When Life Didn’t Go as Planned: My Faith Under Pressure
This isn’t a story about having it all together. It’s about what happens when you don’t — and where you turn when there’s nowhere left to go.
There’s a version of life we all quietly plan for. The one where the hard work pays off, the relationships hold, and the love we pour into our children comes back in the ways we imagined. I had that version mapped out too.
The life I didn’t expect
What I didn’t plan for was how many of those pages would get rewritten at the same time.
I built a career in accounting — the kind of work that demands precision, composure, and an ability to hold a lot of pieces together. Professionally, I carried that well. But careers carry their own kind of pressure, and for a long time I let that pressure define my worth. The professional identity, the expectations, the weight of being the one others depend on financially — it adds up. And for years, I let it.
At home, things were harder in different ways. My marriage went through a crisis that I wasn’t sure we would survive. My child’s journey — navigating the world on the autism spectrum — required a depth of presence and advocacy I had to learn on the fly, often while running on empty. And through all of it, I carried the quiet, exhausting responsibility of being the primary earner for my family.
Then came an illness. The kind that stops you. The kind that takes language like “life-threatening” out of the abstract and puts it right in front of you.
God was there — just not close
Through all of this, God was never absent from my life. I knew He existed. I believed. But if I’m being honest, my relationship with Him looked more like a hotline than a relationship. He was my firefighter. When a fire broke out in my marriage, my health, my finances — I called. When things settled, I went back to managing life on my own.
I didn’t know I was supposed to get close to Him. I didn’t understand that faith was meant to be a daily, living relationship — not a rescue service I kept on standby. I had belief without intimacy. I had God without really knowing God.
“I had always had God in my life. I just hadn’t realized He was inviting me into something more than emergency calls — He wanted to be part of the ordinary days too.”
The turning point
When everything hit at once — the exhaustion, the illness, the weight of holding a family together while quietly falling apart — the firefighter model stopped working. There were too many fires. And I was too tired to keep making the calls after the fact.
I reached the end of myself. And I mean that in the most literal, bone-deep way. I didn’t want to continue alone. Not one more day of carrying what I had been carrying, in the way I had been carrying it, by myself.
So I surrendered. And for someone who had built a career on logic and precision, surrender did not come naturally. As a certified accountant, I was trained to trust the numbers. If you work hard enough and plan carefully enough, the math works out. But I had to come to terms with something that no spreadsheet could hold: in the kingdom of God, 1 plus 1 equals whatever God decides. And that was not a flaw in the formula. That was the point.
The words of the Lord’s Prayer — words I had recited since childhood — suddenly stopped being a rehearsed response and became an honest cry:
“Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”Matthew 6:10
I had prayed those words dozens of times before. But this time, I meant them. Not as a recitation — as a surrender. As a release of my plan, my calculations, my need to control the outcome. For the first time, I was genuinely saying: not my will, but yours.
“I had to admit, as someone who built a life on numbers, that God’s arithmetic follows different rules entirely — and that surrendering to that truth was the most honest thing I had ever done.”
That moment of surrender was the beginning of something different. I stopped approaching faith like a box to check or a number to dial in a crisis. I started approaching it like oxygen. Not because I was suddenly more righteous or more disciplined, but because I had finally become honest. Honest about how much I was carrying. Honest about how long I had been trying to carry it alone. Honest about the fact that “managing” and “trusting” are not the same thing.
The Word started landing differently. Passages I had read a hundred times began to feel like they were written for exactly this season. I started anchoring myself in Scripture daily, not as a ritual, but as a lifeline. And for the first time, I began to understand what it meant to actually walk with God — not just call on Him.
That practice became the foundation of this devotional.
Why I’m writing this
I’m not writing from a place of arrival. I’m writing from a place of having found something real in the middle of something hard — and wanting to share it with the people who are still in it.
This devotional is for the person who is keeping it all together on the outside while quietly unraveling on the inside. For the one whose marriage is strained, whose parenting is hard, whose body has betrayed them, whose career has become a burden — or who simply woke up one morning and realized they have been treating God like a last resort instead of a daily companion.
Faith wasn’t something I had. It became something I needed. And in needing it — really needing it — I found it to be more real, more steady, and more personal than I had ever allowed it to be before.
If any part of that resonates with you, you’re in the right place. I’m glad you’re here.