When promises seem to fail

Some personal thoughts on processing disappointment with God

On processing disappointment

I have long held a strong theological conviction that pregnancy loss is never God’s will or plan for anyone’s life, and if you’re interested in exploring this idea further you can read my blog on it here: A Theology of Miscarriage.

But in this post, I also want to explore more about my personal, lived experience of grappling with this truth. Because often it tends to be much easier to deal with big theological concepts and ideas, than to process the personal disappointment we can sometimes experience in our faith.

Disappointment can creep in whenever God seems to speak or make a promise to us, but then apparently doesn’t deliver (or at least not in the way we expect).

Or in the nagging doubt that creeps in when we hope and believe for something, but our prayers remain unanswered.

Or perhaps, most cruelly of all, when prayers initially look like they’re being answered, but the miracle ultimately still falls short…

That type of disappointment in God (or at least our idea of what God is like or should do) has been only too real as I’ve walked through multiple pregnancy losses over the past few years.

How do you resolve the questions left behind when God seems to promise a healthy future pregnancy, yet your babies just keep on dying? What’s the point of praying about anything at all, if God doesn’t answer your most important, heartfelt requests? And how can you ever trust God’s voice, when you’ve previously misheard, or maybe even heard right but been let down anyway? How do you make peace with all the unknowns that this kind of experience leaves behind?

I obviously can’t speak to all situations, but I do finally have some loose thoughts forming on this area of disappointment for me personally, and I thought I’d share them here in case it’s helpful for anyone else wrestling with similar issues and experiences too.

On getting specific

I want to start unpacking this subject by getting quite specific and using some real examples from my own life (as vulnerable as that feels to do), especially since so many of the signs, promises and prophecies/words of knowledge that (seem to) come from God are incredibly specific too.

Maybe it’s an obvious thing to say, because if they weren’t very specific and accurate and tinged with a strong sense of the miraculous or the divine, then we probably wouldn’t pay very much attention to them, would we? But they so often are, and so we do…

So let’s explore just a few specific examples that I can pull from my own walk of faith and recurrent miscarriage story below.

1. Direct words or signs from God

I’ve felt like God has spoken direct encouragements about the hope of having another child to me a number of times over the past few years - be that through physical signs or situations, or sometimes a specific scripture verse that has ‘jumped out of the page’ at me, exactly when I’ve needed it the most.

But one particular example of this which really springs to mind is a rainbow appearing in the sky right in front of me just as I’ve been praying and crying out to God for a breakthrough in our pregnancy situation.

A coincidence of timing? Perhaps. But a rainbow is both the christian symbol of God’s faithfulness to fulfil his promises to his people, and also a widely accepted symbol of a pregnancy after loss amongst fertility communities too - so it sure felt like a sign sent to me in that exact moment with an encouragement to keep trusting God with my future motherhood journey.

2. Words of knowledge & encouragement from others

It can often be difficult to trust your own ability to hear God, especially when it’s about something that you long for so very much. How can you really ever distinguish God’s voice from your own desire?

At times I’ve found myself asking, ‘Is this scripture really from God? Or is it just my own wishful thinking?’ ‘Is what I am seeing really a sign from God, or is this just me interpreting something into what I want it to mean?’ In situations like this, there’s always a space left for doubt…

For this reason, I think that God sometimes speaks to us through other people, especially when it’s about something we’re really emotionally invested into.

Because when God speaks to you through someone else, especially someone who doesn’t know all the details of your situation, then it can really catch your attention and make you sit up and listen.

Personally, I have so many different examples of when this has happened to me that I could draw on, but I’ll pick out just a few for consideration here…

For instance, the day that I shared my recent pregnancy news with a few trusted friends, one of them said she’d felt God had been encouraging her to pray for me very specifically in the area of pregnancy over that previous week. At the time, she couldn’t quite understand it, as she was aware that we had already closed the door on the idea of any more pregnancies. And yet suddenly, here I was just a few days later, sharing that I was unexpectantly pregnant again - right after God had been nudging her to pray for me.

In a similar vein, one of my sisters also had a similar experience during one of my previous pregnancies. She suddenly felt led to pray over me in the area of pregnancy during a worship service she was in. At the time, she didn’t know that I’d had a positive test just a few days earlier or that I was getting a scan to confirm it’s viability that very morning, as we were only planning to share this news after we’d had the scan that day, if there was a healthy heartbeat.

It was only in discussing it together later, that we realised that the moment she’d felt prompted by God to pray for us was the exact time that we were visiting the hospital to have our scan - completely unbeknown to her at the time.

Situations like this have felt like such a strong reminder from God that His hand was upon my pregnancies because He was speaking directly to other people about them, even before they knew anything of them. But God knew, and was looking out for us in those moments. Isn’t that incredible?

3. Promises & prophecies

I’ve also experienced moments when God has spoken more directive or specific promises to me about having another child too.

For example, somewhere between my second and third miscarriage I received a very clear prophetic word in a church setting (from someone who didn’t know my situation at the time) about a future pregnancy.

It was almost Christmas, and so they had a picture of God giving me a gift and saying to me, ‘This one is to keep’. They didn’t know if this felt significant or meant anything to me at all… But for me, at the time, it felt like such a clear promise God’s intention to gift me with another pregnancy, and of His reassurance that it would be healthy and go full term.

Then month later, when our next pregnancy still ended in an early loss, I found myself wondering what had gone ‘wrong’.

Had I misinterpreted what God was actually saying to me in that moment? But also, how could I have when that was the only gift I was asking God for in that season? Or was the promise perhaps meant for someone else instead of me?

I don’t really know for sure, but I do think God’s ability to communicate with us is much bigger than our capacity for human error so I’m not sure that the ‘getting it wrong’ argument holds much sway for me. Instead, perhaps there are also other spiritual dynamics at play…

Either way, since it was so very clear in its meaning in my mind at the time, it’s a promise I have found myself still wondering about from time to time…

And then, when we were suddenly confronted with another unexpected pregnancy this spring, and it was a baby with a Christmas due date, a small part of me just couldn’t help wondering ‘what if’? What if maybe this pregnancy could be that gift that God had promised to me all that time ago? But again, it wasn’t to be.

What I used to think …

Obviously all of these examples, and many more that I could describe besides, feel kind of supernatural and God-inspired.

And yet, here I am, still notching up loss after loss anyway. So where does any of this really leave me? I mean, what is the use of a God who speaks to us, if you can’t really trust what He seems to say to you anyway?

For a long time, I used to think that unfulfilled signs and promises and words of knowledge like this in my life made God out to be a liar. Or at very least a cold and disinterested deity, who wasn’t half as committed to me as He claimed to be, or as my evangelical upbringing would have had me believe.

At times, the disparity between what God seemed to have said and the reality I was actually living through has felt so great, that I’ve wondered if I could continue to live out my faith with any real conviction or trust in God at all.

But the truth is that this kind of thinking is completely counter to what scripture says about who God is. God is not a liar. In fact, scripture asserts over and over that God cannot lie or change his mind at all. (Numbers 23:19, Hebrews 6:18).

And what’s more, in John 14:6, Jesus (the representation of God in human form) actually claims to be ‘the way, the truth, and the life’. In other words, God is not just truthful as we understand this characteristic in human terms. He is the truth itself.

God is literally truth to the very core. So the idea that He could ever lie, deceive us, change his mind or take a sudden u-turn on the intention to do good to us is completely counter to His Word, which claims that this is simply not within His nature or ability.

The truth is that in the middle of my disappointment, I had got my view of God a bit twisted up.

It was as if God was speaking out His good and perfect desire and intentions for my life and my motherhood - and then when my present circumstances didn’t match up, I was interpreting it as God breaking his promises to me.

But since this conclusion doesn’t stack up at all with the nature of God, I needed to go back to the drawing board and rethink my interpretation a bit.

What I now believe…

As I’ve continued to wrestle with my questions in light of some of these experiences, I’ve realised that it’s also possible to interpret moments like this through the eyes of faith and hope, instead of disappointment and doubt.

So now I think that maybe signs and promises and words of encouragement like the ones I have received are not necessarily examples of failed or unfulfilled promises which undermine the faithfulness of God, but can also be taken as a clear sign of God’s intimate involvement in and care for our lives.

I mean, the one thing I just can’t get away from through all of this, is that there’s been so many different situations where God has been ‘rooting’ for me and my family, and even urging others to act on our behalf at key moments.

At times that’s involved asking them to pray and fight for us spiritually (especially when we’ve not had the strength to keep fighting those battles ourselves), and at others it has just been a timely sign or word to lend us hope or encourage us keep on going.

Maybe God doesn’t let us see all the different ways that He is working in and through our lives behind the scenes - I imagine it would probably be much more than we could ever comprehend with our human minds. But maybe occasionally in His grace and kindness, God chooses to just reveal to us a small glimpse of how He’s continually acting on our behalf. And I think for me, that’s what some of these experiences have been about.

I know that some people would probably say - but since God didn’t actually save you from the pain of losing those pregnancies, what difference does any of this actually make? I mean, what kind of God leaves you high and dry like that? But I no longer see it that way.

As disappointing as this season of failed motherhood has been, and as imperfect and incomplete as some of those moments where God has ‘broken in’ have felt, they have also been some timely reminders that I have needed that God is with us, and actively involved in our story - in some quite specific ways.

The truth is that I still don’t have any answers to ‘the big why’ in this situation. Perhaps there are some spiritual complexities or powers at work in this world which we cannot fully fathom or even begin to comprehend? Or perhaps some things still don’t make much sense simply because it’s not the end of our story just yet.

I don’t know… But maybe understanding ‘why’ is simply not the point. Maybe the point was never to act as a guarantee of any specific outcome, but simply to encourage and equip us with the knowledge that God was there, and the reassurance that He cared about what we were going through.

Not having all the answers

Not having all the answers is still uncomfortable for me. I still really want to be able to know and understand and explain every aspect of my walk of faith in order to fully believe.

But unfortunately that just isn’t the way that faith works. Instead, Jesus talked a lot about having faith the size of a tiny mustard seed, or of having a simple faith just like a child.

Of course, God isn’t afraid of our difficult questions, especially those raised by our pain. In fact, He welcomes them. Just spend a bit of time in books of the Bible like Job, Psalms and Lamentations if you aren’t sure that this is true!

But even so, in exploring these biblical examples it seems to me that asking our questions of God doesn’t necessarily lead to getting everything perfectly answered or explained away. Instead, it just tends to lead us into deeper, more honest conversations with Him and greater intimacy.

And maybe, just as Job discovered, a greater revelation of who God is, turns out to be the only answer that any of us really needs.

Personally, I’m still learning to make peace with not having all of the answers that I want, and still learning to accept that having faith doesn’t always equate to receiving everything that God has promised to us either (at least not this of heaven). But I do take some comfort in the fact that I am in good company, as are all of us who sit in this tension space between hope and disappointment.

Just look at all the heroes of the faith listed in Hebrews 11, and all of the great feats they undertook with God. Each one of them was commended for their great faith. And yet… the final verse of this chapter says that ‘none of them received all that God had promised’.

Not a single one of them! Just take a moment to let that reality sink in...

Their lives displayed the faithfulness of God in a thousand different ways, and yet not one of them saw all of God’s promises fulfilled within their own lives.

Why? Not because God was unfaithful or uncaring or got bored or distracted or changed his mind, but because He had ‘something better in mind’. Their stories weren’t over yet, and maybe ours aren’t either…

A final benediction

So may we learn how to hold our questions well, letting them to draw us into greater conversation and intimacy with God (instead of accusation and avoidance).

May we find how to sit in the pain and the tensions, and trust that God is sat there too.

May we know that God is for us, even when we can’t see it.

May we remember that God still loves us, even when we don’t feel it.

May we believe that God is still good, even when our circumstances are not.

And may we understand that our stories still aren’t finished yet, and hold onto the hope that one day (either here or in heaven) all things will be made right.

… to be continued!