When It Feels Like God Rejected Us
When It Feels Like God Rejected Us: A Letter from the Place That Breaks
⚠️ Content note: This post speaks honestly about child loss, abuse, and spiritual betrayal. If that is fresh for you, please take care before reading.
I want to say the thing that won’t fit into prayer: I have felt abandoned. I have felt punished. I gave my child to God in trust, and she was taken in the most vile, personal way I could imagine. That is a grief that is not theoretical — it is a wound on the body of my heart.
I tried to reconcile this with every version of God I knew. For years prior her death I had taught scripture, I led, I believed. I tried to be faithful. And still—this happened. If God would take her, why not in a way that did not carry the particular cruelty that has haunted me? If there are those God chooses and those God rejects, then I am left in the place of the rejected: a castaway.
I don’t offer tidy theological answers. The tradition of faith has many voices—some say suffering is the price of freedom, some say it shapes the soul, some say it is the consequence of human brokenness. Yet none of those words soothe the rawness of a mother’s loss. And none of them answer the intimate, personal ache of feeling singled out by cruelty.
Here are a few truths I am holding (and testing) in this season:
Feeling rejected is not the same as being rejected. Emotions tell us what we are experiencing — abandonment, rage, numbness — but they don’t always name ultimate truth. It’s valid to feel cast away. It’s also possible that what you feel is the result of a universe broken by human evil rather than divine choice.
There are many theological views; none are mandatory. Some traditions teach predestination or election in absolute terms; others insist God’s love is universal and unconditional. You don’t have to swallow a system that makes your pain feel justified or small. Theology should help you hold pain, not gaslight it.
If you’ve been taught that suffering is deserved or deserved by someone else’s child, reject that without apology. Nothing about what happened deserved the horror that was done. That claim is cruel theology wearing a holy cloak.
There is a witness to suffering inside the faith story itself. The Bible and sacred traditions are full of people who rage at God, who feel forsaken, who demand justice. That sacred honesty can be permission: you are allowed to be furious and God-sized sorrowed at the same time.
Maybe God’s presence is not the cancellation of suffering but the insistence on love after it. I don’t mean platitudes. I mean the stubborn, small mercies that keep arriving: a stranger’s hand, a memory of your child’s laugh, the way your own love refuses to die. That persistence can be a different kind of “God” — not an explanation, but a companion.
If you want words that aim at comfort rather than explanation, try this: if there is a choice being made anywhere, it is not to love some and reject others. The choice I see is whether the Divine—if Divine there is—will sit in the ashes with us, or remain aloof. The stories of grief that matter are the ones where God shows up in the wound, not outside of it.
If you are furious at God, bring that fury. If you are silent, sit in it. If you want to rage publicly, write it down (it is not necessary to share rage publicly). If you want to whisper to the dark, whisper. None of that makes you less faithful or less human. It makes you honest.
Closing Reflection
You may feel like a castaway, rejected by the very God you once trusted. But feeling rejected and being rejected are not the same. Love—your fierce love, the kindness of strangers, the stubborn flame that refuses to die in you—remains. And maybe that persistence of love is the truest sign that you have not been abandoned after all.
If you’ve ever felt abandoned by God, I see you. This space is not for platitudes or quick answers—it’s for honesty. You are welcome to sit here in your questions, your grief, and your rage without needing to resolve them.
🪷
Jen 💙