A tarot spread on a hard night rarely means a woman has stopped believing in God. Neither does a crystal kept to shift the energy, or a vision board treated less like a plan and more like a contract. When a woman who grew up in church, and did everything the way she was taught, turns to these things, Dr. Sarita Lyons’s diagnosis is exhaustion rather than curiosity. She calls it faithfulness fatigue: the wear that sets in after years of obedience that have not produced the life a woman hoped for.
New Age practice offers a way out of the waiting. That is why a church that only says don’t keeps missing the real problem.
Where does “this isn’t working” come from?
The pattern is familiar to anyone who has spent years in church. Lisa Fields, raised in church herself, describes women who married young and are now divorcing, women who never married and are asking God how long, and women who want children and feel the clock running. The reasoning many of them land on fits in one line of hers: “this don’t seem to be working for me.”
Lyons takes that phrase seriously, because it reveals more than the speaker may realize. “I don’t think people have really interrogated their motivation,” she says. Before anyone picks up a tarot deck, there is already a belief about what faith was supposed to do. Lyons names it plainly: “So we do things God’s way without understanding God’s heart.”
The belief underneath, in her words, is this: “If I do this for God, then God will do this for me.” That is a transaction, and a transaction has its own logic. When a vendor fails to deliver, you find another one. Seen this way, tarot and manifesting replace a deal with God that never existed. The woman still wants the same things. She has simply gone looking for a new supplier.
Lyons’s correction starts with the motive behind everything God does. She points to John 3:16, where God gives his Son because he loves the world. If a person doesn’t assume God’s goodness and love from the start, she argues, disillusionment is close behind. She also distinguishes what God has told us in his revealed word from what he has chosen not to tell us, and calls for trust in both. Her picture of uncertainty echoes Psalm 139:12, where darkness hides nothing from God. The unknown feels dark to us. To him it is plain daylight.
What is faithfulness fatigue, exactly?
Lyons describes it with a list many church women will recognize. Walking holy. Saying no to sex. Giving tithes and offerings. Showing up. Serving people. Dying to yourself. Stretching money until you are “making a dollar out of 15 cents.” Do that long enough without seeing the outcome you prayed for, and something wears thin.
The tired woman usually still believes God is real. What has eroded is her confidence that waiting on him is worth what it costs. That is a different problem from unbelief, and an argument for God’s existence will not touch it.
Lyons adds a layer specific to Black women, who she says experience real disempowerment in society. That sharpens the hunger for something that feels like power. She compares it to how many in Israel expected the Messiah to deal with Rome. Jesus did not match their picture of a victor and defender. “And so we don’t think Jesus is enough,” she says. In her reading, this is one of the enemy’s oldest and most effective lies.
The surprising part of her diagnosis is what fatigue calls for. Lyons sees it as the moment a believer needs more rest in Christ and more help from the Lord, the moment to roll anxiety over onto God and admit openly that she needs support. Fatigue tells you that you have been carrying something alone. It does not tell you the faith has failed.
Why reach for tarot instead of simply walking away?
Because these practices promise exactly what the tired believer feels God has withheld. Lyons voices the thinking from the inside. A person has prayed for something for a long time, someone says a reading or a crystal will help, and the hope becomes: “somehow I will get answers for where God has not spoken.” Then comes the second half: “Somehow I will get power for where God has not moved.”
Answers and power, on a schedule the person controls. The vision board fits the same pattern. Lyons gives voice to the prayer behind it, “God, I did my vision board,” a way of telling God who you want to be, what you want and when you want it. She calls much of this impatience with God, and a wish to help him along.
Her main biblical lens is the golden calf. Exodus 32 is narrative, and it describes Israel’s sin rather than commanding anything. Notice what sets the scene in motion. Exodus 32:1 says the people acted “when the people saw that Moses delayed to come down out of the mount.” The crisis in the text is delay. The people kept their religion. They asked Aaron for gods they could see, gods that would go before them.
Lyons’s application fits because the trigger is the same. As soon as hardship sets in, 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.” That last phrase is the key. The substitute is built to do a job, and it exists because of anger at what God has not done yet.
A crystal on a nightstand is far smaller than a golden idol at Sinai. Lyons’s point concerns function rather than scale. When God seems slow, people make something they can manage, and they ask it to do what they wanted from him.
Isn’t this just blaming tired women for being impatient?
It is a fair objection. Lyons does use the word impatience, and she says this generation has little gift for waiting and tends to bail quickly. Someone worn down by years of disappointment could hear that as one more demand to try harder.
Lyons puts a large share of the weight on the church, and she speaks as one of its members. “We have given people a faith that couldn’t wrestle,” she says. Churches have made seasons of disillusionment and even despair feel like failure, as if questioning God were incompatible with following him. Scripture’s great figures lived otherwise. They went through ebbs and flows, questions and despair. A woman taught a faith with no room for those seasons may well go looking for a spirituality that lets her admit she is struggling. And Lyons’s prescription for fatigue begins with rest and help, ahead of any call to more effort.
There is a real limit here. Lyons is describing a pattern she sees in ministry and counseling, not reporting a study. Some women come to tarot through grief, some through church hurt, some through plain curiosity. Her diagnosis does not explain every case. It does offer a question worth asking in almost every case: what was I hoping this would do for me?
What does the church miss by only saying don’t?
Lyons does not dismiss warnings. “And it’s good because we’ve had to point out a lot of things that have been normalized,” she says. Christians have needed to hear that Scripture forbids certain spiritual practices.
Her concern is that the church stopped there. “We have been great at saying don’t, don’t, don’t,” she says. A warning addresses the behavior and leaves the reason untouched. A woman can throw away the deck and still carry the disappointment that made her pick it up, and the next substitute is only a matter of time.
So Lyons wants the conversation to move from don’t do it to helping people ask why they did. The question she hands the reader is one to ask yourself: “what does that say about where I lost confidence in the Lord?”
That question also puts the line where it belongs. Using astrology, manifestation, divination, or sage and crystals to reach spiritual power, guidance or destiny apart from God is incompatible with following Jesus. A candle lit for its smell, or a crystal kept because it is pretty, is a different matter entirely. Lyons’s question goes straight to intent, which is where the real issue sits: what were you asking the rock to do?
Lyons ties this to Paul’s letter to the church at Colossae, whose message she sums up simply: you don’t need all that other stuff, because Jesus is enough. Colossians 2:9-10 says, “For in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily. And ye are complete in him, which is the head of all principality and power.”
Read that with a woman who feels powerless in mind. The practices she is drawn to promise access to spiritual forces that can change her situation. Paul says every such power has a head, and the head is Christ. Leaving him for those forces means going down the chain of command looking for authority that sits at the top. That is also why Lyons warns that “the enemy always over promises and under delivers.” A practice that bypasses the One who rules every power cannot hand over more power than he holds. At best it offers the feeling of control. The longing for answers and some say over one’s future is a real and human hunger. The trouble lies in where it is sent.
What would honest endurance look like?
“We need to cultivate in this culture some endurance,” Lyons says. She contrasts adding things to Christ with what Peter tells believers to add. Second Peter 1:5 urges them to “add to your faith virtue,” and the list that follows includes patience. The answer to fatigue is a faith that grows in its ability to wait, with no new technique required.
Endurance in Lyons’s account is not silent. Her model is David in the Psalms, who often opens with despair before turning to trust. “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,” she says. Psalm 13 follows that pattern. It begins by asking God how long, and it turns at verse 5: “But I have trusted in thy mercy; my heart shall rejoice in thy salvation.” The psalm holds the complaint and the trust together, without skipping the first to reach the second.
A tired believer needs room to do the same: say out loud what she has been waiting for and how long, without someone rushing to fix it. Lyons doesn’t promise that the prayer written in the journal will be answered as written. She says God’s will is good even when it differs, and that feelings may take time to catch up while the mind and behavior change first. That is a more honest offer than any reading can make.
For anyone in this place, two questions can do what a warning cannot. What have I been waiting on God for, and what did I want this practice to give me that I stopped expecting from him? They are best asked with someone safe, a friend, a pastor or a counselor, because fatigue is the condition Lyons says calls for support.
The woman with a tarot app is evidence that she wanted something from God badly and stopped believing he would answer. That desire is a door back, if someone is willing to ask what it was.