Consistent and Unwavering

 

When Life Changes, God Doesn't

I don’t know if any of you have ever had a conversation with someone who is truly disappointed with life, but I have. I know a woman who had lost almost everything that was important to her. She became jobless, then homeless and car-less, and eventually her children were taken away. As a single mother, she struggled to hold everything together for as long as she could, but it seemed like every turn she made brought another problem. Every time she thought things might finally get better, something else happened. Eventually, she gave up.

What troubled me most wasn't just that she had become disappointed with life; she had become disappointed with God. She believed God was punishing her for something she couldn't understand, and the more difficult her circumstances got, the more difficult it became for her to trust Him. Her mind got so entrenched in that way of thinking that she stopped looking for reasons to believe God and started finding reasons not to. She became bitter, and eventually doubt became more comfortable to her than faith.

I think we have to be careful about allowing what is happening around us to determine what we believe about the God who is above us. Life has a way of changing without asking our permission. One day everything can seem stable, and the next day we can find ourselves dealing with something we never saw coming. A relationship changes, a job disappears, money gets tight, a loved one becomes sick, a door closes, or something we prayed would happen simply doesn't happen. And when enough of these things pile up, we can begin to look at God through the circumstances instead of looking at our circumstances through what we know about God.

Letting our circumstances determine how we view God is a dangerous place to be, because circumstances are temporary and constantly changing, but God's character is not. Malachi 3:6 (NLT) says, “I am the LORD, and I do not change.” Think about that for a moment. The God who loved you when you were celebrating is the same God who loves you when you're crying. The God who was faithful when everything was going right is the same God who remains faithful when everything seems to be going wrong. Your circumstances may change, but God doesn't.

That doesn't mean we will always understand what God is doing. In fact, there will be times when we don't understand it at all. We may pray about something for months or even years and still not see the answer we hoped for. We may ask God why He allowed something to happen and hear nothing that satisfies our question. We may become disappointed, frustrated, and even angry. God already knows what's in our hearts, so there is no reason to pretend with Him. We can tell Him that we're hurting. We can tell Him that we're disappointed. We can tell Him that we don't understand. But we have to be careful not to allow what we don't understand about God to become greater than what we already know about Him. Lamentations 3:22–23 (NLT) reminds us, “The faithful love of the LORD never ends! His mercies never cease. Great is his faithfulness; his mercies begin afresh each morning.” His faithfulness is not dependent upon whether today looks the way we wanted it to look. He is faithful because that is who He is.

This is why our relationship with Jesus Christ has to be deeper than what God can do for us. If I only trust God when He answers my prayers the way I want Him to, then I'm not really trusting Him; I'm trusting the outcome I want Him to produce. Real faith has to take us beyond that.

There will be moments when we have to say, “Lord, I don't understand this, but I still trust You.” We may not understand the season, but we can know the One who is walking through it with us. Hebrews 13:8 (NLT) says, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.” That means Jesus doesn't change because my life changed. He doesn't become less loving because I'm hurting. He doesn't become less faithful because I'm waiting. He doesn't stop being good because I don't understand His timing. If I have built my relationship with Him on who He is rather than simply on what He does, then even disappointment can become an opportunity to know Him more deeply.

The enemy would love to use difficult seasons to convince us that God has abandoned us. He wants us to look at everything that has gone wrong and conclude that God doesn't care, isn't listening, or must be punishing us. But we cannot allow pain to become our theology. We have to return to God's Word and remind ourselves of what is true. Romans 8:38–39 tells us that nothing can separate us from the love of God that is revealed in Christ Jesus our Lord. Nothing. Not disappointment. Not failure. Not loss. Not confusion. Not the season we're in. That doesn't mean God will prevent every painful thing from happening, but it does mean we never have to walk through those painful things believing that we are abandoned by Him. We can be disappointed and still trust Him. Faith isn't pretending that everything is okay; faith is knowing that even when everything isn't okay, God is still God.

So if you are in a season right now where your life doesn't look anything like you expected it to, don't let this season tell you who God is. Let God's Word tell you who He is. Your circumstances may change tomorrow, next month, or next year, but God's character remains the same. He is still faithful. He is still loving. He is still merciful. He is still worthy of your trust. And because of Jesus Christ, you can come to Him exactly as you are, even when your faith feels weak and your heart is tired. You don't have to have all the answers before you trust Him. Sometimes you simply have to make the decision that regardless of what changes around you, you will not change your mind about God. He has been faithful before, He is faithful now, and He will be faithful to what He has promised in His Word. ■

Scripture quotations marked (NLT) are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved.

“Consistent and Unwavering”, written by Kim for https://rescuefromdomesticviolence.blogspot.com© 2026. All rights reserved. All praise and honor to God through Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior.

When Abuse Gets in the Way of the Life God Intended

The book of Job is one of those places in Scripture where we see just how deeply suffering can affect a person's life. Job lost his children, his wealth, his health, and almost everything that had given his life a sense of security. At one point he said in Job 3:25 (NLT), “What I always feared has happened to me. What I dreaded has come true.” Imagine living through that much loss and still trying to make sense of your life. When pain keeps coming, it can change the way you think, the way you see yourself, and even what you believe is possible for your future. Abuse can do something very similar. It can get into places that go far beyond what happens in the relationship itself. It can affect your confidence, your peace, your relationships, your decisions, and sometimes even the way you see God. And before long, you can find yourself living around the abuse instead of living the life God intended for you.

Abuse has a way of making your world smaller. You may stop saying what you really think because you already know how it will be received. You may stop doing things you enjoy because they cause an argument. You may begin checking somebody else's mood before you decide what kind of day you're going to have. Little by little, you can become more focused on keeping the peace than living your life. And after a while, you may not even realize how much of yourself you've given up just trying to avoid the next problem. That isn't the life God calls you to live. Jesus said in John 10:10 (NLT), “My purpose is to give them a rich and satisfying life.” Abuse takes. Jesus gives. Abuse controls. Jesus leads. Those are two very different things, and we have to learn to recognize the difference.

After you hear the same hurtful messages long enough, they can start sounding like your own thoughts. Maybe you’ve been told that you’re not good enough, that nobody else would want you, that you can’t make it without him, or that everything is your fault. Those words can get deep. But what somebody says about you does not get to decide who you are. Your identity was never supposed to come from another person’s approval in the first place.

Ephesians 2:10 (NLT) says, “For we are God’s masterpiece. He has created us anew in Christ Jesus, so we can do the good things he planned for us long ago.” That means the person God created you to be is still there, even if abuse has buried her under years of hurt, fear, and self-doubt. Jesus is not looking at you through the eyes of the person who hurt you. He sees you through the truth of who you are in Him.Top of Form

Getting free from abuse is about more than getting away from the person who hurt you. There is also an inner freedom that has to happen over time. You have to start separating what God says about you from what you have been told about yourself. That can take some work, especially when you've heard the same lies for years. But you don't have to carry somebody else's words as if they are your identity. Romans 12:2 (NLT) tells us to “let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think.” This is where Jesus meets us in the healing. He begins to rebuild what has been torn down. And He doesn’t do it by pretending the hurt never happened, but by teaching us to see ourselves, our lives, and our future through His truth instead of through the eyes of the person who hurt us.

The life God intended for you may not look exactly like the life you once imagined. Abuse may have changed things you never expected to have to deal with. But it does not get the final word. You can heal. You can learn to trust yourself again. You can make decisions without being afraid of somebody else's reaction. You can laugh again, make plans again, and discover parts of yourself that got buried under the weight of survival. Most of all, you can walk with Jesus through every part of that journey. He is not asking you to pretend it didn't happen. He is inviting you to let Him meet you in the places where it hurt and lead you forward. What happened to you matters, but it does not have to determine the rest of your life. There is still life ahead of you.■

Scripture quotations marked (NLT) are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved.

“When Abuse Gets in the Way of the Life God Intended”, written by Kim for https://rescuefromdomesticviolence.blogspot.com© 2026. All rights reserved. All praise and honor to God through Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior.

Looking Forward After What You’ve Been Through

 

Philippians 3:13–14 (NLT)
“13 No, dear brothers and sisters, I have not achieved it, but I focus on this one thing: Forgetting the past and looking forward to what lies ahead, 14 I press on to reach the end of the race and receive the heavenly prize for which God, through Christ Jesus, is calling us.”

There are some things you go through in life that leave a mark on you. Sometimes it is a relationship that ended badly, a decision you wish you could take back, a season when you felt lost, a disappointment you never saw coming, or simply a period of life that took more out of you than you expected. And if you've lived long enough, you already know that life can teach you some lessons you didn't think you needed to learn. Some of those lessons come through our own choices, and some come through what other people have chosen to do. Either way, when you've been through certain things, you don't always come out thinking the same way you did before.

You may become more cautious. You may question yourself. You may find yourself wondering if you can trust again, love again, hope again, or even believe that something good can happen again. That's where what you've been through can become a problem—not because the experience wasn't real, but because we can allow something that happened in one season to start telling us what we should expect in every season that follows. We have to be careful with that. What happened to you may explain some of what you struggle with today, but through Jesus Christ, it does not have to keep controlling what happens in you tomorrow—it does not have to keep deciding how you live, love, think, and respond.

Paul understood something about moving forward that we sometimes have a hard time accepting. He had a past. He had things in his history that he could have spent the rest of his life thinking about, explaining, regretting, or trying to make up for. But when Paul talked about his life in Philippians, he didn't present himself as a man who had forgotten everything behind him. He presented himself as a man who had made a decision about where he was going. He understood that if he kept reaching backward, he would have difficulty reaching forward. That's a word for us because there is a difference between remembering what happened and continuing to live in it.

You can remember the relationship that hurt you without allowing that relationship to determine whether you will ever trust anybody again. You can remember a mistake without making that mistake your identity. You can acknowledge that somebody mistreated you without spending the rest of your life allowing what they did to shape how you see yourself.

Moving forward doesn't mean you suddenly forget what happened. It means you stop allowing what happened to have the final word over who you are and what you believe is possible for your life. There comes a point when you have to recognize that God can still do something new in you, even after what you've been through. Isaiah 43:18-19 (NLT) reminds us that God is not finished: “But forget all that—it is nothing compared to what I am going to do. For I am about to do something new. See, I have already begun! Do you not see it?”

We can spend so much time mourning the door that closed that we never notice the door God is opening. Sometimes we become so focused on what we lost that we fail to recognize what God is placing before us. A closed door may have disappointed you, but it does not mean God has stopped making a way for you. The Word of God tells us in Revelation 3:8 (NLT), “I know all the things you do, and I have opened a door for you that no one can close.” Your life is not over because something didn't work out. You are not finished because you made mistakes. You are not disqualified because you have a history. You are not too old, too damaged, too disappointed, or too far behind for God to continue working in your life.

You've already lived through yesterday. You don't have to keep living there. Take the wisdom. Take the lessons. Take the growth and give God the hurt that you are still carrying. Repent where you need to repent. Forgive where you need to forgive. Release what you cannot change. And then look forward. Not because you know exactly what is coming, but because you know the God who holds your future. After all you've been through, don't spend the rest of your life looking backward. God is still working. He is still leading. And there is still more ahead of you. Lift your eyes, trust Him with what comes next, and keep looking forward.■

Scripture quotations marked (NLT) are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved.

“Looking Forward After What You’ve Been Through”, written by Kim for https://rescuefromdomesticviolence.blogspot.com© 2026. All rights reserved. All praise and honor to God through Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior.