We have a word for people who are struggling.
We call them backsliders—which is a remarkable thing to call someone. It implies direction. It implies choice. It implies that the person who stopped coming to church, who can’t pray right now, who hasn’t opened their Bible in three months, made a decision to slide. Picked up their things. Headed deliberately downhill.
Most people who are spiritually struggling are not sliding anywhere. They are standing completely still, in the middle of something very hard, trying to breathe.
Maybe they lost someone. Maybe the marriage ended. Maybe the depression came back and this time it stayed. Maybe they gave the church everything they had for twenty years and one day looked up and realized the tank was empty and nobody had noticed. Maybe they just got tired. Tired of performing faith for people who would not have recognized the real thing anyway.
We called that backsliding. God calls it being human.
The Bible is not a catalogue of people who had it together. It is a record of people who fell apart, repeatedly, and were met there—in the falling apart—by a God who apparently has a very high tolerance for mess and a very long memory for covenant.
You are not a cautionary tale.
You are not a prayer request to be whispered about over potluck.
You are a person God has not stopped thinking about for a single day.
Not one day.
Not even this one.
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