Spiritual Comparison: When Other Christian Women Seem More Steady Than You

Have you ever sat in a Bible study, church group, or conversation with other Christian women and felt like everyone else knew something you somehow missed?

In this episode, Katrina talks about spiritual comparison, feeling behind in your faith, not knowing how to pray, and the shame that can make you want to stay quiet instead of keep showing up. She shares what it felt like to be a newer believer surrounded by women who seemed fluent in Scripture, prayer, and church life — while her own answers felt small.

Through Romans 8, Psalm 103, and Hebrews 4, this episode names the difference between conviction and condemnation and reminds you that God does not shame you for starting where you are.

You do not have to know more before you come to Him.

http://www.katrinagambill.com

Transcript

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Welcome to Made for This. I'm Katrina Gamble. This is a podcast for the Christian wife and mother who loves God deeply but still finds herself overwhelmed by the ordinary weight of real life. Each week, we talk honestly about what it looks like to follow God in the middle of a loud, full, imperfect life by bringing the struggles of marriage, motherhood, emotional overwhelm, and spiritual inconsistency back under the truth of Scripture. Because your faith was never meant to work only in the quiet moments. It was meant to support you in the middle of your actual life. It's always the car. And she said out of nowhere, Mom, everyone has a sparkle within that makes them who they are. And I said, You're right. What's yours? And she said, It's Jesus. He's my sparkle within. I cried right there in the car. I didn't cry because it was super sweet, even though it obviously was, but because she said it in a way you'd say the sky is blue, like it was just true. Like she'd never once questioned it. She just knew Jesus was real the same way she knew the sun was in the sky. Something she was certain of in her bones. And it made me realize I was not certain of anything. A few weeks before that, she had said, I wish I could give Jesus just one more life. And I asked her why. And she said, because I would just really love to see him. Another direct quote I memorialized via text to Keaton and also cried after hearing. She was five, and she had a longing for Jesus that I didn't have. I felt like I was letting her down because she was a child and I was the one who was supposed to be guiding her, and she was presenting me with a desire to know Jesus without actually asking for it. So the very next weekend we found a church. It was a little scary, but also immediately comforting. It felt like I had found what I had already been looking for without knowing I was looking for it. Not long after we started going to church, I joined a Bible study. It was about being a wife, the way scripture describes, which, if you know anything about where I was in my marriage at that point, you know that was exactly what I needed. The study was held in a woman's home, and she was probably 40 years older than me. I was 30 and I legit felt like a child in that study because I was the youngest by at least 15 years. We went around the table to introduce ourselves, and one by one, each woman said how long she'd been attending the church, not just church, that church. Decades. And then they would mention how many times they had done this particular study, fourth time, fifth time. One woman said she had lost count. I had been attending church for like three weeks. We opened the study and started working through questions, and I realized almost immediately that I did not know how to extract meaning from scripture the way these women did. They had long, eloquent answers that referenced other passages and connected ideas across books of the Bible that sounded like they had been thinking about this their whole lives. And from what I had gathered, they had. Conviction is specific, it points at something real and says, take this to God, be honest about it, take the next step. Conviction is uncomfortable, but it moves you and it moves you toward God, toward honesty and toward growth. Condemnation is different, it's heavy and vague, and it doesn't move you anywhere. It sounds like you've been at this for a while now and you're still this far behind. You don't belong in that room, or don't come back until you can come better. The voice that told me to look down and mumble wasn't God's voice. It was condemnation, pretending to be self-awareness. Condemnation doesn't come from God. Romans 8 says so plainly, there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. None. The case is not being built against you. The evidence of your starting point is not being gathered and held. Psalm 103 gives us a picture of who God actually is, and it's so different from the one I had in my head during that time. Verse 8 says, The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. Honestly, I had to look up the word abounding. I mean, I've heard it before, obviously, but I wanted to make sure I really knew what it meant. It means overflowing, more than enough, not carefully rationed out based on how much you've learned or how much time you've spent reading the Bible. Overflowing, regardless. The Psalm keeps going. It says, He does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our iniquities. God doesn't deal with you according to what you don't know yet. He doesn't deal with you according to the questions you were afraid to ask, the passages you couldn't find, or the answers you wrote down from other women because you didn't have your own yet. He knows your frame, he knows you are dust. That's a reference back to Genesis to humans being formed from the earth, which yes, I did have to look up because I am no biblical scholar. And his knowing your fragility doesn't make him pull back from you. It makes him move toward you with compassion. When I picture what God felt toward me during that time, I thought he felt something like what I feel when I drop my son off at the mall with his friends and tell him to be back by two o'clock. And now it's 2 14 and he's not there yet. I'm frustrated, I'm a little annoyed, but when he comes around the corner, I'm still gonna love him exactly as much as I did before he was late. The love doesn't change. The waiting doesn't erase the love, it just keeps waiting. That's what I thought God felt toward me. Not cruel, not absent, just waiting and a little tired of waiting, but still gonna love me when I showed up. And here's what Romans 8 actually says about that. Paul writes, For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. He lists everything he can think of, every terrifying force or impossible distance, and none of it is enough to cut you off from the love of God, and then he lands on anything else in all creation, which means you, you're on that list. Your three-word answers and your mumbling, your YouTube search for how to pray, none of it is strong enough to separate you from the love of God. Hebrews 4:15 says, We do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. Jesus knows what it feels like to be human from the inside. He knows what it costs to be in a room where you feel like you don't belong. He knows what it is to be uncertain and tired and not enough for the thing in front of you. He sympathizes with weakness, not from a distance, but as someone who has lived inside a human body and knows exactly what that costs. So when you sit down to pray and you're not sure you're doing it right, or when you open your Bible and you get a little lost, you're not approaching someone who is confused by your struggle or disappointed by your starting point. Verse 16 says, draw near to the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in a time of need. The throne already has a name before you arrive. It's grace. And the invitation is to come confidently, not because your knowledge is impressive or your habits are consistent, but because the one receiving you is merciful. Your confidence is not in yourself, it's in him. That feeling of being the new girl, of sitting across from women who speak scripture like a first language and thinking, I am so far behind, it still shows up for me. I won't pretend it doesn't, but it doesn't do what it used to because now I know something I didn't know then. We are all at different places on the same road. The women who could quote passages without looking them up, who had done the study four times, who had been at the church for decades, they had more years of showing up imperfectly and coming back anyway. That's the whole difference. Not a different kind of faith or a foundation that I missed. They've just been practicing the returning more. You get that practice the same way they did. Not by waiting until you feel ready or by getting your answers to be long enough before it's your turn, not by looking up the right words before you're allowed to pray. You get it by coming back today in the exact condition you're in and trusting that what God says about you is more true than what the comparison is telling you. Ella knew something at five that I was still working out. She knew he was real, she knew he was close, she knew it the way she knew the sun was in the sky. That's where we're headed, that's what we're after. Not to be the woman in the room who has done the study five times, but to have that kind of certainty, the kind that doesn't need to perform or pretend, the kind that just knows. Maybe you're not there yet, but you're on the road, and that's exactly enough to keep going. If this episode struck you in some way, if you realized you've been avoiding God because you feel behind or sitting quietly in rooms where you feel spiritually smaller than everyone else, I didn't want to leave you there. I made a workbook called The Shame Reset to help you walk through this with scripture and actually process what's been weighing on you. The link is in the show notes.