Things That Change Our Views About God

“Incurable.”

That was the word the oncologist used.

After that, I kind of stopped listening.

I’m sure he kept talking. Oncologists always do. There would have been discussions about treatment options, survival rates, side effects, and next steps. My wife probably heard more of it than I did.

But my brain had become stuck on a single word.

“Incurable.”

In that moment, life quietly divided itself into two chapters: before and after.

You have probably had a moment like that yourself.

Perhaps it wasn’t cancer. Perhaps it was a phone call in the middle of the night. A divorce. A redundancy. A funeral. A conversation you never expected to have. Whatever form it took, you knew instinctively that life had shifted beneath your feet and that things were never going back to the way they were before.

What I’ve come to realise is that these moments don’t just change our lives.

They also change our understanding of God.

Or perhaps more accurately, they expose parts of our understanding of God that were never as solid as we thought they were.

The God I believed in as a teenager is not the God I believe in today. Not because God has changed. And not because I intentionally set out to change my theology.

Life happened.

Again and again, reality collided with all the assumptions I had about God that I didn’t even realise I was carrying. Assumptions about fairness. About love. About parenting. About suffering. About who belongs. About success. About death.

Each collision left me standing at a crossroads. I could either cling to the version of God I had inherited, or I could allow the experience to reshape the way I understood God.

Looking back, there were seven moments in particular that changed everything.

Seven crises that changed my God.

Crisis #1: The First Time Life Isn’t Fair

Most of us begin our spiritual journey with a fairly simple understanding of how the world works.

Good people are rewarded. Bad people are punished. If we try hard, make good choices, and trust God, things will generally turn out okay. We may never articulate it quite so clearly, but the assumption sits quietly beneath much of our thinking.

In psychological terms, this is known as the “

just world hypothesis.

” First identified by social psychologist Melvin Lerner, it describes our tendency to believe that the world is fundamentally fair and that people largely get what they deserve. It is an appealing idea because it makes life feel predictable. If good behaviour leads to good outcomes, then we can protect ourselves by doing the right thing.

The roots of this belief appear early.

Spend enough time around children, and you’ll quickly discover that fairness matters enormously to them. One child receives a larger slice of cake. Another gets an extra turn. Someone is punished for something their sibling gets away with. The response is immediate.

“That’s not fair.”

Children instinctively expect the world to operate according to principles of fairness and reciprocity. In many ways, they have to. Fairness helps create a sense of order in what would otherwise feel like a confusing and unpredictable world.

The surprising thing is how many of us carry that same assumption into adulthood.

We may stop complaining about unequal dessert portions, but we continue expecting life to reward good behaviour. We assume honesty will be recognised. Hard work will be rewarded. Kindness will pay dividends. Faithfulness will produce blessing.

Then comes the crisis.

Perhaps it happens in the schoolyard when the bully becomes popular, and the kind kid becomes the target. It might happen in your workplace when a colleague who cuts corners gets promoted. You probably recognise it when someone lies, cheats, manipulates, or exploits their way to success, while people who do the right thing are overlooked.

Whatever form it takes, the message is the same: Life does not appear to be keeping score the way we thought it would.

This can be profoundly destabilising because it challenges more than our expectations of the world. It challenges our assumptions about God. If God is good, and if God is in some sense involved in the world, why doesn’t virtue seem to pay better dividends? Why do selfish people prosper? Why do decent people get left behind? Why does doing the right thing so often fail to produce the outcome we expected?

This is exactly the tension that runs through the Book of Ecclesiastes. The writer looks at the world and observes that being a good person doesn’t actually guarantee a good outcome. Sometimes the people who deserve success don’t get it. Sometimes the people who deserve consequences avoid them.

The first major spiritual crisis often begins right there, simply when we realise that life is not nearly as fair as we imagined. The first God many of us lose is the God who guarantees that virtue will be rewarded and vice punished. We discover that God is not running a cosmic scoreboard.

Crisis #2: Falling in Love

If the first crisis teaches us that life is not fair, the second teaches us that life is not nearly as controllable as we imagined.

At first glance, it might seem strange to describe falling in love as a crisis. Most of us think of crises as painful experiences. But falling in love is usually one of the happiest things that ever happens to us.

The love itself isn’t the crisis.

The crisis is what love does to everything else.

Most of us spend the early years of our lives learning how the world works. We absorb rules from our parents, teachers, churches, and communities. We learn what is expected of us and gradually come to believe that a good life is largely a matter of making good decisions. Follow the right path, make wise choices, and things should turn out more or less as planned.

Then we fall in love.

And suddenly another person matters.

The things that once seemed important begin sliding down the list. Ambitions are rearranged. Priorities shift. Decisions that once revolved entirely around our own goals now have to take someone else into account. Their joy affects us. Their pain affects us. Their wellbeing becomes intertwined with our own.

And that changes how we see God as well.

The God many of us inherit is often a God of order, management, and control. He rewards good behaviour, maintains the rules, and keeps the universe running according to established principles. There is a certain logic to that picture of God.

Love, however, has a logic of its own.

When Jacob falls in love with Rachel, he agrees to work seven years to marry her. The biblical writer then makes one of the most remarkable observations in all of Scripture: those seven years “seemed like only a few days to him because of his love for her.”

Anyone who has been deeply in love understands exactly what that means.

Love changes how we experience sacrifice. It changes how we think about time. It changes what feels important. Things we would once have considered unreasonable suddenly seem entirely worthwhile.

That is why falling in love becomes a spiritual crisis, not because it destroys faith, but because it exposes how limited some of our assumptions about God may have been.

The God who merely enforces rules begins to feel too small. The God who primarily keeps score becomes less compelling. In their place emerges a God who is relational, self giving, and motivated by love rather than mere compliance.

We become less interested in asking, “What must I do?” and more interested in asking, “What kind of person am I becoming?”

The crisis is not that love undermines faith.

The crisis is that love reveals dimensions of God that rules alone could never teach us.

Crisis #3: Your Child Doesn’t Follow Your Script

Long before children are old enough to make their own decisions, most parents have already begun writing a story about how their lives will unfold.

The details vary from family to family, but the pattern is remarkably common. We imagine the values they will embrace, the choices they will make, the people they will become, and the future they will build. Much of this happens unconsciously. We don’t mean to live vicariously through our kids. We simply want good things for them. We want them to avoid unnecessary pain. We want them to flourish.

For many religious parents, these expectations often carry a spiritual dimension as well. We teach our children what we believe to be true. We bring them to church. We pray for them. We try our best to model the kind of life we hope they will one day choose for themselves.

Then reality intervenes.

At some point, many parents discover that their children are not characters in a story they control. They are independent human beings with minds of their own, desires of their own, and journeys of their own.

Sometimes the divergence is relatively small. A child chooses a different career path, a different political outlook or even a different lifestyle.

Sometimes it feels like a much more monumental shift. They might walk away from the faith they grew up with. They enter a relationship you would not have chosen. They reject values you spent years trying to instill. They become someone you never expected them to become.

Jesus captures this moment in the parable of the Prodigal Son. The younger son takes his inheritance and leaves home, abandoning everything his father had hoped for him. By the time he finally returns, he has made a complete mess of his life. Yet the father is not waiting to interrogate him or demand an explanation. He runs to meet him.

For many parents, this is the crisis that changes their image of God.

Until this point, it is easy to imagine God as someone who loves people when they are obedient, faithful, and heading in the right direction. It is much harder to maintain that image when someone you love refuses to follow the path you had planned for them.

Suddenly the issue is no longer theoretical. If I am being asked to keep loving my child when they disappoint me, reject my values, or choose a different path, what does that say about the way God loves people?

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Crisis #4: Serious Suffering

Before serious suffering enters our lives, most of us carry a collection of assumptions about how God works. We may not even realise we have them. We assume God is guiding events in a particular direction. We assume there is a reason for what happens. We assume that if something painful occurs, there must be a lesson hidden somewhere within it. These beliefs can sit in the background for years, largely unexamined, because life has never required us to test them.

Then suffering arrives.

And I’m not talking about ordinary disappointments and frustrations that visit all of us from time to time, but the kind of suffering that permanently alters the landscape of a person’s life: A cancer diagnosis, the death of a child, a debilitating illness, the collapse of your marriage. I’m talking about the kind of experience that divides life into before and after.

When my wife was diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer, one of the strangest things wasn’t the fear, the surgeries, or even the endless appointments.

It was the way certain Christian clichés suddenly stopped working.

“Everything happens for a reason.”

“God has a plan.”

“God won’t give you more than you can handle.”

Before cancer, those phrases sounded comforting enough. After cancer, they honestly sound like BS, to put it bluntly. Not because I had stopped believing in God, but because I could no longer believe in a God who needed my wife’s suffering in order to accomplish some hidden purpose.

I suspect this is why suffering changes so many people’s faith.

Not because suffering destroys belief necessarily, but because it exposes beliefs that were never strong enough to carry the weight of reality.

The older I get, the more I think Job is really a book about people who feel the need to explain suffering. His friends can’t sit with what has happened, so they keep reaching for reasons. They are determined to make sense of Job’s pain, even if it means blaming him for it. What they cannot accept is the possibility that some things are bigger than their explanations.

Yet by the end of the story, it is not Job who is rebuked. It is the friends.

Their mistake was believing that every tragedy has a neat explanation, that every painful event is part of some grand plan that can eventually be justified.

In its place emerged a different image of God.

Not a God who stands above suffering explaining it, but a God who enters suffering and shares it. A God who sits beside hospital beds, not one who causes people to occupy them. A God who can be present in pain without being the reason for it.

That God is harder to explain.

But he is also far easier to love.

Crisis #5: Meeting Good People You’re Supposed to Reject

For much of my life, it was easy to have opinions about people I had never actually met.

Like many people raised within a religious tradition, I inherited certain beliefs about particular groups of people. Some were considered misguided. Some were considered spiritually lost. Some were considered morally compromised. Some were viewed with suspicion. Others were viewed with pity.

At the time, those beliefs seemed perfectly reasonable.

The problem was that most of the people I held those opinions about were largely theoretical.

Then I started meeting them.

Actual people.

I met atheists who were thoughtful, generous, and deeply committed to making the world a better place. I met gay people whose capacity for kindness, loyalty, and self sacrifice challenged many assumptions I had carried for years. I met people from different faith traditions whose humility and compassion made me question whether God was as tribal as I had been led to believe.

What surprised me was not that these people existed. What surprised me was how normal they were.

They loved their families. They worried about their children. They cared for their friends. They celebrated, grieved, laughed, struggled, succeeded, and failed just like everyone else.

The more people I met, the harder it became to maintain some of the beliefs I had inherited.

Psychologists have long observed that personal relationships have a remarkable ability to reduce prejudice and challenge stereotypes. It is one thing to hold an opinion about a group of people. It is much harder to maintain that opinion once those people have names, faces, stories, and a place in your life.

I suspect this is one reason Jesus spent so much of his time with people respectable society preferred to keep at arm’s length. Tax collectors, sinners, Samaritans, and outsiders have a way of disrupting neat theological categories.

Peter experienced this when he met Cornelius. Until that point, Gentiles largely existed as a category. Then Peter encountered an actual person and watched the Spirit move in ways that did not fit his assumptions. By the end of the story, Peter’s understanding of God had expanded because his understanding of people had expanded.

When I think back over my life, I don’t think meeting good people outside my tribe weakened my faith, but it definitely weakened my certainty that God only worked through people who looked, believed, and behaved like me.

The question that emerged was one I could no longer ignore: What if God loves people I have been taught to judge just as much as God loves me?

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Crisis #6: Failure

For much of our lives, we quietly assume that our worth is tied to our success.

Now, I don’t remember anyone ever sitting me down and saying, “Your value comes from your achievements,” but the message still came across loud and clear. The teacher pointed out the one kid in the class who was doing the right thing and praised them, and pretty soon, every other kid fell into line. It was obvious: people who succeeded were admired and celebrated. It became easy to assume that accomplishment and worth belonged together.

It is hardly surprising that we often project the same logic onto God.

Consciously or unconsciously, we imagine that God is most pleased with us when we are doing well. When we are succeeding. When we are strong, competent, and in control.

Then we fail.

Perhaps the business collapses. Perhaps the marriage ends. Perhaps we make a decision we deeply regret. Perhaps we simply discover that we are not the person we thought we were. The stories we tell ourselves about our competence, goodness, and significance suddenly become harder to maintain.

Peter experienced this crisis on the night of Jesus’ arrest.

For years he had been the confident disciple. The loyal disciple. The brave disciple. Yet within a few hours he had denied even knowing Jesus three times.

What makes the story so powerful is that Peter’s failure does not have the final word. The risen Christ does not humiliate him, shame him, or discard him. Instead, he cooks breakfast and invites Peter back into relationship.

That is not how many of us expect God to respond.

Failure often exposes a version of God who is little more than a divine performance manager, rewarding success and withholding approval when we fall short. Yet failure also creates the possibility of discovering a different God, one whose love is not contingent upon achievement.

The question that emerges from this crisis is simple but unsettling:

If I can no longer define myself by my success, who am I?

And if God still loves me at my worst, what does that say about God?

Crisis #7: Mortality

Most of us spend the first half of life assuming we have time.

Not consciously, of course. We know people die. We attend funerals. We read the statistics. Yet death remains largely theoretical. It belongs to the distant future, safely separated from the concerns of today.

Then something changes.

A parent dies. A friend receives a terminal diagnosis. A classmate’s obituary appears unexpectedly in your social media feed. Perhaps your own body begins reminding you that it is not as young as it once was.

For the first time, death stops being an idea and becomes a reality.

Psychologists have long recognised that awareness of mortality changes human behaviour. Research suggests that when people are confronted with the reality of death, they often begin re-evaluating what truly matters. Ambition, status, possessions, and achievement can suddenly seem less important than relationships, meaning, and legacy.

This crisis changes our image of God because it exposes how much of our faith has been built around managing life rather than preparing for death.

When the rich young ruler approached Jesus, he wanted to know what he needed to do to inherit eternal life. Jesus’ response was striking. Rather than offering reassurance, he invited the man to loosen his grip on the things he thought would save him.

For many people, this is the crisis in which God becomes larger.

The God who once existed to help us succeed, prosper, and achieve our goals begins to fade. In his place emerges a God who is concerned with deeper questions. Questions about meaning, purpose, love, and what remains when everything else is taken away.

The question that emerges from this crisis is one that eventually confronts every human being:

When all is said and done, what was life actually for?

The God who once existed to help me build a successful life slowly gives way to the God who teaches me how to die.

Why God Keeps Escaping Our Boxes

If there is one lesson I have learned from these seven crises, it is that there is a difference between God and my ideas about God.

For a long time, I treated those two things as though they were interchangeable. I assumed that because I believed something about God, it must therefore be true of God. I assumed my understanding was largely complete. Not perfect, perhaps, but close enough.

Life has a way of challenging that assumption.

Again and again, I found myself confronted by experiences that didn’t fit the framework I had inherited. Sometimes it was suffering. Sometimes it was love. Sometimes it was another person. Sometimes it was my own failure.

And each time, I found myself facing a choice. I could ignore the experience and cling to the beliefs I already had. I could conclude that God wasn’t there at all. Or I could accept the possibility that my understanding of God might need to grow.

Looking back, I can see that many of the things I lost along the way were not God at all. They were assumptions. They were interpretations. They were ideas that had helped me make sense of the world at one stage of life but could no longer carry the weight I was asking them to bear.

That realisation has changed the way I approach faith.

I am less interested these days in defending every belief I hold and more interested in remaining open to what life might still have to teach me. I am slower to judge people whose experiences differ from my own. I am more cautious about offering explanations for things I have never personally endured. Most of all, I am less frightened when one of my assumptions begins to fall apart.

After all, every significant season of growth in my life has begun that way.

Perhaps faith is not about arriving at a place where all the questions have been answered. Perhaps it is about developing enough trust to keep moving forward when the old answers stop working. Perhaps it is about recognising that God is always larger, more mysterious, and more surprising than our explanations allow.

If these seven crises have taught me anything, it is that reality is not the enemy of faith. Reality is often the thing that saves faith from becoming too small.

And maybe that is why these moments matter so much. They force us to decide whether we will devote ourselves to defending our ideas about God, or whether we will remain open to encountering God himself.