It's Okay Not to Be Okay: Moving Forward One Day at a Time

by Sheila Walsh

“Grace is love that cares and stoops and rescues.” Grace is the opposite of karma. We get what we don’t deserve: the love, mercy, forgiveness of God. Grace is unmerited favor. Grace is here for you right now, in the middle of what is hard or not working. The writer to the Hebrews described it this way: “Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need” (Heb. 4:16 ESV).

We have a gut-level, honest, pour-your-heart-out conversation with God.

Even when David was exhausted, soul weary, he called out to God. I don’t know where you are right now. You may have given up on God and yourself, but He has not given up on you. You may be afraid to hope again, but hope begins like a tiny drop of rain. My prayer for you is that as you keep moving forward with the tiniest of steps you will find yourself soaked to the skin.

Sitting with the possibility of a drastic change in how I’d lived up until that point, I saw how I had defined the quality of my life by what I was able to accomplish. I’d placed so much value on what I do rather than on who I am.

This is the beauty of brokenness. When we face our losses in the hallway with God and offer the broken pieces to Him, it’s amazing what He will do to bind up the broken pieces in someone else’s life. This is how our brave brother Paul described it: God is our merciful Father and the source of all comfort. He comforts us in all our troubles so that we can comfort others. When they are troubled, we will be able to give them the same comfort God has given us. (2 Cor. 1:3b–4) The second gift Paul gives us in this letter is to remind us who we are and where we’re going. That is why we never give up. Though our bodies are dying, our spirits are being renewed every day. For our present troubles are small and won’t last very long. Yet they produce for us a glory that vastly outweighs them and will last forever! So we don’t look at the troubles we can see now; rather, we fix our gaze on things that cannot be seen. For the things we see now will soon be gone, but the things we cannot see will last forever. (4:16–18)

God never rushes us through our pain. He sits with us for as long as it takes. But as you begin to receive His comfort, you might look around and see that you’re not alone in the hallway. There’s someone else there, and they can’t even lift their head.

For some time though, there was more going on for me than simple cultural reticence. I lacked confidence in who I was in a crowd of new people. That might sound strange if you consider that I spend a lot of time on stage or on television, but those are roles I’m comfortable in.

teacher, I believed I had value because God was using me, so therefore He must be pleased with me. I didn’t understand that God wanted to totally transform the way I thought and therefore how I lived. Not only that, I didn’t understand that the greatest, most profoundly personal love story ever is the one between God, in Christ, and any man or woman who will come with nothing and accept His everything. That would take me many years along a broken road to begin to understand.

We’re invited to come back to Christ over and over again to be renewed. Having our vision clarified is a powerful gift, an ability to see ourselves as Christ does, not by the labels we wear or the way we think about ourselves.

I told him that night what I wish I’d understood at sixteen or even at thirty-six: what he did wasn’t a good thing, but that didn’t make him a bad person. It made him human. I told him that God loves him as much on the days he feels he’s done everything wrong as He does on the days he feels he’s done everything right.

The breathtaking truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ is that we are not judged on our failures but on the finished work of Christ.

lives. God looks down on this crazy, mixed-up bunch of beautiful that is the body of Christ and He loves us. He doesn’t love the one who fought for her marriage one bit more than the one who gave up. You’re not an outsider, not second best.

You may not be married or have children, but do you wrestle with your basic value as a person? If you didn’t get the promotion you expected or if you weren’t invited to join a certain group heading out for lunch, it’s very easy to feel undervalued or insignificant, and that can begin to change how you think about your life.

Christ wants you to be free. Free from condemning thoughts, free from compulsive behaviors, free to be who you really are, free to live your crazy, beautiful life. When Paul wrote to the church in Galatia he said, So Christ has truly set us free. Now make sure that you stay free, and don’t get tied up again in slavery to the law. (Gal. 5:1) Paul wanted to make sure the believers in Galatia didn’t fall back into condemnation under the law.

Ask the Holy Spirit to soften your heart and to open your eyes. Find a translation of the Bible that you can understand.

Take every thought captive. Grab hold of every negative thing you’ve ever believed about yourself and replace it with truth. This step will not be easy.

We’re called to show up! It’ll never be about us getting anything perfect, but when we are present God can do what only He can do.

Why was Elijah heading to Mount Sinai when he felt as if his life was over? He went to the very place where God met Moses. He went to the holy mountain. He needed God to meet him there. When I think of that intentionality, I remember the response that Peter gave to Jesus when Christ asked the disciples if they would leave Him too: Simon Peter replied, “Lord, to whom would we go?” (John 6:68) Does that resonate with you? It does with me. Even at my lowest point in the deepest pit of depression when I too prayed to God to take my life, the only place I knew to go for help was to Him. Elijah made his way up the mountain and into a cave. Some translations give us cleft instead of cave. Perhaps this was the very cleft in the rock where Moses waited for God to pass by. Exhausted from his journey, Elijah spent the night in the cave. But then God asked him a question: “What are you doing here, Elijah?” (1 Kings 19:9).

they don’t do things the way you do? Do you ever get so discouraged by the state of Christianity that you’re ready to throw in the towel? God is moving even when we can’t see Him. God is in control even when things seem out of control.

You don’t have to be perfect, just present. You can pour out your what-ifs to the Lord. When you take that step and things seem to go wrong, God is working, God is faithful, and God is a God of grace. What are the what-ifs holding you back? Are you willing to take a step and see what God might do?

The Lord was with Joseph. We need to stop right there. That is a profound, eye-washing truth. It’s tempting to think, If the Lord was with Joseph, why did he end up bruised and battered in a foreign country? Why didn’t God protect him? When we look at our own lives we think, Surely if God is with me terrible things won’t happen.

it became bitterly clear to me that the word cold is a relative term. There’s “Would you like a cold beverage?” and then there is “Would you like your face to fall off in the next five minutes?”

We’ll never have enough to fulfill all the demands made on us, but that’s okay. We’re not supposed to have enough. We’re supposed to bring what we have, our clearly not enough, to Jesus and ask Him to meet us where we are. When we give Jesus our not enough He blesses it and breaks it and He feeds His people. Understanding that principle has shifted something deep inside me.

Jesus thanked His Father for the not enough given up by one little boy. The spiritual principle of bringing the little we have and trusting Christ to meet us there applies across all areas of life, not just in what we perceive as ministry situations.

It’s become a daily habit of mine to acknowledge every morning that I don’t have enough for the challenges that day will hold, and I ask Christ to meet me there. When you and I do that, Christ gives thanks. In our humanity we are bowing the knee to our Lord and Savior and acknowledging that He is God and we are not.

I used to question God when I met someone who was in as much pain as the mom who had recently buried her son. How could God allow these things to happen? I struggled because I used my human understanding to try to understand the divine plans and ways of God. I’ll never know enough about Him this side of eternity to make everything crystal clear. So I don’t question anymore. Instead, I pray for them, often with tears running down my face, and I worship God in that sacred space of not understanding. That may seem like a strange response. It could come across like a cultlike obedience that’s out of touch with reality. Far from it. For me, there is no greater reality than the love and faithfulness of God. I don’t always see God’s hand in a heartbreaking situation but as the great preacher Charles Spurgeon wrote, “And when we cannot trace His hand, we must trust His heart.”1

Christ told him he’d answered correctly. Heart, soul, strength, and mind. What does that look like for you and me right now? We love with our heart, even when it’s broken. We love with our soul, even when our humanity wrestles against our situation. We love with our strength, even when it’s almost gone. We love with our mind, even when we don’t understand.

Some unexpected changes in life are welcome, but no one imagines the hard things that wait just around the corner. How do we live, then, when we find ourselves in a place that’s far from the life we imagined?

When we are crushed, Christ is near. You are not alone.

You may not be married to a Nabal or waiting for a David, but I know that there are disappointments in life, dreams that fall by the wayside, but as the Scripture at the beginning of this chapter reminds us, when we choose by faith to press on, to endure in Christ then endurance produces strength of character, and character produces a confident hope of salvation. And that hope, that assurance that whether some dreams may have to fall by the wayside on this earth, our true hope in Christ will not disappoint.

Perhaps you can take a few moments today and ask the Holy Spirit to show you places of disappointment in your life. Some of them might even be from your childhood but are still casting a shadow today. Write them down, and then let your Father know that these hurt.

Meditate on this verse: Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. (John 12:24 ESV) Sometimes we have to let one dream die to welcome a new one.

Have you ever been in a place like that, a place where you felt so hopeless that no matter what anyone said, it didn’t reach you? Have you ever looked at words that used to bring life and joy and hope when you opened the Word of God, and now they’re just words on a page? Have you ever felt that even when you’re surrounded by people, you are desperately alone?

If Christ had chosen to live eternally with His scars, why would I be ashamed to show mine?

I love these scars. I love them because they are a physical reminder to me every day that Christ is permanently scarred for you and me. He didn’t hide His scars and neither will I.

The Hebrew word for “engraved” is chaqaq. It means “to be cut into or cut open.” The practice of having an image on the palms of your hands was a familiar one to Jews. The practice was called “ensigns of Jerusalem.” Jewish men would engrave pictures of the temple or of Jerusalem on the palms of their hands. It meant for the devout Jew that these images would be always before them. This is what they did. They would choose an image and then have it cut into a block of wood. Then they’d dip the image into powder or charcoal and apply it to the palms of their hands. Next, they would tie two needles tightly together and dip them into ink, then gently pierce along the image, careful not to draw blood. When the image was complete it would be washed in wine. It reminded them of the temple, but not of the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. They still had to follow the laws given to Moses. They still had to have an animal sacrificed, symbolically taking their sins away. They had to do this over and over. But the prophet Isaiah spoke of the One to come who would step into our place and once for all take our punishment on Himself:

I wonder what the angels thought when they saw the Holy One return, marked like this? I think it would only make the worship more intense, the praise even more glorious. The wonder of what God in Christ had been willing to do for those He loves.

I can’t imagine how heartbreaking it would be to be an observer in that place when the waters stirred. Those who were waiting were blind, crippled, and desperately sick. If one person made a move toward the waters others must have done everything in their power to drag their poor, broken bodies to the edge of the pool, but only one would be healed. I imagine that this was a place most people avoided. It was a place of misery and disease, and Jewish people had such strict laws concerning who was clean and who was unclean. I love that Jesus chose to go there. He never stayed in the nicest places in town and seldom hung out with the most respectable crowd. He went to the poor and the broken, those whom society had given up on.

Not all scars are visible. Sometimes the scars we bear are from the choices we’ve made. Those are easier to hide, but they leave a mark inside. I think those scars are potentially the deadliest because they can’t be seen, but the ongoing impact on our lives is profound.

What I am saying is that when we’re burdened with the scars of guilt from the choices we’ve made and don’t know where to turn for help, anxiety and depression can be present or become greater. I know of a good man who killed himself because he couldn’t bear to tell his wife that he had cheated on her and face the possibility of losing his children. I know of many who are addicted to online pornography—men and women who are afraid to confess their sin because it feels so dark.

can I remind you that there is a safe Savior? No matter what you’ve done, there is no sin too great to separate you from the love of God (see Rom. 8:38–39), apart from denying who He is and rejecting the Holy Spirit. You don’t have to clean yourself up; come as you are.

As long as we feel that we have to look perfect, we’ve missed the great opportunity to point someone else to Christ, who is perfect.

I wish I could sit down with you, look you in the eyes, and remind you that no matter what your scars are, internal or external, you are loved more than you have the capacity to bear.

Let me ask you something as I bring this chapter to a close: Are you willing to look at your scars? Some might be external ones that you’ve always seen as ugly. Christ doesn’t. He welcomes you to bring your scars to Him. Talk to Him about them. Tell Him how you feel about them. Ask Him to touch them.

If your scars are internal because of choices you’ve made or things that have been done to you, don’t let them be your identity anymore. Find your identity as a son or daughter of God. Christ wants to bring glory to the Father through your scars.

Every one of us is invited to begin that journey from the place where we were shamed to the place where we begin to experience the freedom Christ offers.

When you have placed your trust in Christ, that is the label that defines you—child of God.

Yes, we might be divorced or overweight, we might struggle with mental illness or be scarred on our faces, but none of these things define us. Rather, like my brave friend who sat through a woman’s conference, the very things that we think would disqualify us become the places that remind us daily of the grace of God.

That may sound a little strange to you, but we serve the God who was there in all our yesterdays, is here with us today, and will be with us in all our tomorrows.

He told me that the bullet is still in his skull as it would be too dangerous to remove and that his voice is permanently damaged. I asked him if that was a harsh reminder of his past. He told me that it was the absolute opposite. He said that he has a daily reminder of the grace and mercy of God. He has learned to love the brokenness in himself and offer it to Christ.