E16 | You Don't Know the Full Story: Why Secondhand Faith Always Leads to Doubt

I was angry at God for years. And the honest truth is that most of my anger was built on a version of Him I had never actually taken the time to know.

I had heard about Him. I had sat in rooms where people talked about Him. I had consumed the content, the books, the sermons. But I had never done the work of sitting with His word myself, letting the Holy Spirit correct me, letting the full story of who He is get past my arms-crossed, already-decided heart.

This episode is for the woman who is tired, skeptical, or quietly furious and does not fully understand why. We are talking about secondhand faith, why it always produces doubt, what the enemy does with our unanswered questions, and what transformation actually looked like when I finally stopped managing my pain and handed it over.

You don't have the full story yet. Neither did I. But it changed everything when I finally started reading it.

Transcript

Speaker 2 0:00

Every year without fail, there was one or maybe a few, the one student who walked in on the first day of the outsider's unit and already had their arms crossed. I already knew everything. They had seen TikTok edits that explained the whole story, and then someone else in the hallway gave them a summary, told them who died, told them how it ended, told them which characters were good and which ones were not. that student sat in the back of the room completely convinced they had it all figured out. I specifically remember this one particular student, that when we got to Johnny Cade, I saw something happen, and it's happened to not only that student, but several students throughout my years of teaching this unit. and I've never gotten tired of seeing it. They got quiet, not bored, quiet, still quiet. The kind of quiet that means something just got in because the story they thought they knew was not the story they were actually reading. And friend, I need you to know something before we go further today. That student that is a lot of us sitting across from God with our arms crossed, completely convinced we already know who he is. and we have not even read the book. Here is what I want you to think about. If someone described a person to you, told you their name, told you their reputation, told you that they had heard this about them from other people, You formed an opinion, you made a judgment. You maybe even decided you didn't like them, but you never actually sat down with them. You never had a real conversation. You never gave them the chance to speak for themselves. Is that fair? We say no. When we think about it in terms of people, we say no because we know that secondhand information is incomplete and sometimes not even closely accurate. We know that the full story is always more complicated and layered than what gets passed around, but we do this with God every single day. We form our entire understanding of who he is based on what we've heard, what we have observed from a distance, what someone else told us. And then when life gets hard, when things don't go the way we expected them, we make a judgment. We say he's not good, we say he doesn't care, and We say he is not who they told us he was. But have you actually sat with him? Have you opened his word and read it for yourself? Not a highlight reel, not something you see on social media, not a quote graphic, the actual text, the actual story. Have you sat with it long enough to let it say something back to you? Because honestly, I hadn't, I didn't for a long time, and I wanna tell you what that cost me. So I used to teach language arts, and one of the books that we studied was the Outsiders. If you've read it, you know, if you did not, here's what you need to know for this conversation. It is a story about two groups of kids who are in a conflict and on the surface, if you had only heard about a secondhand, you might think you know which characters are good and which ones are not. You might think you already have them figured out before you even turn a page, but then you made Johnny Cage. Johnny is one of those characters who gets misread completely if you only hear about him from someone else. On the surface, he looks like trouble. He runs with a rough crowd. He is caught up in something violent. If a student spoiled a story for you in the hallway, you would walk into class thinking you already knew who he was and what he was about. But when you actually read the book, when you sit with the dialogue, when you track his behavior across the whole story, when you learn what he has been through, what he has survived, what he carries every single day, you do not see the same person anymore. You see someone who has been hurt deeply and is still trying. You see someone who's ending means something completely different once you know his beginning. I would watch my students experience that shift in real time. I would explain characterization. I would explain internal and external conflict. I would give them the definitions, context, examples, and they would nod and they understood it on a surface level. They could repeat it back to me, but that was not knowing it. They knew it when we dissected specific dialogue together. When we looked at a scene and asked, what is this character actually feeling versus what they are showing. When they started to trace how a person's history shapes every decision they make when they put the book down and said, I've felt that I've been seen the wrong way too. I have made a judgment about someone that the full story would've changed. That's when the lesson becomes theirs, not because I said it, because they did the work of reading, analyzing, sitting with it and arriving at their own understanding. Some of my students came in thinking they already knew the story because another student had told them how it ended, and they thought that meant they could coast through the lesson. They could just relax and be passive bystanders in the classroom, but knowing the ending is not the same as knowing the story. You can know the ending and still completely missed the point. And that is exactly what happens when we approach God the way we approach a spoiled book. Someone told us a summary, someone gave us the highlights, and we think we know him, but we never actually sat with the text. We have never read his character across the full story. We have never let the Holy Spirit point to a specific moment and say, do you see what he is doing there? Do you see what he has been carrying? Do you see what this cost him? You can't know someone from a summary, not a person, and definitely not God. What someone tells you about God is information. What you encounter in his word for yourself is understanding And there is no shortcut from one to the other, and I want to go somewhere that might be a little uncomfortable, so stay with me. A lot of us are angry at God, angry at our circumstances, angry at what is happening in the world, angry at what we have been through personally, and underneath that anger is a question that sounds like if you are a good God, why would you let this happen? Why would you let this happen to that person or to that situation or that child or whomever? And I'm not here to dismiss that question. Because I have asked it too loudly in my car alone after certain situations that if you continue listening to my podcast, you'll know when those moments surfaced and when it arise. And I've asked it through tears. That did not make sense to me. The question is real, but here is what I had to deal with. I was asking that question without the full picture. I did not understand free will. I did not understand that there is an enemy who is real, who operates in this world, who uses our own mind. And the people around us to work against what God is doing. I had spent years focusing on God and God alone, which is not wrong, but I had never honestly grappled with the other side of the story. So I was holding God responsible for things that were not only his to carry. And when I started to understand the full picture, my anger did not disappear immediately, but it started to shift. Because I was no longer judging the author of the story based on one page I had read Outta context. That is what happens when we sit with his word. We start to get the full picture, not all at once, but piece by piece and the pieces change how we read everything else. Because I had tried everything before I did this work, before I got into his word. I went to therapy, and therapy helped. I'm not dismissing it, but it could not get me all the way there. I read the self-help books, every one of them, and there was a lot of good in those pages, but they could not get me all the way there either. And I sat in church, I watched services online. I was surrounded by the right environments, and still still, the transformation did not happen until I cracked open completely, until I stopped managing the pain and handed it over, the hurt, the trauma, the unforgiveness. I had been caring for myself. The unforgiveness I have been carrying towards others, and until I surrendered it. Not just acknowledged it, surrendered it, and that could not happen from a distance that happened in the work, in the sitting, in the wrestling, in the moments that were, were not pretty and did not make good content and had no audience, just me and God and the Word, and the Holy Spirit correcting me and showing me who God actually is. That is where I met him. Not in the reels, not on the quote graphics, not in the sermons. I consumed from a comfortable couch, but in the work, and I needed something to change, not just for me, for my family, for how I move, for the decisions I make for the woman I was becoming. I wanted that to change, and it did, But not until I decided I was willing to do what it took. so I want to ask you something before we go. When is the last time you sat with God yourself? Not a real, not a sermon from someone else's encounter? Now with your parents told you or what you heard growing up Him, his word, your Bible, your journal, your honest questions on the table. With no performance attached, you cannot judge a story you have not read, and his story is still going, including the chapter with your name in it. You don't have the full story yet. Neither do I, but the more I sit with the author, the more I understand what he's doing and the more I trust the pages I can't see yet. And before I let you go, I wanna leave you with one more question. what? If you've been doing that with your own life too. Not just with God, but with your own story. What if you've been trying to write the ending before he is finished? I put together a free guide called Five Signs. You're trying to finish a story. God is still writing. It is short. It is honest, and it might show you exactly where you have been getting ahead of the author because sometimes the student sitting in the back of the room where their arms crossed is not just skeptical about God. She's also writing her own ending before he is done. Grab it free at the link in the show notes. It is waiting for you. And if you're not on Substack yet, come find me at middle of the story. I write there every week. For the woman who is still in the middle. The link is in the show notes as well. If this episode hit, please share it. Someone in your life might be sitting in that same anger and they need to hear this episode too. as always, before you leave, I want you to know that you are seen, you are loved, and the author of your story isn't finished yet. Not even close. Grace and Peace