Mad at God: When Chronic Pain Leads You to Wrestle with the Almighty
Alicia Wright
Chronic pain takes no prisoners. It comes to break you, rip you from your moorings, and leave you afloat in a million emotions you never knew existed. One of the most often repeated themes I hear in the chronic pain and illness community is anger—anger at our bodies, anger at the world, anger at what brought us to this place, and often anger at God.
Faith in a good God is simple when life is going well, but faith in a good God when life is crumbling around you—as you desperately try to shore up a falling structure—can feel absolutely impossible. Those of us who believe that God is both good and sovereign often have an especially hard time with this. If He is good, then why is life so often bad? Why has the body I was relatively responsible with and worked hard to care for turned against me? And most of all, why has God allowed it? Isn’t He supposed to be on my side? What was the point of all my hard work and obedience when the results now look and feel like punishment?
A friend recommended a book of prayers to me last year called Liturgies for Hope. It includes a beautiful prayer based on the experience of Jacob wrestling with God the night before he returned to Canaan with his family (Genesis 32:22-32). At this point in his life, Jacob had endured a significant amount of pain—some self-inflicted and some inflicted by others. He was walking into a situation he rightly feared, and he wanted to know that God was going to be with him and bless him.
I used to wonder whether Jacob was right to openly demand that God bless him that night on the eve of his biggest fear. His past sins are easy to see when we can read decades of his life’s story in just a few verses but despite a well-established pattern of deceit early in life, he’s now been the victim of the deceits and tricks of others. He’s less cocky and more broken. At this point I don’t think he was attempting to trick God or asking for something extra out of pure hubris. Now that suffering and fear have entered my own life, I see his plea as the desperate prayer of a man staring down the barrel of his worst fears and weaknesses and knowing that he isn’t enough to face them on his own. I think we have support for this view in the fact that God’s response to his request is a blessing—though one that comes with pain. God was present for the purpose of wrestling with Jacob in his moment of deepest fear and blessed him in a way he didn’t expect and couldn’t earn.
Living with pain that seems to have come for no reason except to destroy brings our deepest fears to the surface, and often, anger comes with them. We may believe we shouldn’t direct any of that anger toward God, yet still find ourselves unable to suppress those emotions. Jacob gives us a beautiful example of what to do with these struggles: bring them to God, acknowledge them openly before Him, and wrestle through them with Him. Don’t throw out your accusations and walk away. Don’t attempt to minimize your pain to paint His plan in a better light that you don’t truly believe anyway. Don’t decide that you must be the problem for not understanding what He’s doing in this moment and then slink away without hope. Instead, own the truth of how deeply suffering is breaking your heart and beg Him for a blessing.
In this place of honest pleading—and perhaps even open wailing—we have the privilege of standing in the presence of God Himself. As she recommended the book, my friend sent me the prayer based on Jacob out of it called “A Liturgy for Those Wrestling with God.” One paragraph says:
“All my longings are remembered by You,
and all my fears laid bare.
You already know what I doubt and what I seek
and the name of what I need.”
What a beautiful place to be! God knows all that we desire, the darkest fears of our hearts, and the anger that threatens to consume us—and we can be absolutely sure that He already has a blessing prepared for us.
Wrestling will be hard and will take time. There may be long seasons when we need to return to it again and again. But it will give us gifts we wouldn’t otherwise receive. The first and most obvious gift is God Himself. If we continue to acknowledge Him in our mental battles and return to Him in honest conversation, we remain connected to Him in the fight. Simply acknowledging His presence brings the recognition that He has not left us alone. As the prayer continues:
“Oh God of Jacob, I wrongly believed my prayer would first
be met with an answer,
but instead, You have given me Yourself…”
Wrestling with the Almighty God of the universe also gives us other gifts—ones we may not have considered or understood before. It has brought me rest as I come to Him in exasperated, angry prayer, and encounter a God who willingly made Himself human to suffer for my sake. It’s hard to stand in the presence of a God who lived a life of sorrow in order to be like his brothers and sisters, and still hold on to my own anger. My hands slowly loosen the demands they’ve been holding onto and my fight dissipates in the presence of His infinite love. That love tells me He is doing something with me in the middle of my pain, fear, and anger. He is blessing me, as He blessed Jacob and He is with me, as he was with Jacob. In our hardest places God meets us and shapes something in our lives and hearts that would not exist apart from our sorrow.
Sometimes, though—perhaps for long stretches—it may feel like our wrestling is pointless. We may pray, weep, and wail before God, only to walk away feeling just as angry and frustrated as when we came. In those moments, don’t assume you asked for God’s blessing incorrectly or that you weren’t heard. You were heard. And you will continue to be heard, even if heaven feels locked and it seems like your cries of confusion and anger have fallen into silence. If you went to Him in that grief, then it was not wasted.
The final lines of this prayer capture our time with God perfectly:
“I have been touched by the One who loves me,
crippled by grace,
and have limped into the promised land with a new name.”