There are times when trusting God feels easy. Life is going well, prayers are being answered, and it feels like everything is moving the way it should. Then there are times when you’re praying harder than ever, trying to stay encouraged, and wondering why nothing seems to be changing. You still believe God. You still love Him. But waiting starts to wear on you, and that’s when the harder questions show up. If I trust God, why am I still anxious? Why hasn’t He answered me yet? If He loves me, why is He allowing this to happen? How long am I supposed to keep believing when I can’t see anything changing?
I’m asking those questions because I’m living them too. As I’m writing this, I’m in the middle of a situation I never expected to be in. Life looks very different from the way it did a year ago, and some days the weight of everything feels much heavier than what I can bear. I get stressed. I get anxious. There are things I’m actively praying about that I can’t tie up for you with a cute testimony at the end because I haven’t reached the end yet. Sometimes my prayers are just “Why?”or “How much longer?” and sometimes I don’t say anything at all. I just sit with God because He already knows what I need and what’s on my heart. But even in the middle of all of that, you couldn’t make me doubt God if you paid me.
So to the person reading this, please know I’m not standing above you. I’m not a theologian, and I don’t have every answer wrapped up neatly. I’m a woman who loves God, has real experiences, has real questions, and wants to understand what faith is supposed to look like when you’re anxious, tired, hurting, and still waiting to hear from God. So, if there’s one thing I want us to walk away from this article understanding, it’s this: how do we keep waiting on God and trusting Him when we don’t understand what He’s doing, He seems silent, and life still feels heavy?
If I Trust God, Why Am I Still Anxious?
One of the first questions I’ve had to wrestle with is whether feeling anxious means I’m not trusting God enough. I have anxiety, so I’m not asking that from some distant, theoretical place. I know what it feels like when your mind won’t slow down, when you start overthinking everything, and when fear makes a situation feel even bigger than it already is. I think Christians can sometimes make that even harder by convincing themselves that strong faith should eliminate anxiety completely. Then something happens, you become anxious about it, and now you’re dealing with the actual problem plus guilt because you think a “good Christian” shouldn’t feel this way.
But Jesus never promised His followers a life with nothing to be troubled by. In John 16:33, He tells them plainly that they’ll have trouble in this world while also telling them that peace can be found in Him because He has overcome the world. To me, that means the presence of fear or anxiety doesn’t automatically mean God has disappeared or that my faith has failed.
I’m starting to think faith has less to do with never feeling afraid and more to do with what I do with that fear when it shows up. Trusting God doesn’t mean I’ll never feel anxious or scared, but I do think real trust should make room for some level of peace, even in the middle of the storm. Not because I know exactly how everything is going to work out, but because I believe God is still with me in it. I can be afraid and still believe I’m not alone. I can be anxious and still have something underneath that anxiety saying, God is still God, and I’m still in His hands. Do I let fear convince me that He has forgotten me, or do I keep bringing that fear back to Him?
I actually bought Joyce Meyer’s Worry-Free Living: Trading Anxiety for Peace long before I ever planned to write this article because this is something I’ve genuinely been trying to work through in my own life. I’m still reading and learning, but if you’re dealing with some of these same thoughts right now, it might be a helpful resource to pick up for yourself too.
* This post contains affiliate links. I may earn a small commission if you purchase through them, at no extra cost to you.
And if you’ve ever considered therapy or getting some kind of help for your anxiety, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. It’s something I’ve done for myself too. Seeking support doesn’t compete with God, and it doesn’t mean your faith is weak.
What Do You Do When It Feels Like God Isn’t Listening?
Waiting on God gets especially hard when you feel like you’ve been saying the same prayer forever. You prayed yesterday. You prayed last month. Some prayers, you’ve been praying for years. Eventually, the questions start coming. Did God say no? Is He telling me to wait? Am I asking for the wrong thing? Does He hear me at all?
One thing that comforts me is realizing how honestly people in Scripture spoke to God. In Psalm 13, David asks God how long He’ll forget him, talks about wrestling with sorrow, and asks Him to answer. But by the end of that same psalm, David is still trusting God’s love and remembering His goodness. His questions didn’t cancel out his faith. They were part of the conversation he was still having with Him.
So what do you do when it feels like God isn’t listening? You keep talking to Him anyway. Tell Him when you’re angry, tired, confused, disappointed, or scared. Ask the questions. Sit in silence if that’s all you have. Keep bringing yourself back to Him instead of assuming His silence means He’s gone. Maybe faith isn’t about never having questions. Maybe it’s about continuing to turn to God with them.
When Is It My Turn, God?
That question is one of the reasons DcrypTos’ song “When Is It My Turn, God?” caught my attention long before I started planning this article. There’s a line in the song that asks, “God, when is it my turn for a miracle?” And I get it. You can genuinely be happy for someone else while still wondering when something is going to change for you. You can celebrate the house, pregnancy, marriage, promotion, healing, or answered prayer and still quietly think, God, I’m happy for them, but when is it my turn? That doesn’t automatically make you jealous or ungrateful. Sometimes you’re just tired of waiting.
The hardest part is that I can’t tell you when things will change or whether the answer will look the way you’re hoping it will. No one can. But not seeing an answer yet isn’t the same as being forgotten. That’s one reason Danny Gokey’s “Haven’t Seen It Yet” resonates with me too. I’m very capable of looking at what I can see right now and deciding that it must be the whole story, when the truth is that I simply don’t know what God is doing beyond what I can see.
So when I find myself asking, “When is it my turn?” I’m learning not to turn the waiting into evidence that God has passed me over. I may not know when something will change, or even whether it’ll change in the exact way I’ve been hoping for, but “I haven’t seen it yet” and “God isn’t doing anything” are not the same thing.
If God Loves Me, Why Does He Let Bad Things Happen?
This is where my questions get much bigger than waiting for one particular prayer to be answered. If God really loves us, why does He allow people who genuinely love Him to suffer? What do we say to someone who’s faithful, spends time in His Word, talks to Him, serves Him, and still receives a devastating diagnosis? What do we tell the mother whose child is seriously ill, or the person who loses a spouse, a home, or a child? I don’t think we can look at any of those people and say, “Maybe you just needed more faith.”
My mother is what I affectionately call a hardcore Jesus freak. She loves God, talks about God, prays constantly, and her faith is simply part of who she is. And she’s had cancer twice. First breast cancer, then uterine cancer years later. She’ll tell you herself that neither diagnosis made her question God. Her attitude was basically, “Okay. This is something I have to get through.” And she did. Today she’s alive, well, and still very much the same Jesus-loving woman she’s always been.
But I’ve seen the other outcome too.
One of my best friends lost her mother to cancer. While she was sick, my friend would reach out to my mother because she knew what a prayer warrior she was. My mother prayed for her. People believed God could heal her. People wanted her healed. And she still died. That’s exactly why I’ll never tell somebody that survival is proof of stronger faith. The outcome alone doesn’t tell us who loved God more.
Job gives us another example of why suffering can’t automatically be treated as evidence of weak faith. He’s introduced as a man who feared God and lived with integrity, yet devastating suffering still entered his life. So as uncomfortable as it is, being faithful to God doesn’t mean terrible things will never happen to us.
Honestly, I don’t know why God allows every specific tragedy. But this is also where my belief in eternity matters. Revelation 21 describes a future where death, mourning, crying, and pain do not continue forever. So while I would never tell someone who’s grieving, “Well, God healed them anyway,” I do believe death isn’t the end of a believer’s story. The people praying wanted healing here. They wanted more birthdays, more phone calls, more dinners, more ordinary Tuesdays. Faith doesn’t make losing those things hurt less, but it gives me hope that suffering, sickness, and death do not get the final word.
Has God Ever Failed You Yet?
Look backward. Think about another time when you genuinely didn’t know how you were going to make it through. Think about the problem that kept you awake at night, the situation you couldn’t see a solution for, or the moment that made you wonder what in the world you were going to do next. Somehow, you’re not still standing inside every one of those moments.
Think about someone in your personal life who has always been reliable. Someone who’s never lied to you, never made promises they didn’t keep, and has always shown up when they said they would. If that person told you, “I’ve got something for you,” but didn’t tell you when, you probably wouldn’t spend every day wondering if they were lying. You’d trust them because their history with you has already proven who they are.
That’s the kind of trust I’m talking about with God. That’s the kind of trust I’m talking about with God. I may not have every answer in front of me, but I do have a history with Him. When I look back at my own life, I can see things that felt impossible while I was living through them, and somehow I made it to the other side.
That’s what I mean when I ask, has God ever failed you yet? When you look at the moments you thought would take you out, did He leave you there?
That’s why I keep coming back to this: I have absolutely no idea what God is going to do. But I know what He’s already done. I can’t use tomorrow as evidence because tomorrow hasn’t happened yet. But I have yesterday, and I have enough history with God to know that my inability to see an answer right now isn’t proof that there isn’t one.
You Want God to Be Down for You. But Are You Really Down for God?
Now comes the part where I have to stop asking God questions for a minute and look at myself. Romans 8:28 is one of those verses people quote constantly. It says that God works in all things for the good of those who love Him and are called according to His purpose. But when you keep reading Romans 8, Paul isn’t describing a painless life where nothing terrible happens. He talks about trouble, hardship, persecution, famine, danger, and even death while still insisting that none of those things can separate believers from God’s love.
One phrase in verse 28 really caught my attention: those who love Him. Do I really love God, or do I mostly love what I hope He’ll do for me? Because listen, you want God to be down for you. But are you really down for God?
Oop.
And please know I’m asking myself this right along with you. What does my relationship with God look like when I’m not in an emergency? Do I seek Him when life is good? Do I spend time in His Word because I actually want to know Him, or only when I’m desperate for reassurance? Do I thank Him for what He’s already done, or is most of my conversation with Him about what I still want? Would I still love Him if the answer were no?
That doesn’t mean God owes us blessings because we pray enough, read enough Bible, talk about Him enough, or behave well enough. That would turn grace into a rewards program and God into a vending machine. What I’m really asking is this: Do I want God Himself, or do I mostly want what God can do for me? And if this life is temporary and eternity is forever, I also have to ask myself what I’m allowing this temporary season to do to my relationship with God.
Are You Obedient?
Before I ask God why everything is going wrong, I also have to be willing to ask myself an uncomfortable question: Am I being obedient? Because sometimes the situation I’m asking God to rescue me from is connected to choices I made while ignoring what I already knew I should be doing.
If I’m financially strained, have I actually been a good steward of what I have? If I want my health to improve, am I taking care of my body and following the guidance available to me? If something keeps falling apart, have I been ignoring red flags, making decisions based only on what I want, or asking God to bless something I never really sought Him about in the first place?
That doesn’t mean every bad thing that happens is punishment or proof that we’ve done something wrong. We’ve already seen in Scripture that faithful people suffer too. But there’s a difference between suffering we didn’t choose and consequences we helped create. Sometimes before I ask God, “Why are You allowing this?” I need to ask myself, “Did I listen when I already knew better?”
If I Have to Go Through It Anyway, Who Am I Going to Go Through It With?
This might be one of the simplest thoughts in the entire article, but it’s changed the way I look at waiting. Let’s say the rent is $3,000 and I have absolutely no idea where that money is coming from. I panic. I pray. I ask God to provide. Nothing miraculous falls out of the sky, so eventually I get angry and decide I’m done with God.
Do you know how much the rent is next month? Still $3,000. Walking away from God didn’t lower the bill. Being angry with Him didn’t erase the circumstance. Deciding I no longer believe because God didn’t move when I wanted Him to doesn’t fix the thing that made me angry with Him in the first place.
So if I have to go through the situation either way, who am I going to go through it with? If I have to walk through the valley either way, why would I choose to walk through it without the One I believe can actually see beyond it? Or don’t we believe He can see beyond it?
Waiting on God Doesn’t Mean Putting Your Life on Hold
There’s also a practical side to waiting on God that I don’t want us to miss. Waiting doesn’t always mean sitting completely still and doing nothing until something supernatural happens.
If I’m praying about finances, I can still make a budget. If I’m praying about a job, I can still submit applications. If there’s a conversation I need to have, I can have it. If I need help, I can ask for it. If I want my health in a better place, I can still follow my doctor’s recommendations and take the steps I can. Trusting God with the outcome doesn’t excuse me from doing my part today.
And I can still live while I wait. I can laugh with my children, make plans, celebrate someone else’s good news, and enjoy a good day without feeling guilty because everything in my life hasn’t been resolved yet. Waiting is already difficult enough. I don’t want to put my entire life in storage until every prayer I have has been answered.
I Don’t Need My Faith to Convince Me This Doesn’t Hurt
What helps me most in moments like this is remembering that this life is temporary and eternity isn’t. That doesn’t make pain less real. If you’re grieving, hurting, scared, or living through something you never wanted, faith doesn’t require you to pretend it doesn’t hurt.
I don’t need my faith to convince me that this doesn’t hurt. I need my faith to remind me that this isn’t forever. Revelation 21 points toward a future where death, mourning, crying, and pain no longer have a place. That doesn’t erase what hurts today, but it reminds me that today isn’t the whole story.
And strangely enough, believing that nothing here lasts forever makes me appreciate the good parts of life more too. Babies grow up. Holidays end. People get older. Beautiful seasons pass just like painful ones do. There’s something bittersweet about that, but it reminds me to be present for what’s good while I have it and not let a hard moment convince me that it will always feel this way.
So What Does Faith Look Like While You’re Still Waiting?
After everything I’ve been thinking about, praying about, reading, and researching, I don’t think faith means having all the answers. I don’t think it means never crying, never feeling anxious, or always understanding what God is doing. For me, faith looks more like continuing to turn toward Him anyway. It looks like praying again, telling Him the truth about how I feel, doing what I responsibly can today, and trusting Him with what I still don’t understand.
One thing that’s helped me personally is speaking Scripture over my life. I almost want to call it a little faith life hack, not because saying a verse magically fixes the situation, but because it reminds me what God’s Word actually says when my emotions are telling me something completely different. I’m not reminding God of His promises. He knows what He said. I’m reminding myself. And sometimes saying those words out loud almost feels like I’m speaking straight to the devil, or whatever negativity is trying to get in my head, and saying, “Nope. This is what God said.” It gives me something solid to hold onto when everything around me feels uncertain.
Sometimes faith is simply saying, “God, I don’t understand this, but I’m still here.” That’s where I am. I’m still waiting too. There are things in my own life I still want God to change, and there are prayers I can’t give you the ending to because I haven’t reached it yet.
But I’ve seen enough of God’s faithfulness in my own life to keep going. I don’t need every answer today to keep trusting Him today.
Until then, I’m going to keep walking with Him.
Thanks for doing life with me.
— Lexi 🤍
Share this:
