“The Ache”: Honest Faith Wrestling with Doubt

It’s almost embarrassing admitting this, but here we go. For most of my adult life, I have simultaneously craved change and been terrified of it. Not one or the other. Both. The longing and the dread, occupying the same space in my chest at the same time, like two people who do not particularly like each other being seated at the same table and expected to get along.

I have caught myself daydreaming about a different version of my life. A circumstance that finally shifts. A longing that gets satisfied. A situation that resolves itself into something that looks more like what I thought I wanted. And then, when something resembling that actual door appears in front of me, the wide-open, right-there, walk-through-it door, I have absolutely turned around and gone the other direction. The fear showed up bigger than the dream, and I let it win. More than once.

And then there are the changes that don’t ask permission. The ones that arrive without warning and rearrange everything before you can even orient yourself. One day the life you had carefully and quietly built is intact. And the next, something shifts, or breaks, or ends, and nothing is going to be the same again, and you know it, and you cannot unknow it.

When I was younger, I had a very specific picture of what fifty-one would look like. A modest home that felt like me. A husband I adored who adored me back. Two children I loved with every part of myself. Teaching in a school where the work actually meant something. A published book with my name on the cover. Maybe a dog. Friends who could do dinner out and board games at someone’s kitchen table in equal measure and find both equally satisfying. I had a plan. I had a picture. I had, as it turns out, very little control over either.

Change had its own ideas about my life.

Not all at once. That is rarely how it works. It is usually more gradual than that, more erosive. One dream quietly revised. Then another. Then the whole picture shifted so much that I could barely recognize what I had originally hoped for. And somewhere in the middle of all of that, I developed a theology I am not proud of.

I thought God just didn’t want me to be happy.

With every detour, every door that refused to open, every version of the plan that fell apart, I quietly filed it as evidence. God was withholding. God had some other, harder path in mind for me, and happiness was simply not part of it. I would watch other people live out the very things I had wanted for myself and feel something I couldn’t quite name, something heavy and complicated that sat somewhere between grief and guilt for even feeling the grief.

What took me years to understand was that I had confused two things that are genuinely not the same.

Happiness is entirely dependent on circumstances. It goes where they go. When the circumstances cooperate, happiness shows up. When they fall apart, happiness goes with them. My happiness was always going to be fragile, because circumstances are, at least in part, always going to be outside my control. I was trying to build something permanent out of material that was never designed to hold that kind of weight.

Joy is different. Not louder. Not more dramatic. Actually quieter, and far more stubborn.

But here is what took me the longest to understand. Joy doesn’t arrive after the grief clears. It doesn’t wait politely while you finish mourning the life you lost before it makes its entrance. It lives somewhere underneath all of it. Psalm 16 says that in his presence there is fullness of joy, not in the resolved circumstance, not in the answered prayer, but in his presence, which is already where you are. Paul in Romans 15 calls it a joy and peace that comes as we trust, not as we finally arrive at some cleaner and more resolved version of our circumstances. Which means you do not have to be okay to have joy. You do not have to have finished grieving the dream that didn’t happen. You can carry both at once, the real loss and the stubborn hope, the disappointment and the deep-down certainty that you are still loved, because that is what trust actually looks like in the middle of the hard part.

Understanding that distinction did not make everything feel better immediately. It didn’t. I still grieve the version of my life that didn’t happen. Grief is allowed. Losing a dream is a real loss, and pretending otherwise is a kind of dishonesty I don’t have the energy for anymore.

Whether I have been chasing a change I wanted or reeling from one I didn’t choose, Jesus has been in it with me. Whether I was building a dream or watching one come apart, he was there. He does not love me more when the circumstances are favorable and less when they aren’t. He is not more present in the chapters that look good and less present in the ones that don’t.

He is constant. Unchanging. Always loving me. Always leading me. Always holding, somewhere ahead of me in the story I cannot yet see, his own dreams and plans for my life.

I do not have to be afraid of what changes next. I do not have to manage and control and strategize against every possible outcome, though if you are anything like me, you have tried. I can grieve the life I hoped for and still walk forward in the one I actually have, because the one I have, even in its unexpected and sometimes difficult shape, has him in it. And he has not changed his mind about me. Not once. Not ever.

That is the thing that holds when everything else shifts.

If you are reading this and your life turned out mostly the way you hoped, you are probably still familiar with what I am describing. The low-grade fear that something good might change. The way you hold the beautiful things a little too tightly, braced for the moment they shift. The guilt that comes from wanting something different when you know you should be grateful for what you have.

And if you are reading this in the middle of a life that doesn’t look the way you planned, I want you to know something. The grief you feel about that is not a faith problem. It doesn’t mean you aren’t trusting enough or believing hard enough or focusing on the bright side with sufficient effort. It means you loved something. You wanted something real. And that was never wrong.

You were allowed to want those things.

You are also held right now, in this exact shape of your life and not the one you imagined, by a love that is not made smaller by your disappointment or confused by your grief. He is not waiting for you to finish the hard part before he shows up. He is already in it with you, in the detour, in the loss, in the unlived version of the dream, in the quiet mornings when you do the math on your life and feel like it doesn’t add up the way it was supposed to.

Joy is already in you, too, even when it is quiet. Not the kind that announces itself. The stubborn underneath kind. The kind that holds.

Go in peace. You are more loved than the version of your life you lost.