God Is Near the Broken, Not Disappointed in Them

“I thought I was a bad Christian because I still flinch.”

A woman said that in my office years into her healing, and she said it the way people confess sins. Head down, voice small. She had survived things I will not describe here, built a life, raised good kids, taught Sunday school. And underneath all of it ran a quiet arithmetic that was eating her alive: God heals, I am not healed, so I must be doing faith wrong.

I have heard that math from more Christians than I can count, and I want to take it apart in front of you, because it is wrong on every line.

Where the bad math comes from

Most of the people carrying this shame did not invent it. Somebody handed it to them, usually somebody who meant well.

They brought their pain to church and got told to pray harder. Sometimes, they mentioned the nightmares and got told to claim victory over them. They finally whispered the word counseling and watched a face fall. Some people act as if therapy were an admission that Jesus was not enough. Some got a timeline: it has been a year, hasn’t it been long enough? A few got Scripture used on them like a paddle instead of a balm, and we will spend a whole post on that kind of wound later in this series.

Stack up enough of those moments and the lesson lands: God is disappointed in you for still hurting. So you hide the flinch, smile through the panic attack in the pew, and pull away from the very places that were supposed to hold you.

What the Bible actually says about broken people

“The LORD is near to those who have a broken heart, And saves such as have a contrite spirit” (Psalm 34:18, NKJV).

Near. Sit with that word a minute. Not near once you get it together, not near after the nightmares stop, not near on the condition of a testimony with a tidy ending. Near to the broken heart while it is still broken. The verse puts God closest at the exact point where the shame math says He walks away.

And look at Jesus at Lazarus’s tomb. He knew the ending. Resurrection was minutes away, and He wept anyway, right there with the grieving sisters. He did not tell Mary and Martha to claim victory or hurry up. Later, when Thomas needed to touch the scars before he could believe, Jesus did not scold him. He held out His hands. It is worth noticing that a resurrected body still had scars, and heaven did not consider that a flaw in the finished work.

A God like that is not standing over your healing with a stopwatch and a disappointed sigh.

Therapy is not the opposing team

Somewhere along the way, a lot of church folks got the idea that faith and counseling are rivals, as if sitting on my couch means getting off God’s. I have never understood it. Nobody calls insulin a lack of faith. Nobody tells the man with a broken leg to pray instead of setting the bone. Your mind and your nervous system are part of the body God knit together, and getting help for them is stewardship, not surrender.

In fifteen years of practice, I have watched God do some of His tenderest work in a counseling office. Prayers answered through therapeutic sessions. Chains broken with a therapist and a box of Kleenex in the room. He is not picky about His tools, and He never was.

If your faith feels thin right now

Maybe trauma did not just hurt your body and your relationships. Maybe it got between you and God, and the prayers that used to come easy now feel like talking into a dead phone. I want you to hear this plainly: that is not proof He left. Broken hearts have a hard time feeling anything, including Presence, and God does not confuse your numbness with rejection even when you do.

He was near in the room where it happened. I know that raises hard questions, and I will not pretend otherwise or hand you a tidy answer I do not have. But near then, near through every year you survived, and near now, reading over your shoulder, closer to the broken places in you than the polished ones.

You are not a disappointment to God. You are a daughter or a son with a story still being written, and the Author has never once put down the pen.

This is education, not therapy, and reading it does not make me your therapist. If you are in crisis, call or text 988.

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