When someone you love says they are done with God, your first reply tends to set the course of everything after it. Most of us reach for an answer. This guide trains a slower reflex: listening for what happened to a person before deciding what to say, and testing yourself before you argue. You can work through it alone over a week or with a small group across one or two meetings. The reading, the Scripture work and the practice build on each other, so take them in order.
The material draws on a conversation in which Dr. Maliek Blade, CEO of the Whole Brother Mission, interviews Lisa Fields, founder of Jude 3 Project, about her book When Faith Disappoints. Fields explains why she wrote it: “I wanted to engage people that have been disappointed and talk to their heart and not just talk to their head.” This guide asks you to do the same thing for one person.
Start with what you have already heard
Before reading further, picture the person you have in mind. Write down, privately, the reason they have given you for walking away, as close to their own words as you can remember. Then write what you know about their life in the season when their faith began to slip. A death, a diagnosis, a church conflict, a move, a prayer they prayed for years.
Look at the two lists side by side. Have your conversations so far touched the second list at all?
Fields says people often seek her out on their way out of the faith: “They wanna tell me why they left the faith.” Someone may say evolution ended their belief, and yet, she says, “their real reason is they had a prayer that God didn’t answer or they felt he didn’t answer.” The stated reason can be sincere and still have arrived second. You can only learn which came first by asking.
Seven days on the ground with Job
Read Job 2:11-13 slowly. Job has lost his children, his wealth and his health. Three friends travel to see him. Then this:
So they sat down with him upon the ground seven days and seven nights, and none spake a word unto him: for they saw that his grief was very great.
That verse, Job 2:13, describes the best thing these friends do in the whole book. It is narrative, not a command, so it sets no rule that you must stay silent for a week. It does show the friends letting the size of the grief set the pace.
Then they start talking. Over many chapters they explain Job’s suffering, with true-sounding statements about God’s justice, and Job answers in Job 16:2: “miserable comforters are ye all.” At the end God tells Eliphaz that the three friends “have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job hath” (Job 42:7). The man who argued with God is vindicated over the men who defended God badly.
Christians read the details of Job in different ways, and the book leaves some of its questions open. What it plainly shows is that defending God’s reputation to a suffering person can go wrong even when the defenders think they are being faithful. Sit with these prompts:
- What did the friends know about Job’s situation when they sat silently? What did they claim to know once they spoke?
- What did their silence give Job that their speeches took away?
- Why might God count Job’s honest complaint as speaking rightly?
When the complaint is aimed at Jesus
Read John 11:1-44. Mary and Martha send word that their brother Lazarus is sick. Jesus waits, and Lazarus dies. When Jesus arrives, Martha says to him, “Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died” (John 11:21). Mary says the same words in John 11:32.
Your loved one may be saying something very close to that: you could have stopped this, and you didn’t. With Martha, Jesus talks. With Mary, who is weeping, he asks where Lazarus is laid, and then “Jesus wept” (John 11:35). He shares her grief before he corrects anything.
Be careful with this passage. Jesus raised Lazarus. You cannot promise your friend that their loss will be reversed, and you should not hint at it. The point you can take is narrower. A disappointed accusation against God appears on the lips of people Jesus loved, and his first response to Mary was tears.
Fields knows this from the inside. Asked whether disappointment with God and faith in God can coexist, she answered, “I’m a living witness that they’re coexisting.” She points to David, who in the Psalms asks God where he has gone and by the end gives thanks. So when your friend finally says the angry thing, you do not have to treat it as the end of faith. Scripture is full of believers who said it.
What helped Fields when she was the one struggling
In seminary, Fields learned that children had been murdered by terrorists, and it struck her hard. Her class was studying the problem of evil at the time. “I could explain the problem theologically, philosophically, logically, but emotionally it just didn’t hit.” She went to one of her New Testament professors and told him she was wrestling. He told her he was too. “That was the answer I needed to know.”
The admission carried weight because of who made it. “Somebody that has spent all this time in school, has walked with the Lord this many years, could still wrestle with his faith, and it was okay.” As she puts it, “He normalized the struggle for me.”
He offered his own struggle instead of a second lecture. She already had the material. You may not share your friend’s particular wound, but you probably know what it is to not get what you asked God for. Fields is candid about her own version, unmet personal hopes, and she concluded, “It was not that God lied to me, it was that I didn’t like the provision that he gave me.” That is her conclusion about her own life, not a verdict you get to hand someone else.
A test before you argue
At some point you will want to say something corrective. Maybe your friend expected God to guarantee success and spare them pain, and you can see that God never promised that. Fields agrees that some disappointment comes from bad teaching and that reframing what God actually promises can help. Jesus said, “In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world” (John 16:33).
Fields also refuses to reduce every disappointment to a wrong expectation. She notes that “there are also times where people actually have gone days without eating and have been faithful to God.” Some losses are simply losses. Say you expected the wrong thing too soon, and your friend will hear that their pain is their own fault.
So before you offer a correction or an argument, run this test:
- Can I describe, in their terms, what they lost or what they prayed for?
- Have they shown me they feel heard, or only that they are tired of talking?
- Is my next sentence for their good, or for my relief at having said something?
- Did they ask me a question, or am I answering one they did not ask?
The last item comes from how Fields reads 1 Peter 3:15. She sees the passage as describing a life distinct enough that people ask why, and then a reason given. “We’re trying to give a reason before we show them our lives.” Passing the test does not mean you stay quiet forever. Fields is clear that facts and reasons are needed. Sometimes the intellectual question really is the question, and then you owe it a careful answer. If all four answers are yes, you may be in that conversation. If not, keep listening.
The practice: one honest question, then wait
Over the next two or three weeks, look for one unhurried moment with the person you have in mind. A meal, a drive, a call that is already happening. Not a planned confrontation.
If the subject comes up naturally, ask one question about their story rather than their conclusion. For example: When did things start to feel different between you and God? or Was there a time you asked God for something that mattered a lot? Then stop talking and let the silence run longer than feels comfortable. If they change the subject, let them. Their freedom to decline is what makes the question safe.
Afterward, run the four-part test against what they actually said, and add it to the lists you made at the start. You are not carrying the outcome. “It is God who penetrates the heart. It is only the Holy Spirit that transforms us.” Fields describes your part this way: “I should listen to understand how they got there and then share the hope of the gospel on the other side.” The gospel still gets shared, after the listening.
One boundary. If your friend’s disappointment comes with deep despair, talk of not wanting to live, or a struggle that looks like depression, presence is not enough on its own. Encourage professional care and stay close while they get it. If they may be in danger, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available by call or text.
Using this with a group
Many people in your group will have a specific person in mind. Protect those people. Use first names only, or none, and share your own experience rather than details of someone else’s private pain.
Some members may be the disappointed ones themselves. Fields describes people sitting in church after God did not heal a parent or mend a relationship, who “felt like I can’t express that to God because he doesn’t make mistakes.” Her hope is that they would get it “out of your mouth so you could get it out of your heart.” Let anyone pass on any question, and leave room for a member to say this guide is about them without pressing for more. If someone discloses current danger, abuse or crisis, pause and talk with them privately afterward about appropriate help.
Questions to talk through
- Job’s friends were at their best when they said nothing. What makes silence hard for you when someone questions God in front of you?
- What differences do you notice in how Jesus meets each sister, and what might explain them?
- Think of a time you were struggling and someone helped. Was it what they said, what they admitted, or simply that they stayed?
- Where is the line, in your view, between helping someone see a wrong expectation of God and blaming them for their pain?
- When would it be right to engage your friend’s intellectual objection directly? How would you know?
- What would change in how you approach this relationship if the outcome were not yours to secure?
You may finish this practice and still not know what lies beneath your friend’s decision. Some people never say. Some say and still walk away. Carry one question into your next conversation: what has this person lost that I have never asked about?