Yes. You can question God and keep your faith. The Bible is full of people who did exactly that. What tends to break under a disappointing life is a version of faith that was never allowed to ask anything. Dr. Sarita Lyons places the problem on the church’s side of the ledger: “we have given people a faith that couldn’t wrestle.” A faith like that has no move to make when the promises seem to fail. It can only hold still or let go.
The question deserves more than a quick yes, because the people asking it are rarely being casual. In conversation with Lyons, Lisa Fields describes what she keeps hearing from women who grew up in church: “I did the things the Godly way and my life didn’t turn out the way I wanted it to turn out.” The details vary. Some married young and are now walking through divorce. Some have never married and are tired of waiting. Some want children and feel time running short. Fields sums it up this way: “there seems to be so much trepidation and confusion sometimes around God’s promises for women.” Underneath all of it sits one worry. If I admit how let down I feel, have I already started leaving?
Lyons locates the danger somewhere else: in what the question is resting on.
Where brittle faith comes from
Lyons names the root in one sentence: “So we do things God’s way without understanding God’s heart.” That describes a lot of sincere people. They kept the rules. They gave, served, waited and said no to things they wanted. What they never quite grasped was why God asked for any of it. Lyons voices the hidden logic plainly: “If I do this for God, then God will do this for me.”
That is a deal, and deals are brittle by design. A deal has terms. When one party seems to break the terms, the arrangement is over. So for someone holding a transactional faith, the question God, why didn’t this work out? becomes an accusation of breach of contract, and every unanswered prayer becomes evidence in the case. No wonder people are afraid to ask it. Inside a deal, asking is the first step toward walking away.
Lyons offers a different starting point. When she talks about God’s heart, she means “first and foremost, everything that he does is motivated by his love.” She reaches for the most familiar verse in the New Testament to make the point. John 3:16 reads, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” The order matters. The giving came first, before anyone had performed anything.
Then Lyons adds a word that does a lot of work: “if we don’t presuppose the goodness of God, if we don’t presuppose the love of God, we can get really disillusioned.” To presuppose something is to start from it. If God’s goodness is a verdict you are still waiting to reach, a divorce or a long silence feels like the jury coming back. If it is your starting point, the same pain becomes something you bring to a God whose character you already know. The pain is just as heavy. It sits on a foundation that can bear being spoken out loud.
What honest questioning looks like in Scripture
Lyons treats doubt and despair as familiar ground for disciples. The faithful figures of Scripture, in her reading, “went through ebbs and flows of their faith and questioning God and wrestling.” She points to the Psalms as the clearest place to see it.
Fields mentions women who look at their lives and say, in her words, “God, how long?” That is almost word for word a prayer already in the Bible. Psalm 13:1 opens, “How long wilt thou forget me, O LORD? for ever? how long wilt thou hide thy face from me?” The psalm does not apologize for asking. It presses the question four times in two verses. Then, a few lines later, it turns. Psalm 13:5 says, “But I have trusted in thy mercy; my heart shall rejoice in thy salvation.”
That turn is the pattern David returns to again and again. A psalm opens in despair, and then comes the “but.” Lyons describes what David is doing in those prayers:
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.
Both halves are addressed to God. The venting is complaint brought straight to him, and the anchoring does not erase it. The opening of Psalm 13 stays in the Bible. Nobody edited it out once the psalmist felt better. These are prayers and poems, so they do not promise that every lament ends neatly by the final line. They give believers words for honesty and words for trust, and show the two living in the same prayer. That is what a faith able to wrestle looks like: doubt has somewhere to go.
The difference between questioning God and leaving him
The strongest objection deserves a hearing. Scripture also tells of people who questioned God and paid for it. Israel complained in the wilderness, and the story does not treat that as healthy lament. So is questioning really safe?
Lyons takes the wilderness seriously, and she uses it as a warning. She describes Israel’s pattern this way: “soon as hardship sets in, we turn our back on God.” Her example is the golden calf in Exodus 32. The people melted down their gold and built something to do what they were angry God had not done. David brings his complaint to God and stays in the conversation. Israel at Sinai stopped talking to God and made a replacement.
Lyons says she sees a similar move in people she has watched turn to other forms of spirituality after long disappointment. That is her observation from ministry, offered as a pattern she has noticed rather than a claim about everyone who makes that turn. In her telling, the logic sounds like this: if I try this practice or that reading, “somehow I will get answers for where God has not spoken.” The person’s question had nowhere to go inside their faith, so it went looking for another god to answer it.
That reframes the whole fear. People worry that asking the question will pull them away from God. Lyons’s account suggests the question that is never allowed into prayer does not disappear. It waits, it gets heavier, and eventually it finds an exit. A faith that can hold the question is safer than one that has to hide it.
Lyons has a name for the exhaustion behind much of this: faithfulness fatigue, the weariness that comes after years of saying no, giving, serving and waiting. She does not shame the tired person. She says that season is exactly when we need more rest in Christ and more help from him, and when we need to admit we need support. Her remedy also includes a question. “I don’t think people have really interrogated their motivation,” Lyons says. She wants people to ask themselves why they are reaching for something else, and “what does that say about where I lost confidence in the Lord?” She is asking for more honesty, aimed in a more useful direction.
When the question is really about people
Some questions aimed at God start with people. Lyons points out that pain caused by church leaders and members often gets projected onto him. Because the harm happened in a church, by people carrying Bibles, “it is really hard for the human mind sometimes to disassociate the evil of men from the perfection and holiness of God.” She adds a line that cuts both ways: “you only see yourself as correctly as you are able to see the Lord.”
For anyone asking whether they can still trust God, the honest work sometimes means sorting what God actually did from what people did in his name. Those are different charges, and they deserve different answers. A person can be furious at a pastor and still be talking to God. Lyons also notes that many people spend months or years present in a church but unseen before they leave, and she calls that invisibility a silent killer of faith. Her answer is the conviction that “God actually cares about who you are” before you have done anything for him. A question asked by someone who knows they are seen sounds very different from the same question asked by someone who feels forgotten.
Trusting a God who has not explained
Here is the second objection, and it is a fair one. Telling a hurting person to trust God’s heart can sound like changing the subject. If God will not explain the divorce or the empty years, what good is talk about his character?
Lyons does not pretend the answers will arrive on schedule. She distinguishes between what God has told us in his revealed word and “trusting God with his secret will.” That distinction has an old biblical shape. Deuteronomy 29:29 says, “The secret things belong unto the LORD our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children for ever, that we may do all the words of this law.” In its setting, Moses is speaking to Israel about the covenant and their future. The principle carries over carefully. Some things God has made known, and those shape how we live. Other things he has kept, and we are not owed a full account of them.
Lyons is candid that this is hard for her too. She speaks of wanting, in her own life, “having the faith to live in the land of uncertainty.” In her words, “God is a God that is with us in the darkness,” and the darkness “is not dark to him, even if it appears dark to us.” Psalm 139:12 says something close: “Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee; but the night shineth as the day: the darkness and the light are both alike to thee.” That verse does not promise the night will end soon. It says you are not alone in it, and that God is not confused by what confuses you.
What keeps this from being a dodge is that Lyons does not demand the right feelings on command. She says it plainly: “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.” You are not required to feel fine. You are invited to keep walking with God while you don’t.
She is also clear that God may not answer prayers “according to the way we exactly wrote it in our journal.” There is no promise here that the marriage returns, the spouse arrives or the child comes. Scripture does not make that promise, and an honest article should not either. If the weight has settled into a despair that does not lift, talking with a trained counselor is one way of caring for the life God gave you, and it sits comfortably alongside prayer.
Which leaves a practical test for anyone carrying the question. Notice where it is pointed. A question spoken to God, even an angry one, keeps you in the relationship the Psalms model. The same question spoken only to yourself, or carried to some other source of answers, quietly turns the relationship back into a deal. The way to keep your faith through a disappointing life is to keep the hard questions inside the prayer, and to say them out loud there.