Can You Question God Without Losing Your Faith

Disappointment with God tends to make prayer feel either dishonest or dangerous. Polite prayers sound false, and honest ones feel like the first step out the door. Psalm 13 offers a third way. Over seven days you will learn to pray the way it prays: say the hard thing to God directly, then stand on something true about him without pretending the hard thing is gone. You can work through it alone with a notebook, or with two or three people who meet at the start and end of the week.

The goal is concrete. By the end of the week you should have written your own short lament, in your own words, and prayed it out loud at least once.

Before you read anything, write down your starting rule

Take two minutes. Finish this sentence honestly: When I am disappointed with God, the right thing for a Christian to do is… Set the note aside. You will come back to it on the last day.

Many people carry an unspoken rule about disappointment, and the rule often decides whether they keep talking to God. In a Jude 3 Project conversation, Lisa Fields describes what she hears from women raised in church: “I did the things the Godly way and my life didn’t turn out the way I wanted it to turn out.” Dr. Sarita Lyons responds that part of the trouble is how believers were formed: “we have given people a faith that couldn’t wrestle.” Your rule may favor wrestling, or it may favor quiet trust. Either way, this week tests it against Scripture.

Read Psalm 13 slowly, with a pencil

Psalm 13 is six verses long. It is poetry, a prayer set to words, so read it as a prayer and not as a formula. Read it out loud once first. Here is Psalm 13:1-2 in the KJV:

How long wilt thou forget me, O LORD? for ever? how long wilt thou hide thy face from me? How long shall I take counsel in my soul, having sorrow in my heart daily? how long shall mine enemy be exalted over me?

Work through these observations. Write short answers in the margin.

1. Count the questions in verses 1-2. How many times does David say “how long”? What is he accusing God of in the first line?
2. Notice who he is talking to. In verse 2, “take counsel in my soul” is older English for turning a problem over and over inside yourself. Where does David stop arguing with himself and start asking God for something?
3. Find the request. Psalm 13:3 says, “Consider and hear me, O LORD my God: lighten mine eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death.” What exactly does he ask for?
4. Find the turn. Psalm 13:5 says, “But I have trusted in thy mercy; my heart shall rejoice in thy salvation.” What does David stand on here: his circumstances, his feelings, or God’s character?
5. Check the ending. Psalm 13:6 says, “I will sing unto the LORD, because he hath dealt bountifully with me.” Does anything in the psalm say his situation changed between verse 2 and verse 6?

That last observation is the one most people miss. The psalm never reports that the enemy went away or the sorrow lifted. The opening complaint stays on the page, unedited. What changes is where David stands while he waits. The psalm is not a promise that your situation will resolve by Sunday. It shows that honesty and trust can live in the same prayer.

What the conversation adds to the psalm

Dr. Sarita Lyons describes the pattern in the Psalms this way:

He’s able to vent and ventilate his soul by being honest, but then also anchor his soul in the truth of what he knows about God.

To vent is to say the complaint to God without cleanup. To anchor is to attach yourself to something you know about God that does not depend on how today went. An anchor does not stop the storm. It keeps the boat from drifting. Some people learned to anchor without ever venting, which produces prayers nobody believes. Others vent and never anchor, and prayer becomes a loop of grievance. Psalm 13 does both, in that order.

Lyons also helps explain why venting can feel so threatening. She says, “So we do things God’s way without understanding God’s heart.” She names the hidden logic underneath: “If I do this for God, then God will do this for me.” Inside that logic, a complaint sounds like declaring a contract broken. Lyons points instead to a God whose actions are motivated by love, the God of John 3:16, who gave before anyone earned anything. Here is a question to hold all week: does your complaint sound different if you picture yourself speaking to a Father rather than filing a grievance against a business partner?

The case for quiet trust

Not every Christian will be comfortable with this practice, and the hesitation deserves a fair hearing. Scripture also commends stillness. Psalm 46:10 says, “Be still, and know that I am God.” Near the end of Job, after God speaks, Job says he will lay his hand on his mouth and answer no more (Job 40:4). Some believers hold quiet trust on principle, not out of fear. There is also a practical risk. Writing the same complaint every day can harden into rehearsing a grudge instead of bringing it to God.

Two things are worth weighing. Job’s silence came after many chapters of loud, direct complaint, so the book holds both. And the danger of rumination is real, which is why the practice below moves from complaint toward request and anchor instead of staying in the complaint. If you find yourself only repeating grievance, that is a signal to slow down, not to write more.

A test of direction, not an accusation

Lyons describes another response to disappointment through Israel in the wilderness: “soon as hardship sets in, we turn our back on God.” Pointing to the golden calf in Exodus 32, she says “we will melt down all our gold and we will build a golden calf for ourself to do what we are angry that God has not done.”

Being angry at God is not the same as building a calf. David is plainly upset in Psalm 13, and he keeps addressing God. The people at Sinai stopped addressing God and made a substitute. Lyons observes that some people who drift toward readings or other spiritual practices are acting from long disappointment with God. That is her pastoral observation, not a claim about everyone who is frustrated. Treat it as a diagnostic question to ask yourself, in her words: “what does that say about where I lost confidence in the Lord?” The answer may well be that you have kept bringing your anger to God all along.

The seven-day lament practice

Set aside ten to fifteen minutes each day and use the same notebook all week. Each day ends with praying what you wrote out loud, even a single sentence. Speaking it moves the words from thinking about God to talking to him. Lyons notes that God may not answer “according to the way we exactly wrote it in our journal.” Your notebook is a place to tell the truth, not a contract for God to sign.

• Day 1: Your “how long.” Reread Psalm 13:1-2. Write one or two “how long” sentences of your own. Be specific: name the prayer that went quiet, the person, the thing you wanted. Pray it out loud. Don’t add a hopeful line yet.
• Day 2: The deal, and the case for stillness. Finish this sentence: I thought if I ___ for God, then God would ___ for me. Then read Psalm 46:10 and Job 40:3-5. Write one sentence on what quiet trust would look like for you right now, and one on what honest complaint would look like. Which one are you avoiding, and why? Pray whatever you wrote.
• Day 3: The real request. Reread Psalm 13:3. Write one sentence telling God plainly what you want from him. It may be an outcome. It may be to know he is listening.
• Day 4: Where else have I been looking? Read Exodus 32:1-4. Ask Lyons’s question honestly about your own confidence in the Lord. You may write “nowhere.” You may write something you would rather not. Either way, bring it to God instead of hiding it.
• Day 5: Your anchor. Reread Psalm 13:5. Write one thing about God’s character that Scripture actually says, with a reference you looked up. Write it under your Day 1 complaint without crossing the complaint out. Pray both lines together.
• Day 6: One act of trust. Lyons says “it may take us some time emotionally to catch up to that revelation, but we can have a changed mind and changed behavior even if our feelings are slow to process with that truth.” Choose one small action that expresses trust even if you don’t feel it: returning to a gathering you’ve avoided, reading a psalm before bed, telling one safe person the truth. Write what you did and how it went.
• Day 7: Write your own psalm. Using your notes, write six lines that follow Psalm 13: two lines of complaint, two of request, two of anchor. Read it out loud to God. If you are working with others, you may read it to them, but you don’t have to.

Some days you will only manage the complaint. That is still lament. Lyons says “we need to cultivate in this culture some endurance,” and staying in the conversation for a week is one way to start.

If you are long-faithful and simply worn out, Lyons calls it faithfulness fatigue. Her response is not to push harder alone. It is a moment, she says, “where we just need to even own that we need support and help.” If disappointment has deepened into a despair that doesn’t lift, talking with a trained counselor is not a failure of faith. If you are having thoughts of ending your life, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.

If you are doing this with a group

Meet twice: once before Day 1 to read Psalm 13 together and work the observations, and once after Day 7. Nobody should be required to read their notebook aloud. Offer the option and let silence be acceptable.

When someone shares something painful, resist answering it with a verse right away. Speaking about people carrying church hurt, Lyons urges believers to “listen, before we have a lot of Bible advice, but just hear what people have experienced.” She also says, “Don’t rush their healing.” The facilitator’s job is to be, in her words, “a safe place, a safe person.” Don’t push anyone toward the anchor before they’ve been heard. She notes that “sometimes just sharing about it helps them get a revelation.”

Questions for the second meeting, or for your own review

1. In Psalm 13, the complaint stays in the psalm after the turn to trust. What do you make of the fact that the opening was never erased?
2. Look at your Day 2 sentences. How did the deal you described shape the way you prayed, or stopped praying, before this week?
3. Which was harder for you: venting or anchoring? What made it harder?
4. Where do you see a real case for quiet trust in your situation, and where might silence be a way of avoiding God?
5. Did any day of writing start to feel like rehearsing a grievance rather than praying it? What helped, or what would?
6. David asks God to hear him and lighten his eyes. When you pray about your disappointment, what are you actually asking God for, and has that changed this week?
7. What did this group do, or fail to do, that made honesty easier or harder in these two meetings?

Back to your starting rule

Find the sentence you wrote before you opened Psalm 13. Read it next to the six-line psalm you wrote on Day 7.

Does your original rule still describe what a faithful person does when disappointed with God? If it does, write down which part of Scripture supports it. If it doesn’t, rewrite it in one sentence you could actually live by next month, the next time a prayer goes quiet. Keep that sentence and the notebook where you will see them. Lyons speaks of wanting “the faith to live in the land of uncertainty,” and you will likely need this practice again before the uncertainty is over.