There are things that happen to us that don’t just hurt.
They teach us.
A child who is constantly criticized may learn:
I am not enough.
A woman betrayed by someone she trusted may learn:
People always leave.
Someone abandoned by a parent may learn:
I am easy to forget.
Someone who grew up afraid may learn:
The world is dangerous.
Someone who experienced abuse may learn:
Love always comes with pain.
And sometimes, without realizing it, we take those lessons and place them on God.
We don’t just believe that people will hurt us.
We start believing God will too.
We don’t just expect people to abandon us.
We begin wondering when God will.
We don’t just question whether we’re worthy of love.
We question whether God actually loves us.
And here’s the uncomfortable possibility:
What if some of the things you believe about God aren’t things God ever told you?
What if your wounds have been speaking louder than Scripture?
Pain Is a Teacher, But It Isn’t Always a Truthful One
Pain is powerful.
It gets our attention.
It changes the way we see the world.
And sometimes, it changes the way we see ourselves.
But pain isn’t automatically a reliable theologian.
Your trauma can tell you:
“You’re unsafe.”
God can say:
“I am with you.”
Your rejection can tell you:
“You’re unwanted.”
God can say:
“I have loved you with an everlasting love.”
Your betrayal can tell you:
“Nobody can be trusted.”
God can say:
“I will never leave you nor forsake you.”
Your failure can tell you:
“You’ve ruined everything.”
God can say:
“There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”
The voice you’ve listened to the longest isn’t necessarily the voice telling you the truth.
Sometimes we have spent so many years believing the language of our wounds that God’s language sounds foreign.
We Build God Out of Our Experiences
This happens quietly.
A father was cruel, so we struggle to imagine a loving Father.
A mother was emotionally absent, so we struggle to believe God notices us.
Someone betrayed our trust, so surrender feels dangerous.
Someone used Scripture to manipulate us, so the Bible itself becomes difficult to trust.
Someone told us God was angry every time we made a mistake, so we spend our spiritual lives terrified of disappointing Him.
Someone told us suffering meant God was punishing us, so every painful season becomes evidence that God must be against us.
And eventually, we can end up worshiping a version of God that looks remarkably similar to the people who hurt us.
That’s a serious problem.
Because God doesn’t become less true because our understanding of Him became distorted.
The image we carry isn’t necessarily the God who actually exists.
Your Father Isn’t Your Father
This may sound obvious.
But emotionally, it can be incredibly difficult to separate the two.
If your earthly father was harsh, you may instinctively expect God to be harsh.
If your earthly father was absent, you may expect God to disappear.
If your earthly father was impossible to please, you may spend your entire Christian life trying to earn God’s approval.
But Scripture doesn’t tell us to use broken human fathers as the blueprint for understanding God.
It does something radically different.
It presents God as the perfect Father against whom every earthly father is measured.
Human beings fail.
God doesn’t.
Human beings change.
God doesn’t.
Human beings can say they love you and still hurt you.
God’s love isn’t unstable.
Human beings can make promises they don’t keep.
God is faithful.
This matters because some of us have spent years trying to make peace with God for things God never did.
“If God Loved Me, Why Did He Let It Happen?”
This is one of the hardest questions in Christianity.
And anyone who gives you a simplistic answer is probably trying to tie a bow around something that doesn’t come with one.
Some suffering has obvious human causes.
Some comes from living in a fallen world.
Some comes from our own choices.
Some comes from the choices of other people.
And some suffering remains painfully unexplained.
The Bible does not pretend otherwise.
Read Job.
Job loses almost everything.
And perhaps one of the most important things about the book is that Job’s friends desperately try to explain his suffering.
They assume there must be a simple reason.
You sinned.
God is punishing you.
Case closed.
But they were wrong.
Job’s suffering was not proof that God had abandoned him.
And Scripture never gives us permission to look at someone’s suffering and confidently declare that we know exactly why God allowed it.
Sometimes we don’t know.
And saying “I don’t know” is more honest than inventing an explanation.
God’s Silence Isn’t the Same as God’s Absence
There will be seasons when you pray and nothing seems to happen.
You ask for healing.
Nothing.
You ask for restoration.
Nothing.
You ask for clarity.
Silence.
You ask God to intervene.
And the situation gets worse.
Those seasons can make you question everything.
Does He hear me?
Does He care?
Why isn’t He doing anything?
But Scripture repeatedly shows us people who experienced periods of waiting, silence, suffering, and uncertainty.
David cried out to God.
Jeremiah questioned God.
Job questioned God.
The disciples watched Jesus die after believing He was the Messiah.
And even Jesus, in His humanity, cried out from the cross:
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Mark 15:34
Faith doesn’t mean you never ask hard questions.
Faith means you continue bringing those questions to God instead of deciding He isn’t worth asking.
You Are Allowed to Be Angry With God
This might make someone uncomfortable.
But read the Psalms.
There are moments where David sounds devastated.
Confused.
Afraid.
Angry.
Desperate.
He asks God where He is.
He asks why God seems distant.
He asks why his enemies are prospering.
And yet David keeps talking to God.
That’s the difference.
He doesn’t pretend.
He brings the real emotion into the relationship.
There is something deeply important about that.
God would rather have your honest anger than your fake worship.
You don’t have to tell God you’re fine when you’re not.
He already knows.
You can say:
“I’m angry.”
“I don’t understand You.”
“I don’t understand why You allowed this.”
“I don’t know how to trust You after what happened.”
That’s not necessarily rebellion.
Sometimes it’s the beginning of intimacy.
Because real relationship requires truth.
But Be Careful What You Build From the Pain
Here’s where we need to challenge ourselves.
Pain can explain why we struggle to trust God.
It cannot determine who God is.
There’s a difference.
You can say:
“What happened to me makes it difficult for me to trust God.”
That’s honest.
But:
“Because this happened, God must not be good.”
That’s a conclusion.
And conclusions deserve examination.
Especially when they’re built in the middle of pain.
Think about a child who touches a hot stove.
The child learns:
Fire hurts.
That’s a useful lesson.
But imagine that child later sees a fireplace and concludes:
All fire exists to hurt me.
That’s no longer the complete truth.
The experience taught something real.
But it didn’t teach everything.
Your wounds may have taught you something about the brokenness of this world.
They don’t necessarily tell you everything about the character of God.
Jesus Is What God Looks Like
If you’re struggling to understand who God is, look at Jesus.
Not the version of God you were handed.
Not the version created by someone else’s religious trauma.
Not the angry caricature you built in your head.
Look at Christ.
Look at how He treated the ashamed.
The rejected.
The sick.
The grieving.
The adulterer.
The tax collector.
The sinner.
The outcast.
The woman everyone else wanted to condemn.
Look at how He treated Peter after Peter denied Him.
Look at how He responded to Thomas’s doubt.
Look at how He wept at Lazarus’s tomb.
Look at how He prayed for forgiveness for the people crucifying Him.
Jesus said:
“Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.”
John 14:9
That’s significant.
If you want to know what God is like, look at Jesus.
Jesus is not God reluctantly tolerating broken people.
He is God moving toward them.
Maybe You Don’t Hate God
Maybe you hate what happened.
Maybe you hate what someone did to you.
Maybe you hate the version of yourself that emerged from it.
Maybe you’re angry that God didn’t stop something.
Maybe you’re furious that you had to endure something you never deserved.
Maybe you’ve been calling it a crisis of faith when it’s actually a crisis of trust.
Those are different things.
You may still believe God exists.
You may still believe Jesus is Lord.
You may still want Him.
You just don’t know if you can trust Him.
And that’s something you can bring to Him.
“God, I believe You. Help me with the part of me that doesn’t trust You.”
That’s a real prayer.
It’s also remarkably close to the prayer found in Mark 9:
“I believe; help my unbelief!”
Faith and uncertainty can exist in the same room.
You don’t have to have perfect faith to approach God.
You just need enough honesty to stop pretending.
Your Wound Doesn’t Get to Become Your Theology
This may be the sentence I want you to remember.
Your wound doesn’t get to become your theology.
Your abandonment doesn’t get to define God’s faithfulness.
Your abusive relationship doesn’t get to define God’s love.
Your failed marriage doesn’t get to define God’s covenant.
Your betrayal doesn’t get to define God’s character.
Your unanswered prayer doesn’t get to define God’s attention.
Your suffering doesn’t get to define God’s goodness.
Your past doesn’t get to define God’s future for you.
Your experience matters.
But God is bigger than your experience.
And sometimes healing begins when we stop asking:
“What did my pain teach me about God?”
and begin asking:
“What does God say about Himself?”
Go Back to the Source
If you’ve been carrying a distorted picture of God, don’t fix it by listening to another person tell you who God is.
Go back to Scripture.
Read the Gospels.
Watch Jesus.
Read the Psalms.
Read Job.
Read Romans.
Read Isaiah.
Read the uncomfortable parts too.
Don’t cherry-pick verses to make God fit the version you want.
Let Scripture challenge your assumptions.
Ask:
Who is God actually saying He is?
What does Jesus reveal about Him?
What beliefs about God came from Scripture, and what beliefs came from my experiences?
What beliefs came from the people who hurt me?
What beliefs came from religious environments that may have misunderstood Him?
This is where faith becomes deeper.
Not because you stop asking questions.
Because you start asking better ones.
Maybe God Has Been Waiting for You to Let Him Reintroduce Himself
Perhaps you’ve known about God for years.
But perhaps you haven’t known Him.
There’s a difference.
You can know theology without knowing the Father.
You can know Bible verses without knowing His heart.
You can attend church every Sunday and still be terrified of God.
You can pray every night and still believe you’re fundamentally unworthy of His love.
And maybe God wants to dismantle that.
Not because He needs you to think better thoughts about Him.
Because He wants relationship with you.
The God of Scripture isn’t asking you to approach Him as a perfect woman.
He’s asking you to approach Him as His child.
Broken.
Confused.
Angry.
Afraid.
Learning.
Growing.
Returning.
And perhaps today isn’t about fixing your faith.
Perhaps today is about letting God show you that the Father you’ve been afraid of isn’t the Father you’ve been imagining.
Let God Tell You Who He Is
Your wounds have a voice.
But they don’t get the final word.
People have voices.
But they don’t get the final word.
Your past has a voice.
But it doesn’t get the final word.
Your failures have a voice.
But they don’t get the final word.
God gets the final word.
And if you’ve spent years believing He is angry, perhaps you need to discover His holiness.
If you’ve believed He is distant, perhaps you need to discover His presence.
If you’ve believed He doesn’t care, perhaps you need to discover His compassion.
If you’ve believed you’re unworthy, perhaps you need to discover grace.
If you’ve believed you’ve been forgotten, perhaps you need to discover that He never left.
You may not understand everything God has allowed.
I certainly won’t tell you that you should.
Some things are simply too painful to explain away.
But you can begin separating two questions:
“Why did God allow this?”
and
“Who is God?”
The first question may take a lifetime.
The second has an answer.
And maybe the beginning of healing isn’t finally understanding why the fire happened.
Maybe it’s discovering that God was never the fire.
A Prayer for When You Don’t Know If You Can Trust God
Father,
I don’t know what to do with everything that has happened to me.
Some of it has made me angry.
Some of it has made me afraid.
Some of it has changed the way I see You.
I’ve carried beliefs about You that I don’t know whether You ever actually gave me.
So I’m asking You to show me who You are.
Not who my wounds say You are.
Not who other people told me You are.
Not who my fear says You are.
Show me Yourself.
Teach me to recognize Your voice.
Teach me to separate Your character from the broken people who represented You poorly.
Help me trust You without pretending I understand everything.
Help me bring my questions instead of running from You because I have them.
And if there are places in my heart where pain has become my god, expose them gently but honestly.
I don’t want my wounds to write my theology.
I want Your Word to.
So I’m here.
Still questioning.
Still hurting.
But still here.
Show me who You are.
Amen.
Before You Leave
Take a piece of paper and divide it into two columns.
On the left, write:
WHAT MY WOUNDS TAUGHT ME ABOUT GOD
On the right, write:
WHAT SCRIPTURE SAYS ABOUT GOD
Then be brutally honest.
Don’t protect your theology.
Don’t protect your wounds.
Test both.
And ask God to show you where you’ve been worshiping Him through a distorted lens.
Because sometimes the God we’ve been running from…
isn’t the God who’s actually been calling us home.
Armored Ashes 
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