God, Why Aren’t You Doing Anything About This?

Tracing God’s Hand of Faithfulness Through the Pain of Divorce

By: Lysa TerKeurst

Hello, my name is Lysa, and I am a divorced woman.

For a long while, I couldn’t say those words. I couldn’t wrap my brain around the word divorce being attached to my life. So, my therapist, Jim, told me to say, “the death of my marriage.” That helped. But just changing the phraseology didn’t change the intensity of my shock and pain. And it didn’t take away the many questions I had about how God could let so much devastation happen after I had tried incredibly hard to honor Him and do the right things.

When you’re in the throes of heartbreak, even if you feel firmly planted in what the Bible says, sometimes the suffering can still feel incredibly intense. It can seem like God is not intervening on your behalf. For me, doubting that God was with me through the divorce wasn’t the issue. What broke my heart over and over was the fact that I deeply believed God loved me, cared for me, and was all powerful, and yet in some situations it felt like He was doing nothing to help me. I remember writing in my journal, God sees me, God knows what’s happening, and He is in the process of delivering me. But after writing these statements with confidence, I felt increasingly confused. I was writing what I felt I should say but not what I really felt.

Tracing God’s Faithfulness

Hard things just kept happening. Then one day I picked up my journal and realized I could no longer write about the faithfulness of God. I put my pen down and wept. Why isn’t God stopping this? Why is He allowing this to continue?