If I Do Nothing For the Rest Of My Life, Will God Abandon Me?

When life becomes empty of meaning

Judy Hansen
Backyard Church
Published in
7 min readSep 27, 2022

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Photo by Francisco Gonzalez on Unsplash

You know, sometimes, out of nowhere, old memories can get triggered.

It happened to me the other night when a friend was telling us how she had just lost her job. One part of me was tracking with her hope of taking early retirement and planning the next phase of her life. I thought, “That’s good! She’s not being beaten down by this setback.”

The other part of me, though, was bothered because it sounded like she thought she would get her life all figured out by, I don’t know — Christmas.

She’d be up and running again in no time.

“Uh oh,” I thought.

Not because I didn’t think she was capable or had enough talent and initiative to make it happen. It was more that she seemed compelled to figure it out so quickly and not doing so would be a failure on her part. There was no scope in her plan for things to take longer. Life has a habit of teaching us patience in the hardest possible way.

That relatively benign conversation triggered memories for me of a time when I felt I like had no purpose — when all the windows and doors of opportunity were firmly closed and locked for me.

For a long time.

I fought against thoughts that God had no more use for me — that he had boxed me up, put me on a shelf, and left me there to collect dust — for the rest of my life.

There was no way these feelings that I had were being resolved in just a month.

A month would have been nice.

It lasted twelve years.

When life doesn’t go according to plan

As I listened to my friend talk about how she was going to get her life back on track I wondered, what if all her windows and doors get bolted shut, and God boxes her up and places her on a shelf to collect dust for a while? What if all the things she tries fails or quickly fall apart? Over and over?

What then?

Would the same questions that plagued me stalk her?

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Judy Hansen
Backyard Church

Writer, blogger, book author. I push the boundaries of what faith means.