When I Slipped and Fell: Psalm 73

It is one thing to struggle with suffering, unanswered prayer, or the silence of God. Those things can be difficult enough. But when your faith is wounded by Christians themselves, it can leave you asking a much more troubling question: What exactly am I supposed to believe about all this?

Yes, unfortunately, there is a particular kind of crisis of faith that can happen when the people who are supposed to represent Christ behave in ways that seem completely unlike him.

I know something about that kind of crisis.

There was a time when my feet slipped, just as the writer of Psalm 73 says. But in my case, they didn't merely slip. I fell hard, and I fell for quite a while. I don't remember seeing a convenient handrail anywhere.

What happened was deeply painful. I watched young people who were supposed to be christians behave with extraordinary cruelty toward someone I loved. I could not understand how people who claimed to follow Jesus could behave as they did. I couldn't understand the lack of compassion, the cruel dismissal, or the sense that somehow they were better than the person they were hurting.

I was hurt, angry and, eventually, simply fed up. I began to question things I had taken for granted since my youth. Why did these people just leave one person out? How could they cause so much pain and still believe they were doing the right thing? And perhaps most painfully, what did their behaviour say about the faith they claimed to represent? The love they were always proclaiming?

The consequences were not small. This wasn't an unpleasant disagreement that could be put behind us with a cup of tea and a sincere apology. It caused enormous pain for me and for our family, and it created havoc that took a very long time to understand.

I never stopped believing in God. That distinction is important to me now. I wasn't suddenly convinced that God didn't exist. What I lost was my trust that knowing God made much difference. I had expected that people who followed Christ would, at least in some meaningful way, become more loving, more humble, more compassionate and more like him. What I saw seemed to tell me otherwise.

For a long time, I could not find my way back to God.

Then I was introduced to Psalm 73, particularly through the teaching of Tim Mackie, and I recognized something of my own experience in this ancient prayer. The psalm begins with the writer affirming that God is good. But almost immediately he tells us that his faith has become terribly unsettled by what he sees around him. The arrogant seem to prosper. People who behave badly appear to get away with it. The world does not seem to be operating according to the principles he thought he understood.

Then comes that extraordinary admission:

“But as for me, my feet had almost slipped; I had nearly lost my foothold.”

I think there is something deeply reassuring about finding those words in Scripture. The Bible does not give us a picture of faith as a smooth road on which everyone walks confidently toward the horizon. Here is someone who believes in God and yet finds himself looking at the world and wondering how his beliefs can possibly make sense of what he is seeing.

His problem isn't really that he has decided God doesn't exist. His problem is that he can no longer reconcile the God he believes in with the world in front of him. That is a very different kind of doubt.

Perhaps you know something about it. Maybe someone you trusted betrayed you. Maybe a church became a place of judgment rather than grace. Perhaps a Christian leader behaved terribly, or you watched people who spoke constantly about love behave with astonishing cruelty toward someone who didn't fit their expectations. Maybe you simply looked at people who were supposed to be following Jesus and thought, Really? Is this what knowing God is supposed to produce?

That is a hard question to carry. And I think Psalm 73 gives us permission to carry it honestly. The psalmist doesn't tidy everything up before he talks to God. He doesn't put on his best spiritual clothes and pretend everything is fine. He tells God what he is thinking. He is confused, angry and troubled, and he brings all of that into his relationship with God.

I find that strangely comforting.

There is something reassuring about discovering that the Bible contains people who were not particularly good at pretending. Apparently God has always had room for people who come to him with their doubts, their anger and their very awkward questions.

The turning point in Psalm 73 comes when the writer says, “Until I entered the sanctuary of God.”

Something changes there. It isn't that he suddenly receives an explanation for everything. He doesn't get a detailed theological report explaining why bad things happen, why some people prosper, or why God's people sometimes behave so badly. If only it were that easy.

Instead, his perspective changes.

And I think this may be one of the most important things I learned through my own experience. For a long time, I was trying to understand God by looking at the behaviour of people who claimed to know him. Eventually, I had to learn to separate the two.

Christians are not Christ. The church is not God. People can carry the name of Jesus and still behave in ways that are profoundly unlike Jesus.

That doesn't make what happened less serious. In fact, it makes it more serious. Jesus himself had some remarkably strong things to say about hypocrisy, cruelty and the use of religion to elevate ourselves above other people. Christian behaviour matters. What we do in the name of Christ can either help someone see something of his character or make it much harder for them to see him at all.

But the failure of God's people is not the failure of God.

That sounds like a simple distinction now. It didn't feel simple when I was hurting.

When someone has been badly wounded by Christians, it can be almost impossible not to associate the wound with the God those people claim to represent. We naturally make the connection. If these people know God, and this is what knowing God produces, then what does that say about God?

Perhaps part of healing is learning that we don't have to answer those two questions in the same way.

We can say that what happened was wrong. We can acknowledge the cruelty and the damage without having to conclude that God himself is cruel. We can recognize that people may have behaved very badly even as they call themselves christians without deciding that their behaviour tells us everything there is to know about Christ. That distinction took me a long time.

And for years I thought of myself as weak because I couldn't simply recover my faith and move on. I was weak, but I was also wounded. There is a difference, and I think it matters.

When something damages your understanding of God, it isn't surprising that it takes time to find your footing again. We don't expect someone with a broken leg to apologize for limping. When the injury is to the heart, the healing can be a long process.

There is another part of Psalm 73 that has become especially meaningful to me. Near the end, the psalmist says:

“Yet I am always with you; you hold me by my right hand.”

At the beginning of the Psalm, he is worried about losing his footing. By the end, he realizes that he is being held.

I wonder if that might be one of the things we miss when we look at our own periods of doubt. We may remember how far away from God we felt, how angry we were, how little we prayed, or how difficult it was to hear anything that sounded like God's voice. We may conclude that we have been lost to God.

But there can be another way to understand those years.

For a long time, I thought I had lost touch with God. I wondered whether I would ever hear him clearly again. Yet perhaps I was not quite as alone as I thought. Perhaps I was not holding onto God very well, but God was still holding onto me.

Eventually I began reconnect strongly again. Not in exactly the same way.

And perhaps that matters too.

When we go through a crisis of faith, we often hope to get our old faith back. We want to return to the place where we were before everything went wrong. But I'm not sure that is what happens. Sometimes the faith we had before the crisis cannot survive the experience because it was built partly on expectations that life eventually showed us were not reliable.

But I have come to understand something I could not understand when my feet first slipped.

We often think faith means holding tightly to God. But there may be seasons when we are simply too exhausted, too angry or too hurt to hold on very well. There may be times when prayer feels like talking into an empty room and Scripture seems strangely silent. Those are the seasons when we discover another side of faith: we are not the ones doing the holding.

We discover that God has been holding us.

You will discover that you are not walking alone. Because, when we finally look back at the long road, we discover that during all those years when we thought we had lost our footing, there was a hand quietly holding ours.

And, most of all, that is what I needed to learn.

I thought I had lost God.

But now I know, all along, God had not lost me.