chance of waking up tomorrow.

Rightly or wrongly, this little prayer reflects a certain understanding of who God is and what he is like.

And that’s the strange thing about growing up with God.

Long before we are old enough to wrestle with theology, we are already forming a picture of the “person” at the center of it all. We pick up clues from prayers and Bible stories, from sermons and Sunday school teachers, from our parents, and from the things that happen to us. Piece by piece, we construct a version of God that makes sense to us at that particular stage of life.

And then, if we’re fortunate, we grow up.

The God we believed in at seven may not survive what we experience at seventeen. In fact, if we are doing our spiritual journey well, that God should be gone by the time we reach our twenties. Then, the God who made perfect sense at twenty-five may begin to feel inadequate at forty.

As life happens, one “God” gives way to the next until, hopefully, we reach maturity. Looking back on my own journey, I can recognize at least seven versions of God I have believed in along the way.

1. The Protective God

This is the God I was praying to in my bedside prayer when I was a small child. This is the God who keeps us safe. He is the God of small children.

The world is a scary and unpredictable place, so the idea that there is someone bigger watching over us is comforting. We are taught that God protects us. My father would always pray a prayer for safety whenever my family would set out on a road trip… as if Christians are never in traffic accidents.

At this stage, prayers are simple:

• “Please help.

• “Please protect Mum.”

• “Please don’t let bad things happen.”

At this stage, God functions psychologically as a secure attachment figure… like your earthly parents but better, bigger and stronger.

The key question that drives us at this age is this: Am I safe?

2. The Rule-Giving God

As we move through our childhood and into adolescence, life becomes all about forming our identity. We move out of our survival brain and instead of asking, “Am I safe?” we start asking questions of identity and meaning.

Who am I?

What do I need to do to belong?

Do I have what it takes?

At this age, we need certainty, boundaries, and a tribe to which we feel we can belong.

Fortunately, in a church system, we have a God who can answer all of those questions. He is a rule-giving God who lays out the boundaries of belonging. If you keep these rules, do these (good) things, and avoid these other (bad) things, God will love you, supposedly… and the church will wrap its arms around you and call you its son or daughter.

In this stage, God becomes lawgiver, referee, and moral compass. The world is divided into right and wrong, saved and unsaved, us and them. Black-and-white thinking is the order of the day.

And underneath it all, the question that drives us is this: Am I good?

3. The Rewarding God

As we move into young adulthood, it’s all about building a life for ourselves. The focus turns to things like career, relationships, purpose, and achievement. We start our long climb up the imaginary ladder that leads to the life of success, at least as we understand it.

At this point, we follow the God who helps me succeed.

We are taught to believe in the God who blesses and prospers those who seek him with all their heart… whatever that means. For this really is an abstract idea that no one really defines for us.

The assumption is if I do the right things, life will work. Even people who reject prosperity theology often carry traces of this God.

The question we ask is: What do I need to do to receive God’s blessing?

God becomes a guide, coach, and source of that blessing. And this works really well until life gets hard, which it inevitably does.

4. The Disappointing God

If you are fortunate, you can enjoy a long and prosperous season believing that God can be trusted to make life work out more or less the way you hoped it would.

But, eventually, life will thrust us into the classroom of suffering where we learn our best and hardest lessons. This is where everything changes. You may have your first experience of death… You might bury a parent, or lose someone you love in some tragic accident. You could experience betrayal, the breakdown of a friendship or romance. You might lose your job… You know… the one you’d build your whole identity around. You might receive a life-altering diagnosis. There will be a moment that comes where you know life will never be the same again.

And, for all intents and purposes, it feels like God didn’t keep up his end of the bargain. Up until now, God has kept you safe, given you a sense of belonging, and blessed your plans. But suddenly, God has stopped behaving as expected for the first time.

Psychologically, this is often the collapse of the transactional worldview.

Many people mistake this stage for losing faith, and, to be fair, many people do lose their faith at this point. However, it can also be the entry point for a much deeper faith if we are willing to stay with the pain until it has taught us all that it needs to.

At this stage, the question we ask is: Why didn’t God do what I thought God would do?

5. The Hidden God

During this time, we often carry a certain sense of lostness. Our old certainties no longer work. We feel like our prayers are not penetrating the ceiling.

God feels quiet… and distant.

Welcome to the wilderness… a dry and weary land where there is no water to quench the deep longings of your soul. And congratulations! You have arrived at the place that all truly spiritual people have to pass through eventually.

It might not feel like something worth celebrating. In fact, it can feel like the exact opposite. The practices that once made you feel close to God stop working. Worship doesn’t move you like it used to. The Bible raises more questions than it answers. The reassuring explanations you once reached for now sound strangely hollow.

For some people, this is terrifying.

We assume that if God feels absent, something must have gone wrong. Perhaps we have lost our faith. Perhaps we have wandered too far. Perhaps God is disappointed with us. So we try to find our way back to the God we used to know.

But what if the wilderness is not evidence that you have lost your way?

What if it is the way?

The mystics have known this for centuries. There comes a point in the spiritual life when the God we thought we understood disappears from view. Not necessarily because God has gone anywhere, but because our old ways of seeing God can no longer take us where we need to go.

The wilderness strips away the God who could be easily explained, predicted, and managed. It confronts us with the possibility that some of what we called faith was not faith at all, and some of what we called trust was really our confidence that God would behave according to the rules we had been given.

This is why the hidden God can feel so unsettling.

We haven’t necessarily stopped believing in God. We just don’t know who God is anymore. And at that point, the question becomes: What is really true?

6. The Spacious God

Eventually, if we stay in the wilderness long enough, we may discover something surprising.

God is still there.

But the God we find is much bigger than the one we lost.

For much of our lives, we build an understanding of God that helps the world make sense. We learn what God is like, what God wants, how God speaks, how prayer works, what the Bible means, and what happens when we die. There is comfort in having a framework for all of this.

Then life comes along and pokes holes in it.

The Spacious God emerges when we stop trying to patch every hole.

Instead, we begin to make room for mystery. We accept that there are things about God we don’t understand and probably never will. We become less troubled by unanswered questions and less desperate to explain every tragedy, coincidence, prayer or silence.

For years, I thought faith meant having confidence in what I believed about God. Now I wonder if real faith begins when that confidence runs out.

Because it doesn’t take much faith to believe in a God you have figured out. If you know how God works, what God thinks and what God will do next, there isn’t much left to trust. You have a system, and systems are reassuring because they give us the feeling that we know where we stand.

But eventually, faith asks something harder of us.

Can I trust a God I don’t fully understand?

Can I live with questions that may never be answered?

Can I believe God is good when I cannot explain what God is doing?

Can I allow God to be God without needing to make sense of everything?

This is the Spacious God.

This is not to be mistaken for a vague God who can mean whatever we want God to mean, but a God who exceeds our ability to contain him. There is room for what we know about God, but also for what we don’t. Room for wonder and doubt. Room for the possibility that some of our most cherished ideas about God may be incomplete.

So, the question becomes: Can I remain open even when I don’t understand?

7. The God Beyond God

Eventually, we come up against another problem.

Even the Spacious God is still a God we are trying to describe.

The truth is, everything we say about God is metaphor. We call God Father, Shepherd, King, Rock, Light, Spirit, Love. Jesus himself spoke of God as a woman searching for a lost coin, a shepherd looking for a lost sheep, a father running down the road to embrace his son.

These images tell us something about God. But none of them is God.

They are signposts.

And the problem begins when we mistake the signpost for the destination.

We humans seem to have a deep need to name things, define them and put boundaries around them. It helps us make sense of the world. So, naturally, we do the same with God. We develop doctrines and creeds. We construct theological systems. We argue over which words are the right words.

There is nothing necessarily wrong with any of that. We need language to talk about God. The trouble comes when we forget what the language is doing.

It is pointing.

This is the territory of the mystics, not because they know more about God than the rest of us, but because they have become deeply aware of the limits of what can be known and said. They take seriously the possibility that God will always exceed our descriptions of God.

Even the word God is a signpost.

At some point, then, the spiritual life becomes less about collecting better descriptions of God and more about turning our attention towards whatever those descriptions have been pointing to all along.

You can believe that God is love without becoming loving. You can believe God is present everywhere while barely noticing the people in front of you. You can spend a lifetime defending the right ideas about God without ever allowing those ideas to change the way you move through the world.

So perhaps the question changes. For much of our spiritual lives, we ask: What do I believe about God?

Eventually, another question becomes more important: How do I participate in love?

Because God is Love.

How do I become more present? More compassionate? More forgiving? More awake to the sacredness of this ordinary life and the people with whom I share it?

Maturity is not finally arriving at the correct version of God. It’s recognizing that every version of God we carried up until the moment was just a signpost, and learning to follow where the signpost points.

The God We Never Finish Discovering

I sometimes think about that little boy lying in bed, praying that God would keep him alive until morning. I don’t make fun of him. He believed in God as best he could with the understanding he had at the time. He needed a God who would keep him safe, and so that was the God he knew.

Since then, I have believed in several different versions of God. Some lasted for many years. Others fell apart just as soon as life asked them questions they couldn’t answer. Each one gave me something I needed at the time, and each one eventually had to make way for something larger.

I suspect that process isn’t finished. Sometimes my old gods try to come back and take a seat on the throne.

And I reckon twenty years from now, I may look back at what I believe today and realize how much I still had wrong. I hope so. Because if my understanding of God hasn’t changed after another twenty years of living, loving, suffering, questioning and paying attention, I’m not sure I will have been paying much attention at all.

Maybe growing up spiritually isn’t about finally getting God right.

Maybe it’s becoming less afraid of getting God wrong.

Less afraid of questions. Less threatened by mystery. Less attached to the need to explain God, defend God or fit God inside the boundaries we inherited.

And more willing to follow the signposts, because perhaps the goal was never to arrive at a version of God we could finally understand.

Perhaps it was to keep walking towards the God who has always been beyond them all.

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Dan recently joined Substack, and you can find him at backyardchurch.substack.com He also released a book in May, which is available on Amazon here: https ://www.amazon.com/Bible-Telling-Your-Story-characters-

As usual, I chatted with the other customers while standing in line at Walmart. We had just moved to Hickory Creek, Texas, a Dallas suburb, and I asked what the town was like.

“Watch out for the police,” one customer warned. “They’ll give you a ticket for anything.”

“Yeah,” another added. “They hide everywhere.”

The entire line started sharing stories about their tickets. By the time I reached the checkout, I was thoroughly spooked.

Sure enough, on the way home, I headed toward a stop sign when I spotted a police officer parked nearby.

I immediately started thinking about what the Walmart customers had said.

I’d better be careful.

And I blew right through the stop sign because I was looking at the police car.

The moment I realized what I’d done, I slammed on my brakes in the middle of the intersection and skidded to the other side. His lights came on immediately, and I pulled over.

The officer walked up to my window.

“Ma’am, what was that?”

“I just left Walmart, and everyone in there was telling me how easy it is to get a ticket in Hickory Creek. They said you guys give tickets for everything...”

I have no idea why my mouth thought this was helpful information.

The officer listened patiently as I babbled.

Then he said, “Well, ma’am, I had to pull you over because everyone saw what you did.”

He had a point.

And I ended up with a ticket because I was going too fast and paying attention to the wrong thing.

I miss other stop signs, too

I see myself doing that with God, the Bible, and my relationships.

This summer, I’ve been attending a Bible study on the Psalms that’s made that obvious to me.

When I was at my lowest and doubting God’s goodness, I read the Psalms. I read books about them and meditated on them. Yet somehow they rarely moved my heart.

This study has been different.

We spend days observing verbs, imagery, metaphors, and repeated words. It’s slower than I’ve ever studied Scripture before.

I wrote down all the verbs and to whom they applied in Psalm 139. A few of the verbs describing God are searched, known, understood, scrutinized, and acquainted. They’re relational and active. They show a God who cares, understands, and acts.

Many Psalms show this in poetic ways that move my heart more than facts. In Psalm 40, the fierce warrior king David wrote, “But as for me, I am poor and needy” (Psalm 40:17 NIV).

New observations lead to new insights

David portrayed himself as completely dependent on God and trusted God to save him. Intellectually, I’d known that concept for years. But this time, I’m noticing the depth of his intimacy with God. I see David’s humanity and God’s omnipotence coupled with God’s love for the individual.

Rushing has been the enemy of my perception.

I also miss the stop signs in relationships when I’m in a hurry.

A friend might say something that deserves a follow-up question, but I’m half-listening because I’m thinking about what I need to do next.

I even make assumptions with Todd

Todd and I have a dynamic that we’re working on. When I’m driving, he thinks we’re co-drivers and critiques my driving — in his mind, he’s just being helpful. So this week when he made a comment about how I parked the car in the garage, I felt attacked and overreacted. When we talked about it later, I realized he was just trying to figure out the best way to fit both of our vehicles in the garage because we just got an SUV.

What I’m learning

I’ve noticed that when people feel unheard, it’s rarely because no one is talking to them. It’s usually because no one slowed down enough to understand them.

When people are hurting, grieving, or fearful, they usually don’t come right out and say it. They reveal it gradually through stories, word choices, pauses, and unfinished sentences.

If I’m only hearing the words, I’ll miss the person.

I spent years looking for answers about God. But finding answers wasn’t what helped. Seeing God’s character more clearly did.

Like God, I can learn to search, know, understand, and scrutinize. Then I’ll notice what really matters.

I’m also hoping this new skill will save me from future tickets.

Your turn:

What’s a “stop sign” in your life that you might be blowing past? I love hearing your stories.

We talked about doubt, disappointment, prayer, trust, and how my understanding of God has changed through some difficult seasons.

I hope it encourages you.

Next week we’ll be back to our regular format. Thanks for watching.

Love, Patty

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Sometimes God gets my attention in outrageous ways.

• The Drought

It hadn’t rained in Austin, Texas, in nearly two years. So naturally, my older son, Blake, and his fiancée, Erin, planned an outdoor garden wedding. Just in case, they’d rented a vacation home on a lake where the ceremony could be moved indoors. Given the Dust Bowl conditions, no one imagined we’d ever need the backup plan.

Todd and I arrived in Austin a few days early—in the middle of a rainstorm.

The night before we left our hotel, the local news was filled with stories about flash flooding. One image stuck with me: a boat dock that had been ripped apart and swept away.

The next day, we arrived at the vacation home. I looked out the back door and froze.

The dock from the newscast was lying in our backyard.

When the Backup Plan Fails

It was still raining, but every forecast insisted it would stop Saturday night, well before Sunday’s evening wedding.

Sure enough, the rain ended Saturday evening. Relieved, we decorated the backyard and went to bed, expecting a beautiful wedding the next day.

Instead, we woke up Sunday morning to pouring rain.

The forecast had changed. It wouldn’t stop until Sunday evening.

Then things got even worse.

Before we could move the ceremony inside the vacation home, sewage backed up into the house.

In a matter of minutes, the outdoor venue was unusable, and so was our backup plan.

The Ballroom

Fortunately, my friend Teri was with us. Teri is one of those people who can make impossible things happen. She immediately started calling hotels, including the resort where Blake and Erin planned to spend their wedding night.

A ballroom had just become available.

When we arrived, I couldn’t believe it. Instead of a soggy backyard, we were given a stunning marble room with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking a golf course.

As I stood there taking it all in, four deer came galloping across the green.

We texted everyone the new location.

Then, just before the ceremony began, the rain stopped.

As the guests arrived, a double rainbow stretched across the windows at the front of the marble room.

Originally, we’d planned to serve dinner on paper plates. But the resort’s event planner smiled and said she could do better. She set the tables with the resort’s china, welcomed Blake and Erin’s caterer, and didn’t charge them a penny for any of it.

Months later, the photographer submitted the wedding to Bride magazine. In one more over-the-top act of God, it ran in the August 2012 issue.

What had begun as a disaster became one of the most beautiful weddings I’ve ever attended.

What I Was Actually Watching

As Todd and I drove home, I couldn’t shake the feeling that we’d witnessed something much bigger than a rescued wedding. Every setback had somehow become something better. God hadn’t simply solved a problem. He had overwhelmed us with unexpected kindness.

For years, I thought the opposite of doubt was having enough answers. It’s not.

The moments that have most strengthened my faith haven’t been the ones where God explained Himself. They’ve been the ones where He revealed His character—sometimes so outrageously even I couldn’t miss it.

Your turn: Tell us about milestones

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I always wanted to make holidays special for my family. That’s what we moms are supposed to do.

But creating Hallmark-type memories has never been my gift.

A new gourmet grocery store had opened right before Christmas years ago, and they were giving away samples of a delicious spinach, chicken, and feta sausage. The employee suggested serving it with red salsa.

Perfect, I thought. A red-and-green dinner. It’s festive. It will put everyone in the Christmas spirit.

That night, I proudly set the long, greenish-brown sausages and salsa on the table.

Then everyone—including Todd—laughed so hard they couldn’t eat.

That wasn’t the response I expected.

Somehow, I’d forgotten I lived with three males.

They still tell the story, 25 years later, of Mom and the Christmas poo she served for dinner.

Yeah, I made a memory, all right.

Just not the one I’d planned.

At the time, frustration led me to say, “The Christmas poo tastes good. Can’t you guys be mature and just eat it?” But now, it’s funny even to me.

That story could be a metaphor for my life. I can try to do everything right, but life still doesn’t turn out as expected. And sometimes it leads to doubts.

Not a crisis of belief in God’s existence, but a crisis of trust and interpretation because my life isn’t cooperating with my assumptions.

When Life Doesn’t Match Our Theology

And I panic.

Why doesn’t God stop this?

Jesus said, “Whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours” (Mark 11:24 NIV). I prayed. Why isn’t God doing what I asked?

Why don’t I see God working? Why is He silent?

If we’re Christians and we’re all supposed to be like Christ, why did other Christians hurt me?

Doubts come in different flavors, but we all have a challenge that could knock us over. For me, it was having a child who became an addict.

Al-Anon meetings tell parents to say, “I didn’t cause it, I can’t control it, and I can’t cure it.” But I couldn’t make myself believe that.

Good mothers don’t raise addicts. Why wouldn’t God step in and fix it?

I think most spiritual doubts stem from the subconscious question: Can I still trust God when I don’t understand His actions?

Learning to Live With Questions

But how do we work through it?

Just telling myself to trust God wasn’t going to work. I started reexamining my long-held assumptions, such as “Just pray about it, and it will all work out.” Even though that was true in one sense, the reality of it looked very different from what I’d imagined.

That season terrified me because the beliefs that had once comforted me suddenly felt uncertain.

I needed safe people who could sit with my questions without trying to fix them.

The first time I thought, Why bother to pray? I was so ashamed of myself. I knew prayer wasn’t just about getting what I wanted, but my emotions couldn’t get past that.

I had never heard anyone else say that, but when I told friends, most said, “Yeah, I’ve had times like that too.”

When I’d share my day-to-day challenges, they usually said, “I don’t know what to say.” Oddly enough, that helped because sometimes I just needed to know someone understood.

I also had to learn that God was far more patient with my questions than I was. He didn’t change my situation, so I at least wanted Him to swoop down and fix me immediately.

That didn’t happen.

But friends who reminded me that I wasn’t crazy, alone, or abandoned by God made the wait a little easier.

The Next Step Is Enough

Recently, I faced another crisis. I grieved, cried, and prayed a lot, but this time I didn’t question God’s goodness or faithfulness.

That was progress.

I wish I could say every doubt got neatly resolved, but it didn’t.

Yet I’ve learned that God faithfully gives me what I need for the next step, even when He doesn’t give me the explanations I want.

Now I see it all over the Bible. That’s what He did for Job, David, Habakkuk, and many others.

The Christmas poo dinner reminded me that life doesn’t always turn out according to plan.

Neither does faith.

Sometimes our expectations collapse, our prayers seem unanswered, and our assumptions about God no longer fit our experience. In those moments, I’ve learned not to hide my questions. It helps.

God is still present, still patient, and still trustworthy in my uncertainty. Maybe especially then.

I’ve learned that faith isn’t the absence of questions. Sometimes it’s simply trusting that God will meet us in them.

Your Turn: What questions about God have been the hardest for you to ask out loud?

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A friend hosted a neighborhood party, and her porch camera recorded all the conversations from her front porch.

She hadn’t known the camera could do that.

Later, she heard comments like, “I don’t want to stay long,” and one spouse asking the other, “Who are these people again?”

Succumbing to her conscience, she quit listening.

My seared conscience and I would have made popcorn and stayed up all night listening.

I like knowing where I stand with people. That way, I know how to conduct myself. It helps me navigate the unspoken rules of relationships.

Looking back, I realize I’d carried that same mindset into my relationship with God.

I conducted myself a certain way because I wanted to be a good Christian. Then, when I was anxious or confused, I expected God to fix my problems.

It worked until life laughed at my expectations.

And my doubts, hurt, and anger overwhelmed me.

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The Contract I Never Knew I’d Made

I see now that, especially during seasons of stress, I often slipped into a transactional faith. I genuinely loved God, but beneath that love was an assumption that faithfulness would produce certain outcomes. If I prayed enough, trusted enough, or had the right mindset, God would provide what I thought I needed.

Looking back, I don’t think I was trying to master a formula as much as I was trying to quiet my fears. I wanted some assurance that if I loved God faithfully enough, life wouldn’t completely fall apart. Without realizing it, I’d reduced the relationship to a contract because contracts make the world feel predictable.

If someone had accused me of being legalistic, I would have been horrified. I knew all about grace. I’d read the books. I believed salvation was a gift.

Back when my problems seemed manageable, trusting God felt easy. Then trials came that challenged my deepest assumptions.

For example, I tried to be a humble, loving mother who followed biblical principles, and my son still became addicted. I prayed for loved ones to be healed, and instead their conditions worsened.

The pain of those unmet expectations exposed something I hadn’t seen before. It uncovered how much my trust depended on getting the outcomes I wanted.

The trials revealed my need for a different kind of faith. A relational faith that remained steady and close, whether life unfolded the way I hoped or not.

The Older Brother’s Bargain

For the first time, I’ve noticed that the Prodigal Son’s older brother only had a transactional relationship with his father. When the prodigal returned, his father held a celebration. The older brother refused to enter the house and said to his father, “Look, these many years I have served you, and I never disobeyed your command, yet you never gave me a young goat, that I might celebrate with my friends.” (Luke 15:29 ESV)

He had subconsciously held to a contract that his father hadn’t honored. His father owed him and hadn’t paid, even though he’d served and obeyed. He measured the relationship in terms of fairness rather than love.

The father didn’t argue, shame him, or defend himself. He simply said, “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours.” (Luke 15:31 ESV)

He redirected the son’s mindset from performance to relationship. The older brother lived as though he had to earn what was already available to him as a son.

The father also went out to meet both sons. He ran to the prodigal, and when the older son refused to join the party, he went outside to him. The rebellious son got a feast, and the resentful son got an invitation

What the Trials Unearthed

Trials have been excellent archaeologists.

They’ve uncovered beliefs I’d buried beneath years of theology. I never consciously tried to manipulate God, but somewhere along the way I’d started keeping score without realizing it.

Now, I linger over passages like, “See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are.” (1 John 3:1a)

The older I get, the less certain I am about outcomes and the more certain I am about God’s character. I wanted life to make sense. I wanted some assurance that if I trusted God faithfully enough, the people I loved would be okay.

Like the older brother standing outside the celebration, I was trying to earn what had always been mine as a daughter.

The contract existed only in my mind.

The Father’s invitation was never, “Get everything right, and then come in.” It was simply, “You are always with me, and all that is mine is yours.”

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Your turn:

How has your view of God changed over time?

My faith faltered when it seemed God wouldn’t answer my prayers. I believed God could do anything—He just wasn’t for me. I prayed over and over about my son’s addiction and my granddaughter’s heart defect and hearing loss. Nothing changed for years. I didn’t doubt God’s power, just His goodness. That made it even harder.

Jeanie’s book, The Shared Life of God, helped me see God’s love and the relationship He invites us into in a completely new way. To be honest, the concept of the Trinity didn’t interest me much, but I picked it up because I’d loved Jeanie’s other books.

I’m so glad I did.

I’m now more at peace and closer to God than I’ve ever been. In fact, I’ve already started reading it again to deepen my understanding. You can find the book at https://www.amazon.com/Shared-Life-God-Atonement-Transformation

By Jeanie Shaw

Part 2: Freeing and Frightening

To read Part 1 go to: https://pattyasaad.substack.com/p/i-thought-i-knew-the-way?r=2wodj

In the first part of this reflection, I wrote that realizing some of my certainty had come more from the map I inherited than from Scripture itself was both freeing and frightening.

The Bible became freeing because Scripture became larger, richer, and more alive than the flattened readings I had inherited. Frightening, because once the old map loosened in my hands, I had to trust God in a new way.

For those of us who have loved God deeply and served faithfully, questioning an inherited framework can feel like betrayal. We may wonder if we are losing faith when, in reality, we may be discovering that the map we inherited could not fully hold the larger story of God.

Revisiting a Passage

One example, of many, that reshaped me deeply was Hebrews 4:12.

For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. (ESV)

For years, I heard this passage as a warning about the Bible itself, a sharp spiritual blade exposing every hidden flaw. In the framework I inherited, it often sounded like Scripture functioned almost as a legal instrument of judgment, cutting through motives, dividing soul and spirit, and leaving me exposed before God.

But as I studied Hebrews 4 more carefully, I began to notice the flow of the passage. The context is not a detached warning about a book. In the verses leading up to it, the author repeatedly urges readers to enter God's rest. It's part of a larger invitation.

The writer speaks of “the word of God” as living and active, but then immediately says that no creature is hidden “before him.” And without pausing, the next sentence turns our eyes to Jesus, our great high priest, who sympathizes with our weaknesses and invites us to approach the throne of grace with confidence.

That changed the passage for me.

The Living Word

I also had to remember that Hebrews was written before the New Testament was complete. The “word of God” in this passage was not referring to a bound Bible in the way I had often imagined it.

The Bible did not yet exist, and the Scriptures people knew were the narrated Torah and songs.

I began to see that the Living Word who pierces and reveals is not merely text, but Person. Jesus sees me completely, but not clinically or harshly. He sees me through the eyes of the One who also loves, intercedes, sympathizes, and invites me into rest.

The exposing work of the Word is not punitive but leads to rest, as the context of the previous verses shows. Rather than a judgmental “we’d better get it right” collection of verses from the Hebrews sermon, it is healing, clarifying, and deeply relational.

Reading with a Different Map

That shift in my interpretation of Scripture only made me love it more, but it also showed me how much an inherited assumption had shaped what I thought the passage meant. I had been reading it through a map that emphasized judgment and scrutiny, when Hebrews itself was leading me toward encounter, mercy, and rest.

A map is not the same as God, and a framework is not the same as faith. A tradition is not the same as the living Word. Christians rightly treasure Scripture as God-breathed and authoritative, yet Scripture itself points beyond the page to the God who speaks, acts, creates, covenants, delivers, inhabits, and comes near in Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh.

When Scripture Comes Alive

God is not threatened by our honest wrestling.

Scripture does not become less sacred when we learn to read poetry as poetry, letters as letters, story as story, lament as lament, and apocalypse as apocalypse. If anything, Scripture becomes more alive.

Isolated instructions begin to give way to the vast and beautiful story of God’s presence, faithfulness, judgment, mercy, incarnation, death, resurrection, Spirit, and new creation.

Formed by Encounter

In Scripture, disorientation is often the beginning of deeper formation.

Abraham left what was familiar without knowing where he was going. Hagar met the God who saw her in a wilderness she did not choose. Mary’s life was interrupted by a word from God that rearranged her body, reputation, and future. Paul was stopped on the road while traveling in the confidence of his own convictions.

None of them were formed by neat answers alone.

They were formed by encounter.

An Awakening

That realization has changed me. I still love Scripture. Perhaps I love it more.

But I no longer believe faithfulness requires pretending every passage is simple, every question is dangerous, or every inherited conclusion is beyond examination.

In fact, I have come to believe that some of the most sacred formation happens when we finally admit, “I do not know how to read this the way I used to.”

That sentence can feel like loss, but it can also become an awakening to encounter with God.

This is not questioning for the sake of tearing down, nor is it rebuilding that rushes too quickly to recreate something that looks exactly like what came before. For me, this journey has meant learning to look more deeply, ask better questions, examine inherited assumptions, and trust that God is present in the disorientation.

Rather than following Oliver to a private gated airport, I see an open gate into a deeper, richer life with God, where I am learning to recognize his presence in ever-increasing ways.

I’m especially excited to share today’s guest post because Jeanie Shaw’s work helped me during one of the hardest seasons of my faith.

A few years ago, my life unraveled in ways I never expected. Along with those changes came questions about God, suffering, and beliefs I’d carried for years without closely examining. I felt like everything I believed was up for review.

Some days, it felt like I was pulling on a thread and watching my entire sweater unravel.

During that season, I found Jeanie’s book, Reexamining Our Lenses. It helped me ask better questions and think more clearly about issues I was struggling to understand. Her writing brought clarity when I felt lost. It helped me see God in ways I hadn’t before.

I’m grateful for the role Jeanie’s work played in my life, and I’m honored to introduce her to you today. You can find Reexamining Our Lenses at https://www.amazon.com/Re-Examining-Our-Lenses-Relationship-Hermeneutics/dp/1958723258/ref=sr_1_3?

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Freeing and Frightening

by Jeanie Shaw

I am not naturally gifted with directions, so for years, I have depended on the British-accented voice in my GPS. I named him Oliver because somehow it felt more respectful to listen to a British voice with a proper name. Oliver has guided me through many turns, exits, rotaries, and questionable lane changes. I have trusted him.

But Oliver has also led me astray.

Once, while trying to get somewhere entirely ordinary, I followed his instructions and ended up at a private, remote, gated airport. Thinking surely I had misunderstood, I tried again. Oliver recalculated, sounded confident, and led me right back down a one-way road to the same private airport gate. Being a not-so-quick learner that day, I tried it a couple more times.

When the Directions Stop Working

At some point, I had to stop blindly obeying the voice and actually orient myself. I had to ask where I was, where I was trying to go, and why the directions that sounded so certain were not getting me there.

I had to pay attention to the sun, noting where north, south, east, and west were located. I had to learn to navigate roads that twisted in ways the map did not show, and to the humbling possibility that I was not seeing the whole picture correctly.

That experience has become, for me, a small parable.

For much of my life, faith came with a map. I do not mean faith was easy, or that I had no questions. I mean I had inherited a way of reading Scripture, following God, and understanding obedience that gave me a sense of direction.

The map told me where the roads were. It helped me know what counted as faithfulness. It offered clarity, confidence, and belonging.

But eventually, some parts of the map stopped matching the terrain.

Looking Through a Different Lens

This awareness had been growing in me for years, but it took deeper root during my dissertation research on my tradition’s hermeneutic, or way of interpreting Scripture.

I began to see how often we read the Bible through assumptions we do not know we are carrying.

I love Scripture deeply, but I had often asked it to function in ways it was not intended to function. I had often read its many genres as though they all worked the same way.

History became pattern. Poetry became proposition. Letters written to particular communities became direct instructions to me without enough attention to their context. Apocalyptic visions were flattened into timelines. Wisdom literature was often treated as universal promise.

More Than One Way to Tell the Truth

This method is a little like reading a poem, a love letter, a driver’s handbook, lyrics from a record album, and a historical account, then expecting them all to function the same way and give direction by the same rules.

Each may tell the truth, but each tells it differently.

And in the process, I sometimes missed the larger, sweeping story of God. I was not moving toward deeper encounter; I was stuck at the gate, wondering why the directions that once sounded so certain no longer matched the terrain.

A Better Destination

But unlike Oliver’s unfortunate detour to the private airport, this reorientation did not lead me to a dead end.

It has led me into a deeper, richer faith and into a more wondrous experience of life with God.

I did not lose Scripture. I began to hear its many voices with more humility.

I did not lose Jesus. Instead, I began to see him more clearly as the Living Word to whom Scripture faithfully points.

I began to discover that faith could be larger, more honest, and more deeply rooted than the map I had inherited.

That realization was both freeing and frightening.

Part 1 of 2

Jeanie Shaw is a teacher and communicator of spiritual growth. She received her Master’s in Christian Spirituality and Formation from Regent University and her Doctorate in Spiritual Formation and Discipleship from Nazarene Theological Seminary.

She serves as a Christian life coach, teacher, and spiritual director finding great joy in journeying alongside others, helping them discover God’s presence as they navigate life’s joys and challenges.

Jeanie recently retired after serving for over four decades in full-time ministry, alongside her late husband.

She considers her work with the underserved, particularly with orphans in Eastern Europe, a deeply formative part of her life. She resides in New England, enjoying close proximity to her four adult children and eight grandchildren, whom she adores.

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I hate it when people put my sharp knives in the dishwasher. It dulls them, and then I have to resharpen them.

We’d had a lot of people in and out of our house, and I’d been complaining about my dull knives all week. Who did I need to find and train so they’d stop ruining them?

Later that week, Todd and I were cleaning the kitchen. I was in full turbo-cleaning mode.

That’s when he saw me drop the knives into the dishwasher.

If he hadn’t called me out the moment they slipped from my fingers, I would have denied it with complete confidence — I was that certain.

And that certainty comes out in other ways, too.

My More Respectable Version of God

I remember studying mythology in school and smugly thinking ancient people created gods in their own image, flaws and all. Zeus, with all the stories of abuse and immorality, seemed especially awful. How could anyone worship a god like that?

We Christians certainly wouldn’t do that. We’re more enlightened.

Except I do it too. Mine was just more respectable.

I thought I had a solid grasp on God’s love. My version sounded much better than Zeus, but underneath, it wasn’t nearly as true as I imagined.

God loved me, but seemed especially pleased when I was productive, positive, disciplined, and spiritually impressive. I called Him a loving Father, but often related to Him as if He were a boss, as if I were trying to earn a good performance review.

Take Jesus’ words in Matthew 6. He tells the people not to worry, points out how carefully God tends them, and reminds us we matter far more. I took that passage and somehow made it a reason to feel guilty. If I worried, I was failing spiritually.

Even words meant to help anxious people relax became evidence that I needed to try harder.

I also absorbed the idea that sorrow should resolve quickly. Anger and confusion should tidy themselves into neat testimonies with victorious endings. Suffering was acceptable, but only if it stayed inspirational. Faithful people don’t stay sad — they get up, find the lesson, and make it useful.

Apparently, those old beliefs still surface when life stops feeling manageable.

Tuesday Morning Breakdown

This past three-day weekend was rough. Charlotte had multiple meltdowns and wanted me to be her personal jungle gym for hours. I love holding her, but I don’t physically have the energy to wrestle nonstop. On top of that, something else happened — something I won’t get into here — that gutted me.

By Tuesday morning, I woke up with what felt like a spiritual and emotional hangover.

While pouring my coffee, it arrived:

Does God even love me?

The thought stopped me cold. I was doubting God.

I sat with it for a moment. Not spiraling, but not immediately brushing it off either. Just letting it be there — this question I wasn’t supposed to still be asking, surfacing in my kitchen on a Tuesday morning.

Then I prayed. Honestly, without cleaning it up first.

I was glad I took it straight to God. But the fact that the question showed up at all told me something: the God I built in the image of my own anxiety doesn’t disappear just because I’ve noticed Him.

Certainty about God can become a substitute for trust in God.

I want Him fully explained and predictable. I want a theology that holds up on the hard weekends. But learning to trust Him means accepting I’ll never completely figure Him out, and that’s okay.

Still in the Middle

I still catch myself dropping the knives in the dishwasher.

Metaphorically. Sometimes literally.

But the God I actually have is far kinder, more patient, and more merciful than the one I built from my own fears. And these days, I’ve learned to say I’m not okay while I’m still not okay — before I’ve packaged it, before the testimony has a tidy ending.

This is what the middle looks like.

I’m learning God is less bothered by my unfinished faith than I am.

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Now it’s your turn:

How has your faith evolved? You’ve been sharing some powerful insights. I appreciate every comment.

This is the beginning of a series about working through the emotions behind evolving beliefs and doubts.

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My irrational fears made me miserable.

The school milk only cost four cents when I was in first grade. My mother usually didn’t have four pennies, so she’d give me a nickel instead.

Every day at lunch, I’d buy my milk, then put the extra penny in my lunch bag. Fully intending to take it out before I threw the bag away, I failed every single day.

Penny after penny disappeared into the trash.

Only hours later would I remember my dastardly deed. It became my dirty little secret. I dreaded the day my mother would ask about the missing pennies.

Then the fateful day arrived.

My mother casually asked, “What are you doing with all those pennies?”

Cue ominous music.

I immediately collapsed into sobs and confessed the entire sordid tale from the floor. I had wasted penny after penny after penny.

My mother tried not to laugh while reassuring me it wasn’t a big deal. She’d simply been wondering where the pennies were going.

I had been afraid of a mother I didn’t actually have.

And sometimes I realize I’ve been afraid of a God I didn’t actually have either.

When Life No Longer Fits the Formula

Many of my beliefs have changed over the last four years.

Change was frightening, especially when my faith had been part of my identity for decades. I was terrified I might be getting things wrong.

I used to love saying, “Just pray about it, and God will work it out.”

But I prayed for my son to overcome addiction, and things only worsened. I prayed he and Charlotte’s mother would become healthy parents. Instead, Todd and I are raising our granddaughter.

Charlotte came to live with us at six months old, medically fragile. I prayed for her healing, but that story didn’t unfold the way I hoped.

At the same time, Todd and I left full-time ministry after almost forty years because we couldn’t carry both the demands of ministry and the demands of raising a child with special needs.

Suddenly, we were starting over in our sixties.

Somewhere in all that, my trust in God cracked.

Not entirely. But enough that I could no longer force my experiences to fit neatly inside the theological scaffolding I had built for myself.

I didn’t want to walk away from God, but I didn’t particularly like Him either.

That felt horrifying to admit.

The Questions I Was Afraid to Ask

I started wrestling with questions I couldn’t fully put into words.

I tend to be very literal. I like things explained clearly, tied up neatly, and made to make sense. For most of my life, everything in the Bible needed to either fit my understanding or support my existing view of God.

Until it didn’t.

I had subconsciously created rules for suffering. Christian suffering should be noble. Explainable. Contained within acceptable parameters.

Faithful Christian mothers should not have children who become addicts.

But life kept refusing to cooperate with my formulas.

I still believe the Bible is true. Deeply true.

But I’m no longer convinced truth always looks the way I once assumed it did.

That realization frightened me, too.

Reading Jonah With New Eyes

For example, I used to read Jonah strictly as historical fact. Now, I read it differently.

There are details that feel intentionally exaggerated and symbolic to me. Jonah speaks from the realm of the dead while still inside the fish. The Ninevites even put sackcloth on their animals.

To me, it reads less like modern historical reporting and more like a story crafted to drive home a deeper truth — a parable.

And what truth was so important that someone felt compelled to tell the story this way?

That God loved even the brutal Ninevites.

Not just Israel.

Everyone.

Some friends have told me, “But I want to believe Jonah literally survived inside a fish.”

That’s okay. Maybe he did. God can do whatever He wants.

But strangely enough, debating whether Jonah survived the fish doesn’t move me.

What moves me is the possibility that the story’s deepest purpose was revealing the overwhelming compassion of God.

That changes me far more than proving a miracle.

Staying Anyway

In the beginning, questioning any of this felt wrong and disloyal.

But I brought my doubts to God anyway.

Nothing changed quickly. I didn’t get tidy answers. But slowly, through conversations, reading, grief, experience, and time, something unexpected happened.

My appreciation for God deepened.

I’m not trying to convince anyone to arrive at my conclusions. I just want people to keep seeking God as honestly as they can and not pull away.

Because life can be brutal. It can unravel everything you thought you understood.

But I also think about that little girl lying on the floor sobbing over lost pennies, terrified of a reaction that was never coming.

She had misunderstood her mother completely.

And sometimes I misunderstood God, too.

What I see now is a God I can trust even when I can’t understand.

And I’m still learning who He actually is.

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Your turn:

How has suffering changed your faith? Let me know in the comments.

During the worst years of my son’s heroin addiction, I dreaded Mother’s Day. I’d sneak out of church and cry in the restroom.

The few times I slipped out of the service, other women were always in there too. We’d exchange stories while pretending to fix our makeup and salvage our mascara.

After a while, inevitably, someone would say something funny, and we’d all start laughing. Apparently, my church has a surprisingly robust culture of women’s restroom support.

I always walked back into church feeling lighter.

Mother’s Day can be painful for so many reasons. Some women never had children but desperately wanted them. Some have lost children. Some miss mothers who are gone. Some are still trying to recover from the mothers they had.

Some are single and content most of the year, until Mother’s Day rolls around and they suddenly feel like outsiders in a room full of family photos and flower bouquets.

If you’re celebrating this weekend, Happy Mother’s Day. I mean that.

But for many women, the day is complicated.

Sometimes Mother’s Day doesn’t just expose loss.

It exposes the life you thought God would give you.

That’s what it felt like during my son’s addiction. My reality was so far removed from the future I had imagined that I barely recognized my own life.

For a long time, I thought feeling pain on Mother’s Day was unspiritual. I told myself I should just be happy for the families who had what I wanted.

Maybe eventually. But first, I needed to grieve.

Over time, I stopped seeing brokenheartedness as spiritual failure. “The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.” (Psalm 34:18) That verse found me more than once in a church bathroom stall.

Some of us will probably always feel tender on Mother’s Day. Certain losses leave a mark.

But pain is not weakness, and it’s not a lack of faith.

I won’t need to hide in the restroom this year. But I’m grateful for every woman who was in there with me when I did — the ones who made me laugh when I had nothing left, who reminded me I wasn’t the only one holding a life that didn’t look like I’d planned.

And if you find yourself in there, look around. You probably won’t be alone.

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I didn’t expect a painting to undo me. But it did.

A friend from Russia told an artist our story and commissioned a painting for Todd and me. He brought it to us last week: a broken heart repaired with veins of gold — kintsugi style. Tendrils grow out of it. New life from old damage.

We’ve known each other for twenty years, and the friendship runs deep enough that when things got hard for them, we showed up. Now he wanted to show up for us.

He told us the painting represented what we walked through with Charlotte, how her heart is finally repaired.

I cried.

It’s on the mantle now. No matter where we live, it will always have a prominent place in our home.

Sick Again

I’ve been sick again. It’s starting to feel like a pattern. I think my immune system has gone on vacation.

Unable to talk because I’d lost my voice, I texted a friend to say I was discouraged. I didn’t just feel bad. I felt an overwhelming urge to complain about it.

She texted back that whenever she’s sick, she imagines God telling her to stay in bed and enjoy the rest.

Grumpy me was not inspired. Grumpy me was annoyed—and preferred it that way.

Grumpy me thought enjoy the rest was something people say when they are not the ones stuck in bed for the fourth time in a month, raising a four-year-old, and watching their plans for the week dissolve.

I didn’t respond right away. Mostly because I couldn’t. But also, because I didn’t want to.

Fine, God

I wanted my life back. I wanted to make plans with friends, write more, and clean out my closet.

Rest felt like an interruption, not a gift.

But I was stuck there anyway. So eventually, with nothing else to do, I tried it. Not in a noble, spiritual way—more like a reluctant experiment.

Fine, God. If I’m here, I’m here.

That was about as surrendered as I could get.

I didn’t suddenly feel peaceful or start enjoying it. But something in me stopped pushing so hard against the fact that I couldn’t change it.

And that was new.

What the Painting Knows

A few hours later, I found myself staring at the mantle.

The heart is still broken. You can see every crack. But it’s been repaired with gold. The cracks are highlighted, not hidden.

And that’s what makes it beautiful.

Six months ago, being sick like this would have ruined my whole week. I would have spiraled, resented it, tried to power through anyway.

Now I’m still annoyed and tired.

But I’m not fighting it the same way.

The painting has been sitting there all week, telling the truth. It hasn’t changed since the day he gave it to us. But I have.

And that’s what healing looks like—
Not everything is fixed. But something in me is finally willing to rest inside it.

It’s a new tendril growing out of my heart.

Your turn:
What’s something in your life you didn’t choose, but might be changing you anyway?

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Dear Friends,

My head didn’t contain a single deep thought.

I wasn’t going to post this week. I hoped I could skip it and no one would notice.

For the past couple of months, my days have been broken up by driving Charlotte to different programs. She’s exhausted, but instead of slowing down, she speeds up—getting more frantic, more creative in her chaos.

I don’t.

I’m also immunocompromised, which means I’ve been catching a different virus from her each week.

She’s my cute little petri dish.

I even dreamed I checked myself into a psychiatric hospital just so I could get some rest.

I also dreamed I walked into a class I was flunking, wearing a sleeveless dress. I looked down, and tufts of fur hung under my arms because I was too tired to shave.

Somewhere in all of this, I realized I didn’t have anything impressive to say about God. No insight. No neat way to wrap this up.

Just this:

I am so tired.

Then I thought of something I’ve read for years and never really stopped to consider.

The Psalmist wrote,

“Before I was afflicted, I went astray, but now I obey your word.” (Psalm 119:67)

I used to skip past that line.

Now I can’t.

Because left to myself, I drift—and these past few weeks have exposed that just enough to get my attention.

My faith had more holes than I realized.

But something is different this time.

I’m not trying to hold everything together the way I used to.

I’m quicker to admit I don’t have it. Quicker to come back to God—not with something to offer, but empty-handed.

Maybe this isn’t a time to hide after all.

Maybe it’s a time to be honest about what this actually looks like.

Not strong faith.

Not unshakable confidence.

Just returning.

Again and again.

Even when I have nothing left to bring.

Love, Patty

Your turn: What’s really hard for you right now?

PS When I’m sick, more of the load falls on Todd.

And he’s handled it all so well.

I’ve been watching him juggle work, home, and everything in between, and I’m really proud of him.

A real estate magazine recently featured him along with pictures of Charlotte, and it meant a lot to see his hard work recognized. If you want to take a look, here’s the link, but it’s to the middle of the magazine. You have to flip to the left a few pages until you see Todd’s name and picture.

https://issuu.com/northdfwrealproducers/docs/north_fort_worth_real_producers_-_f_cccfcc0136b9f3/36

If you ever need help buying or selling a home—especially in Texas—he’d genuinely take great care of you. But no matter where you live in North America, he can help you find a qualified agent.

Todd and I had just started dating. We still had to work to find things to talk about. Todd had probably been sitting at dinner for several minutes, trying to come up with something to say.

Finally, he asked, “So, have your calves always been that big?”

What was I supposed to say to that? I was in an accident, and they grew?

It’s a family trait that I’ve always been insecure about. At least I won’t blow over in a storm and can really stomp some bugs.

A Spiral I Couldn’t Stop

The rest of the evening, I couldn’t stop thinking about my big calves. I kept squirming as I tried to pull my skirt down over them. Everywhere we went, I looked at other women’s legs with envy.

Top Gun had just come out, and I had been looking forward to seeing it. But all I did during the movie was compare my legs with those on the screen. They all had little bird legs.

I vowed never to wear a skirt on a date again.

Since then, Todd has learned that it might not have been the best question to ask on a date. He’s even apologized.

I told him I was writing about it this week.

“All your women readers will hate me,” he said.

Well, that’s the price you pay …

What Was Really Going On

Todd’s brief question didn’t create my insecurity. It exposed it. I didn’t just notice my calves—I compared them and decided they weren’t good enough.

And I’ve been doing some version of that ever since.

Now it’s not about my body, but my life.

I always thought it was a self-esteem problem. But it’s starting to look more like a trust problem.

Trying to Control What I Can

When I feel out of control internally, I try to control externally. Every closet, drawer, and cabinet is screaming at me to be cleaned and organized. But when I have the energy, I don’t have the time, and vice versa. And the noise in my head only gets louder.

If I’m exhausted, sick, or frustrated, I start looking around and wishing for an easier life.

But I never want little Charlotte to hear the discontent in my sighs.

The Race That’s Mine

For years, I’ve known the passage, “And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us.” (Hebrews 12:1b) But I’ve only focused on “run with perseverance” rather than on the “race marked out for us.”

A race is marked out for me, and it’s not going to look like anyone else’s. I can either keep looking sideways or I can accept that this is my race.

Paul wrote, “For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” (Ephesians 2:10 NIV)

I’m learning to trust that God has made me with everything I need for the life I’m living. If new circumstances arise, He will provide in that moment.

Learning to Trust This Life

My goal can’t be to feel in control of everything around me.

It’s to trust the life I’ve been given, even when it doesn’t look like anyone else’s and seems harder.

Charlotte came to us four years ago. I felt responsible for caring for and training her.

I never realized how much this life would change me.

The point was never just raising her.
It was learning to trust the life I’ve been given.

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Your Turn

What’s something small that can make you feel “less than” if you’re not careful?