When God Isn’t Good

Where do you go what God isn’t there for you? When everybody’s prayers are being answered except yours? What do you do when you know God is real, but you no longer believe that he’s good?

By the mid 1990s I’d been a believer for more than twelve years. During that time I’d been actively involved in first the Navigators, and then Campus Crusade for Christ. I’d led small groups, and gone on short-term missions to Argentina, Mexico, Ecuador and Paraguay. And I wanted more. My quiet time journals from that period record a number of my prayers that God would make me the kind of Christian who would follow him anywhere, regardless of the cost. And, of course, I though I could handle anything he led me through. I even told him I was willing to be made weak, so that he could be my strength.

One of my favorite quotes, both then and now, is from The Screwtape Letters¹. This book, written by C. S. Lewis and first published in 1942, consists of a series of lessons in Christian living, presented in the form of letters from a senior devil, named Screwtape, to his nephew and junior underling, Wormwood. The “Enemy” he talks about is, of course, God. One particular passage which has always moved me greatly reads:

Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.

And so I used to pray that God would make me into exactly the kind of Christian that this passage describes; a man who would continue to be faithful and obedient even if every trace of God’s presence seemed to disappear.

Dumbest. Prayer. Ever.

It started slowly. There were no great disasters, but looking back now from almost thirty years later, I do see that more and more of my journal entries were about my longing to find a wife, and my frustration that God had not yet answered those prayers.

Then I got laid off from my job. And from my next job, and the one after that. Funds came from unexpected sources to keep me going, but never more than the bare minimum I needed just to survive. I began struggling with depression, to the point that sometimes it was all I could do to make it through the day without ending my life. There were times when I could not imagine wanting to survive another week. The only way to survive was to let tomorrow worry about itself and promise myself only that I would not die that day.

This is not to say that everything in my life was negative. In fact, the people I was around mostly had no idea what I was going through. I was part of the young adult ministry at my church, and I frequently heard from others that I had offered some insight into a passage of Scripture that had blessed them. I also saw a lot of answers to prayer, just as long as I was praying for someone else. Prayers for me, whether offered by myself or by one of my brothers and sisters, mostly went unanswered.

Then one day in the spring of 1997, as I was praying, I got a very powerful sense that God was speaking to my about a young lady I knew, named Lisa². Over and over, every time I prayed, the impression got clearer that God would bring her to me to be my wife. More specifically, the message seemed to be, “I don’t want you to pursue Lisa. I don’t want you to go after her in any way whatsoever. All I want you to do is watch and pray, because I’m going to bring her to you.” I very cautiously shared this with two other people I trusted, and they both advised me to do exactly what I was hearing: nothing except watch and pray.

So that’s what I did for the next several months. Praying for Lisa, and feeling the same confirmation over and over again, gave me a reason to hope as I continued to struggle with depression and a lack of income. And in the end, it wasn’t enough to overcome the overwhelming feeling that God was jerking me around. The final straw came when my car was towed for having expired tags, even though the DMV had already processed my check for the registration. I gave up. That day I sent an email to the young adult pastor telling him that I still wanted to be friends with everyone there, but I wanted nothing more to do with God, and did not consider myself a Christian any longer.

A month went by, and then I got the news that Lisa had just married a guy that none of her friends had even known she’d been interested in. And amazingly, that was what brought me back again to prayer. Not in repentance, not yet, but in anger and pain, completely unable to fathom why God would lie to me and betray me with a hope that he knew was false. It took another two weeks of processing before I could acknowledge that I had given God permission, through my earlier prayer, to make me weak. But he also knew very well that I would not have given him that permission had I known what the result would be. Altogether, it took a month and a half after I turned my back on God before I fully returned and asked him to forgive me and take me back. And acknowledged that I had not, actually, come back to God at all. Rather, he had come to get me.

Just one week later, I heard God speak again. This time there could be no mistake, because what I heard was something that could not possibly have come from any other source. God told me to pray for Lisa and her husband; that their marriage would be healthy and strong. That hurt. I had to pause twenty to thirty times a day and make myself ask God to do the one thing in all the universe that I most wanted him not to do.

I made two commitments during that time; I really don’t think I’d have survived if I hadn’t. The first was, when I prayed, never to pretend that I wasn’t feeling whatever it is that I really felt. I’d be angry, or grieving, or lonely, or whatever, and I let God know it. My second commitment was, after I admitted what I felt, I’d make a deliberate choice to pray for what I knew was right, regardless of how I felt about it. It took many weeks before I could manage those prayers for Lisa without feeling like I was cutting my own heart right out of my chest. It never did get easy.

By now, however, I was attending church again, and once again active in the young adult group. They became my lifeline, keeping me from withdrawing into a dangerous solitude although, interestingly, from the day I first heard about Lisa’s marriage, I never again considered suicide.

But as weeks became months, my lifeline started to go away. The young adult pastor who had been there for me through all this was laid off and moved away. The group itself began to splinter into different cliques. More and more the worship time on Sunday morning seemed like it was just about chasing an emotional high, rather than about Jesus. I started a small discipleship group, only to see it break up over romantic rivalry between three of the members. And the church as a whole was noticeably colder and more self-centered than we had been a year or so earlier.

Eventually I discovered that supernatural evil had been invited in to the church. How that all played out is a longer story than I can tell here, and one I’ve touched on elsewhere. The result, however, is that everything I was relying on to survive was, little by little, being taken away.

This went on for two and a half years, as I went from one temporary job to another, just to keep food on the table and roof over my head. Through it all, God kept reminding me to pray for Lisa’s marriage. But eventually, that wasn’t enough of a sacrifice. As much as it hurt to know that he wanted her to have a healthy marriage with someone else, the real blow came when I discovered that he wanted me to want that for her as well. Changing what my heart wants is, obviously, well outside my abilities. Asking God to change my desire, to give up forever a dream that I still believed had come from him, felt like death. It wasn’t fair. I wrote in my quiet time journal:

Oh God, I’m not fighting you. I’m fighting myself. There’s a part of me that already knows I’m going to do this and I hate it. It feels like I’m dying, but I don’t want to die for you. I don’t want to die at all. I want to live and be happy and see your promise fulfilled in my life. I don’t want to be a super saint. All I want is to live a normal Christian life just like everyone else gets to do.

You’re asking me to give up my very self, and I just can’t do that. I’m not the person you think I am God. I’m not! I’m just Joe, I can’t do this. It’s just too big for me.

But later that same day I added:

It’s all over God. You win. Are you happy now? I’ll go where you want me to go. You have the right, and you have permission to change my desire and make it match yours. Do what you have to do to make it work, but please do it quickly before I change my mind.

Lord, I feel numb inside. All I want to do is curl up into a little ball and cry for a very long time. I have to die. The me that is all I’ve ever known of myself has to be killed and whatever is left will just have to go on without it until the resurrection. If there is a resurrection. I don’t know any more if I even believe in resurrection. And at the bottom line I’m not sure it even matters. Dead is dead, and any resurrection is so far in the future it can’t even reach me.

So Father, please do what you have to do. Give me the desires that you want me to have. Let even the deep longings at the bottom of my heart match yours. And even though I am dead I will somehow try to go on following you.

The attitude and the mood at that church continued getting darker. In the end, I had to leave because of a false accusation. I found another, much larger church where I made a couple of half-hearted attempts at being involved in one of the ministries, then settled back into just attending and blending in. The final blow came a couple of months later, when I found out from a friend that Lisa and her husband were expecting a child.

My attendance at the new church became more and more sporadic. I had given God everything I had to give, and all I’d gotten in return was ashes and pain. On Easter of 2000, just over three years since I’d first received the impression about Lisa, I wrote:

I still believe in goodness, and in doing right. In helping people whenever I can. But I no longer really believe in resurrection. Not for me anyway. It’s just something that happened a long time ago. In my heart is just a big empty place where God used to live. Where hope used to live. What is there left for me God? Physically I’m alive and doing fine. But inside? I just don’t know.

I used to go to worship God with joy. But my joy has left and I have not gone to church in months, except for a few times when I went with others. Nor have I bothered to read his Word. The emptiness and hopelessness that I feel, might it be nothing more than simple starvation? I’m doing everything I can to pull away from the one person above all others whom I don’t want to be away from.

I don’t want to do this anymore God. I don’t want to run away from you. If I stop running, will you still be there to take me back, or have I gone too far and gotten lost forever?

In my next journal entry, eighteen days later, I just wrote out Job 1:20-22, without any comment of my own.

At this, Job got up and tore his robe and shaved his head. Then he fell to the ground in worship and said:

“Naked I came from my mother’s womb,

and naked I will depart.

The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away;

may the name of the Lord be praised.”

In all this, Job did not sin by charging God with wrongdoing.

I didn’t journal again, or have another quiet time, for more than twenty years.

With time and rest there came healing. The temporary jobs became longer, more stable, and better paying. I also received a small inheritance that took more of the financial pressure off, and I was able to move up from a rented room to an actual apartment. I went back to school and earned a BA in anthropology. Along the way I met, dated, and eventually married Catherine.

We moved to Reno in 2008. I found a large church where I could blend in and attended for a while, but without active involvement I kept finding less and less motive to actually go, until I finally stopped altogether. I went back to school again and earned my MA, graduating just as Covid was becoming bad in 2020. And during this entire time, I kept up the habit I’d developed long before of offering a silent prayer every time I heard a siren or saw the red lights of an emergency vehicle.

It was Covid that eventually brought me back to church. All the news I saw about governments closing churches while allowing liquor stores and casinos to continue operating made me angry. But I found myself asking why I was upset about not being allowed to go to church, when I hadn’t actually been going in years. That thought convicted me, and one Sunday morning, in the summer of 2021, I walked into a church that I’d found online.

It felt like I had come hone. More than that, the people there treated me like I was family. I kept coming back. After about six months, I knew that I needed to start having quiet times again. And as I thought about it, one phrase kept coming into my mind: “remember who you are.”

I reread my old journals and for the time in a long while, I thought about what I’d gone through more than twenty years before. With the perspective of two decades, I saw a lot of things that I hadn’t recognized at the time; strengths that God had built in me, and ways that he’d been faithful even when I couldn’t see it. And I realized that when he brought me to the place where I believed he had taken everything I had from me, even my very self, all I wanted was him, which was exactly what I had prayed for all those years ago. Every trace of God’s presence hadn’t literally vanished from my life, but every trace of his goodness certainly had, and I found that it was the only thing I wanted.

Eric Ortlund, in his commentary on Job³, makes the point that the only way God could show that Job wasn’t serving him for purely mercenary reasons, as the accuser claimed, was to bring him to the point where he could see no possibility of ever again receiving anything good from God. He had to believe that God was the one who had taken everything from him and was never going to give it back. That was the moment when Job proved he was faithful.

In his epistle to the Romans, Paul writes:

Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? As it is written:

“For your sake we face death all day long;

we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.”

No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. (Romans 8:35-37)

The Scripture Paul quotes here is Psalm 44:22, and it’s part of a lament over the fact that God appeared to have abandoned Israel. The verse points out that they are still being faithful; facing death daily for the sake of God’s righteousness. That was the situation Paul is pointing to in this passage. And that’s the situation, being faithful despite the appearance of having been abandoned, in which he calls us more than conquerors.

Twenty years later, I no longer believe that God lied to me. But he allowed me to be lied to, just as he allowed Job to be struck, because he wanted to give me a strength and a faithfulness that I could not have obtained in any other way.

Why am I writing this? Because I think there’s somebody who needs to read it. Who needs to hear that you’re not the first person God has, seemingly, betrayed and abandoned. To that person I say: keep going. When you don’t think you can take even two more steps, take one. And don’t listen to anybody who tries to tell you that it’s all in your imagination. Everything you’re going through, everything you see, is real. But there is also another reality that you don’t see. That I didn’t see until more than twenty years later. And in the reality that you aren’t seeing, when you reach the very end, when you cry out as Jesus did, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 29:46), at that exact moment you are more than a conqueror.

1. Lewis, C. S.
1942 The Screwtape Letters. Unwin Brothers Limited, Woking.

2. Not her real name.

3. Ortlund, Eric
2021 Piercing Leviathan: God’s Defeat of Evil in the Book of Job. Apollos, London.