Anger at God can be evidence that faith is still alive. Wesley Thompson reached that conclusion after his pregnant wife fell gravely ill just as their life had finally come together. His faith got weak, at times almost to nothing. He still came to believe that his anger showed how close he was to God, because people rage only at someone they are bound to. What matters most is the direction of the anger: toward God in prayer, or away from him.
That answer leaves the pain its full size. It also releases you from performing a faith you cannot feel, which is what some familiar church advice demands, and that demand does real damage.
Why does it hurt more when the collapse comes right after the good?
In 2015 Thompson was a youth pastor in Atlanta who had just begun teaching religion classes at a local university. His wife had just landed a job in grief counseling, the field she hoped to work in, and that June they learned she was pregnant. On August 25 she became severely ill, and she would not leave the hospital until December 31. Seizures led doctors to place her in a medically induced coma, and she was diagnosed with anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis, a rare brain disorder made rarer by pregnancy. Thompson, then 26, had to make treatment decisions about her body and their unborn child alone.
One night, after family and friends had gone home, he stood at the foot of her bed and asked, “God, how come I’m looking at my 28-year-old pregnant wife on a ventilator in the ICU?”
The timing sharpens the question. When life is already hard, people brace for the next blow. When suffering arrives right after things finally worked, it feels targeted, as if an unspoken deal has been broken: you did things right, so you were owed a stretch of peace. Lisa Fields named that confusion in their conversation, asking how this could happen to two young people who were seeking God and trying to do the right things. Scripture never offers that deal. Knowing so does little to quiet the sense of betrayal, and an honest answer has to make room for both.
Why doesn’t “just trust God” help?
Thompson understands why suffering drives some people from God. “I can see why at times, how people can stray away from God,” he said. He placed himself among them: “And I found myself at times on the verge of that.”
That candor matters because a common religious response treats a sufferer’s struggle as a failure of nerve. Thompson describes ministry colleagues who present a superhero faith that nothing can bring down. His reply is that untested people cannot say what they would do, and a pastor who will not admit pain leaves suffering people with nowhere to stand.
He describes what the worst months felt like. At times, he said, “I felt like a relationship did not exist,” because his wife’s illness filled every day. He reached a place emotionally and spiritually “where I honestly just felt numb.”
He treats that numbness as the shape of grief rather than a spiritual defeat. Telling someone in that state to simply trust more is like telling a person with a broken leg to walk it off. The instruction may sound faithful, and it ignores what has actually happened to them.
Is it wrong to be angry with God?
Thompson grew up in a traditional Black Baptist church in the South, where the message that you should not question God came through sometimes directly and sometimes indirectly. It could make questioning God feel like sin or blasphemy. He came to the opposite view. The audacity to question God, or to be angry with him, he said, “signifies that you have a very close relationship with God.”
His reasoning is relational. In every real relationship, with a spouse, a friend or a sibling, you show emotion, good and bad. As he put it, “you don’t display emotion to someone you don’t care about.” People we are indifferent to can do things that ought to upset us, and we are unmoved. The ones who can make us angry are the ones we love. If the relationship with God is meant to be the deepest one we have, Thompson asks, why would it be the one place where emotion is forbidden?
Lisa Fields made the same point from God’s side. “God can handle our anger. He knows what’s in our heart already,” she said. Hiding anger protects God from nothing and only puts distance between you and him. Honesty about frustration and pain, she said, is “when we have our most authentic prayers,” and the relationship strengthens there. Her words echo 1 Peter 5:7: “Casting all your care upon him; for he careth for you.” Anger is one of those cares.
Scripture models this in its prayers. Psalm 13:1 opens with a complaint aimed straight at God: “How long wilt thou forget me, O LORD? for ever? how long wilt thou hide thy face from me?” This is lament, poetry written to be prayed, and it makes no claim that God feels present. The same psalm ends, “But I have trusted in thy mercy; my heart shall rejoice in thy salvation” (Psalm 13:5). Complaint and trust live in one prayer, from one person, to the same God.
Thompson also pointed to the cross. Matthew 27:46 records that Jesus “cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Jesus was praying the first line of Psalm 22, and even his words of forsakenness say my God. Thompson says all of us have our own cross moments. The comparison holds at one point and stops at another: we share the voice of lament with Jesus, while his abandonment on the cross carried a saving work that our suffering does not. What the comparison permits is the prayer. Asking God why can be faith in its most honest form.
Can anger at God turn into something else?
The strongest objection deserves a straight answer. Some anger at God hardens into contempt, a settled verdict that God is cruel, and some people walk away for good. Strong feeling does not guarantee a relationship survives. Many marriages end in anger.
Thompson’s argument allows for this. His anger stayed addressed to God. He asked his questions at the foot of the bed and in the blog posts he wrote while venting without answers. The closeness lies in where the anger goes. The psalmist and Jesus keep speaking to God while they protest. Indifference falls silent, and contempt eventually does too.
So the useful question concerns direction. Are you still bringing your anger to God, or have you started carrying it away from him? The first is lament. The second is where the danger lies, and even there Scripture leaves the same door open: say it to God.
Why can a promise from God make the waiting harder?
At his wife’s bedside, Thompson says, God answered him. He heard no voice and saw no light. A passage he had preached before came to mind, John 11, where Mary and Martha send word that Lazarus is sick. In John 11:4 Jesus says, “This sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God, that the Son of God might be glorified thereby.” Thompson received it in his heart as a word for his wife.
Read in context, Jesus’s words concern Lazarus, who does die before Jesus raises him. Thompson’s sense that the verse spoke to his own situation was a personal conviction, and his wife did come home. His story offers no guarantee about yours, and Scripture does not promise that a particular sickness will end a particular way.
What the passage gives every reader is honesty about delay. John 11:6 says that when Jesus heard Lazarus was sick, “he abode two days still in the same place where he was.” Then, at the grave, knowing what he was about to do, “Jesus wept” (John 11:35). The one who held the outcome still grieved the loss.
Thompson is frank that a promise did not end his suffering. “But even when you hear that at the time, it doesn’t make things easier for you,” he said. He went further: “what makes that suffering even worse at times is when you do get a feel like you have a response from God.” If it was going to be okay, he asked, “why am I still here in this hospital”? Christmas pressed the question hardest. His wife relapsed minutes after a discharge and went back on a ventilator, while their son, delivered by emergency C-section at 28 weeks, lay in the NICU on the far side of the hospital.
If your own sense of God’s nearness makes the waiting feel worse, you are living inside the gap John 11 describes, between a word spoken and its fulfillment.
Is weak faith still faith?
“I struggled. My faith got weak,” Thompson admitted. He credits the foundation his family and church gave him, which held even when it was questioned: “There was still something there just a tad bit, just enough” to get through each day and those four months.
When Lisa Fields asked what he would say to someone thinking of walking away from God because of suffering, he pressed the point. “You can have a weak faith and still say it’s going to get better,” he said. “You can have a weak faith and still say, God, I know you got this.” Of those months he said, “I believe everything I said, everything I proclaimed, every decision I made was honestly out of a weak faith. But it was still a faith there nonetheless.”
The Gospels make room for exactly this. In Mark 9:24 the father of a suffering child “cried out, and said with tears, Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.” The narrative describes rather than commands, and what it describes is faith and doubt arriving in one breath. Jesus heals the boy without first requiring better belief. In Scripture, faith draws its worth from the one it trusts, however thin it feels on a given night.
Thompson keeps one question open. “Is God doing this? Or is God just allowing this to happen?” he asked, and two years later, “I still can’t answer if this is something God did or something God allowed.” He declines to call his suffering God’s purpose or God’s will, since some suffering seems too catastrophic for that language. His wife recovered, and they later had a second son after doctors had doubted they could have more children, yet he hesitates to call it a reward in case it isn’t. That restraint fits the evidence. His outcome is his, and many faithful people are still inside their four months with no ending in sight.
What helps while it is still falling apart?
Thompson’s most practical counsel concerns people. Suffering can make you want everyone gone and only want it over. He knows: “I shut people out at first.” During his clinical pastoral training he met patients with no one beside them, alone by force rather than choice. His plea: “if you don’t have to be by yourself, please don’t be by yourself.” Take the meal. Let them sit with you.
Help also includes trained care. Jude 3 affirms that seeking therapy is not a failure of faith, and that God works through counselors and clinicians. Prolonged numbness after a loss is worth bringing to one. If grief ever turns toward thoughts of ending your life, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.
Thompson also reworked an old church saying. The older saints would tell you to hold out a little while longer, because help is on the way. “I would like to rephrase that and tell you that that help is already here.” He admits it is hard to see and has to be believed by faith. His own months showed that a weak faith is enough to believe it.