Recovering Faithful Participation in a Therapeutic Age – Series Page
Phase 3: Where the Therapeutic Story Breaks Down
Purpose: Show where this way of understanding can’t carry the weight of human suffering.
What happens when God refuses to manage the outcomes we’ve learned to expect?
The Not So “Real”-ity of Reality Television.
We live in a culture captivated with unscripted television, attracted to the raw tension of watching real life collide with human expectations. I enjoy the chaotic real-world friction on Clarkson’s Farm. Sometimes I yell at the TV as Jeremy tries to do a thing. His high-tech plans and big-budget optimism are routinely crushed by uncooperative weather, stubborn livestock, unyielding soil, and oppositional councils. Others are drawn to the raw, unscripted drama of shows like The Traitors or investigative true crime docuseries. We’re fascinated by what happens when the control room loses control. Yet even the best “unscripted” shows are ultimately edited to deliver a predictable narrative arc before the credits roll. But in real life, what do we do when God goes off script?
Life on the ground however, doesn’t employ a production team. When our personal health, families, or long-held plans go off-script, we often default to interpretive fear suspecting that God Himself has gone rogue or abandoned the plot. But a careful look at Scripture reveals a very different pattern – God hasn’t lost control of the narrative. If it seems like God doesn’t follow the script, He simply refuses to act upon the outcome-managed script we keep trying to hand Him.
Praying As a People
In preparing this reflection (among the most difficult ones toward changing a long learned perspective) my thoughts were drawn to the interesting way Luke introduces what we commonly call the “Lord’s Prayer.” Jesus is praying, and when He finishes, one of His disciples asks:
The Disciples’ Request
Lord, teach us to pray, just as John taught his disciples. Luke 11:1
I wonder… this unnamed disciple doesn’t simply ask Jesus how to pray more effectively. Representing the rest of the disciples, he asks Jesus to teach them how to pray as John had taught his disciples.
I see a sense of belonging embedded in the disciples’ request. Before Jesus initiated His public ministry, John prepared His way and taught his disciples how to pray as a particular people. Now Jesus’ disciples want their own identity marker. Teach us how to pray as people who belong to you.
Jesus responds with words that begin in the plural. Our Father. Then the prayer follows as a collective prayer – “the prayer of a people.”
Your kingdom, come… Give us this day our daily bread… Forgive us our sins… Lead us not into temptation.
I don’t think this means prayer must always be spoken in a group setting. Scripture certainly gives us examples of deeply personal prayer expressing deep desire, sorrow and lament. Jesus Himself teaches His disciples to pray privately. But there’s a distinction here that seems easy to overlook.
Private, Not Privatized
Private prayer isn’t necessarily privatized prayer.
As I see it from personal experience, privatized prayer isolates the individual person where prayer acts more along the lines of treating God like a partner in a personal negotiation. I’ve prayed like that… a lot. Conversely, private prayer remains inherently communal. Even when you pray alone, your identity is anchored in a covenant community as a member of the people of God. This means, you’re never praying as a disconnected individual; you’re praying as a part of a larger body of believers.
The Shift in Centre of Gravity
There’s a difference between a community made up of individuals who each have a personal relationship with Jesus and a people whose individual members participate in prayer of the people.
Shared Beliefs vs Shared Identity
In the first example, a Christian community can gradually become a collection of private spiritual lives gathered around a common set of beliefs.
In this second example, belonging goes beyond the first. Christian community doesn’t start with shared beliefs but with a shared identity. You’re not just an autonomous individual who believes in Jesus and who also happens to attend church with other people who believe in Jesus. A Christian is more than that. A believer is one member of a people whose Lord is Jesus Christ. The first example is more like a private members club and the second a deep family tied to Jesus.
The Apostle Paul repeatedly presses this communal imagination. One body. Many members. Gifts given for the common good. When one member suffers, the others suffer. When one is honoured, the others celebrate. 1 Corinthians 12:12-27
The individual doesn’t disappear into the Christian community. Instead, the individual finds their place within it.
Flattened Vocabulary
However, and I’ll be the first to admit, this covenantal understanding is really hard to carry in our age because the words we use have themselves become flattened.
“Personal” and “private” have become almost interchangeable.
“Individual” and “autonomous” can easily become the same thing.
“Faith” can become “my beliefs.”
A relationship with God can become “my” relationship with God.
Even prayer can become primarily about what God is doing “in my life.”
Our therapeutic age has become exceptionally skilled at personalization. We curate our news, entertainment, music, purchases and increasingly our spiritual experiences. So maybe it shouldn’t really surprise us that prayer can follow the same trajectory.
- What do I need?
- What’s my breakthrough?
- What’s God going to do for me?
- What outcome am I believing for?
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with bringing our needs to God. Jesus tells His disciples to ask for daily bread. Scripture gives us all kinds of permission to bring our grief, fear, desires and hopes before God. The question is what happens when the individual outcome becomes the centre of our prayer.
Prayer is to help us remember whose we are. The issue arises when prayer becomes mostly a means of asking God to manage what happens to me.
- The practice of prayer remains.
- The vocabulary of prayer remains.
- The faith behind the prayer may remain sincere.
But the centre of gravity can shift.
An Unspoken Script
The Song We Sing
If you’ve spent much time in contemporary church life, you’ve likely sung declarations about God’s faithfulness that sound something like:
There’s no way You’re gonna let me down. My healing is coming; it’s just a matter of time.
I understand those words. They come from a heart longing for relief, reaching out for assurance in a world that often feels uncertain and unstable. We want to know that the story ends well. There’s nothing wrong with longing for healing or believing that God is faithful. However, repeated language can do more than express what we already believe. Repetition can also shape our expectations. Sometimes those expectations become a script spoken in Jesus’ name.
- God is faithful, therefore the illness will be cured.
- God is faithful, therefore the relationship will be restored.
- God is faithful, therefore the breakthrough will come.
- God is faithful, therefore the prayer will eventually be answered in the way I hoped.
When the Script Collapses
The script is comforting. It gives us certainty and hope. It allows us to believe that although we don’t know exactly how the story will unfold, we think we know what the ending must look like. But what happens when the script starts to fall apart? What happens when the diagnosis remains unchanged?
- A relationship still ends.
- A child doesn’t come home.
- The financial situation gets worse.
- The church doesn’t grow.
- The prayer prayed faithfully for years and the silence of God continues.
How do we respond when God doesn’t follow the script? This is where the difference between God’s faithfulness and our expectations of God’s faithfulness becomes profoundly and painfully important.
If I understand prayer primarily through the lens of my desired outcome, an unanswered prayer can feel like more than disappointment. It can lead us to feeling despondent; the relationship is broken. Many of us know this script:
God failed. I failed. I didn’t have enough faith. Maybe I misunderstood the promise. Perhaps I didn’t pray the right way. If only I could believe more strongly.
Suddenly, prayer itself can become another form of anxious striving. The practice intended to orient us toward God becomes another way of trying to manage outcomes. Rather than simply asking, seeking and finding, we try to make certain things happen. Rather than choosing to trust, we try to dictate what God must do.
Without realizing it, we can move from participation to management. And the language we use can remain thoroughly Christian while the centre of gravity quietly shifts. God’s faithfulness becomes the guarantee of my desired outcome rather than the ground of my trust in God Himself. See the difference in perspective?
When the Script Fails: The Lesson of Job
Job’s Friends and Theological Formulas
I often refer to the book of Job in my reflections. The book has always troubled me for exactly this reason. Job wants an explanation. His friends want an explanation. They need the world to make sense.
Here’s the logic. If God is just, then there must be a discernible reason or cause in suffering. So if Job is suffering, he must have done something to bring it upon himself. Therefore, if we can come up with the right theological formula and apply it correctly, then we can solve the mystery.
However, in the whirlwind, God doesn’t give Job the explanation he wants. The book ends without revealing the hidden mechanics of Job’s suffering. No mention that God micro-manages our individual lives and that everything happens for a reason. Instead, He confronts Job with the vastness of a reality that Job can’t understand.
Presence Over Explanation
Rather than giving answers, God gives Job something else. God gives Job Himself. I confess that must be one of the most frustrating and uncomfortable gifts of Scripture.
- We want an explanation. Yet God gives His presence instead.
- We want certain outcomes. Yet sometimes, God only gives us enough light for the next step.
- We want to know why. Yet often, Scripture invites us to trust without knowing.
This isn’t an argument against hope. Scripture is full of hope. Instead, I wonder if assigning predictable outcomes to God’s faithfulness isn’t hope as much as it’s wishful thinking.
My desire in writing weekly articles is for a reader like you to find some value and meaning in what you read. However, this writing space is for me also. A reflection like this takes at least 15 hours of thought-filled preparation. Before I publish an article, I work about 2 months ahead to allow my thoughts and prayers to work on me first. I also read and re-read an article word-for-word multiple times to do what I can to help make it more readable (especially on a smartphone). All this helps work new perspectives into my thinking. This doesn’t mean I have things figured out.
Honestly, the more I do this, the more I realize how clueless I am. Yet, that doesn’t stop me from asking questions even when I don’t have answers. I attempt to find some resolve in the restraint of Scripture as a guard against the drifting nature of my soul.
So I think there’s some comfort in recognizing that our instinct to seek explanations isn’t itself a failure of faith. As humans, it’s natural for us to look for patterns, causes, and meaning when life becomes uncertain and unstable. Psychology can help us understand something of that human soil, just as other fields of knowledge have helped Christians understand the world God has made. However, the soil of our mind doesn’t determine the life of the seed planted.
Scripture remains our primary witness to who God is and how He has chosen to make Himself known. Perhaps the wisdom of Job isn’t that we should stop asking questions, but that we should become more comfortable with the questions Scripture itself leaves unanswered. We can cultivate the soil without demanding that the seed grow according to our expectations. Sometimes faith isn’t knowing why, but trusting God enough to remain present when we don’t know.
If we don’t know the script, what does authentic Christian hope actually look like when life doesn’t play out as we expect? Next time, the Apostle Peter gives us some insights.