When something in our lives isn’t going the way we want, most of us know exactly what we want God to do.
Change it.
Change the situation. Change the answer. Change the person. Open the door. Fix the relationship. Solve the problem. Make the thing we’re afraid of not happen.
And there is absolutely nothing wrong with asking Him to do that. Scripture is full of people asking God to intervene. We don’t have to pretend we don’t care how something turns out in order to trust Him with it.
But there is a danger in becoming so focused on the outcome we’re praying for that we begin to believe it’s the only way the story can end well.
Because sometimes circumstances change, and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes the person we desperately want to change keeps making the same choices. The relationship isn’t restored. The door doesn’t open. The answer isn’t what we hoped for. The situation we thought would last a few months becomes part of our lives for years—or maybe forever.
If getting what we want is the only way we know how to win, what happens then?
Maybe we need a bigger definition of victory.
It’s Okay to Want Things to Change
I want to make this really clear before we go any further: trusting God does not require becoming indifferent to what happens.
If someone you love is making choices that are hurting them, of course you want them to change. If your marriage is struggling, you can pray for restoration. If you’re waiting for test results, you can pray for good news. If you’re miserable in your job, you can ask God to open another door—and update your resume while you’re at it.
There are situations that require action, conversations that need to happen, boundaries that need to be established, and problems that really do need to be solved. Trust is not passivity.
But there comes a point in almost every difficult situation when we run into something we cannot control. Another person’s choice. A decision that isn’t ours. An outcome we cannot guarantee. A circumstance we cannot make different no matter how desperately we want to.
That’s where things get harder, because now the question isn’t simply, What am I going to do about this?
It’s also, Who am I going to be if this doesn’t change?
Getting What You Want Isn’t the Only Way to Win
I think it’s easy to measure God’s work by what changes around us. We prayed, and the door opened. We prayed, and the relationship was restored. We prayed, and the answer came.
Those are beautiful stories. I have some of them too.
But what about the stories where the door stays closed? What about the person who doesn’t change, the relationship that isn’t restored, the loss that can’t be undone, or the prayer we’ve prayed for years without seeing the answer we hoped for?
If we’re not careful, we can start living as though everything good is waiting on the other side of a changed circumstance.
I’ll have peace when this is resolved. I’ll enjoy my life when I don’t have to deal with this anymore. I’ll be okay when they finally get it together. I’ll move forward when I know how this is going to turn out.
Without realizing it, we’ve given our circumstances an enormous amount of authority over our lives.
There are things we simply don’t get to decide. But that doesn’t mean nothing is happening, and it certainly doesn’t mean we’re powerless.
Ask a Different Question
For a long time, the most natural prayer in a difficult situation may be:
God, please change this.
Keep praying it.
But I think there is another question worth asking alongside it:
God, how do You want to change me in this?
That’s a very different question.
It isn’t asking, What lesson do I have to learn so You’ll finally give me what I want? And it isn’t self-improvement for self-improvement’s sake.
It’s an invitation for God to show us what’s happening inside of us while we’re so focused on what’s happening around us.
Maybe He exposes fear that has been driving our decisions. Maybe we realize how much of our identity has become attached to someone else’s opinion of us. Maybe resentment has been building for so long that we’ve stopped recognizing it, or we’re gripping an outcome so tightly because we’ve convinced ourselves we know exactly what good has to look like.
Maybe we need courage to have a conversation we’ve been avoiding. Maybe we need to forgive. Maybe we need to stop accepting behavior we should have addressed a long time ago. Or maybe God is teaching us to trust Him without first telling us how everything is going to turn out.
This is where the question gets uncomfortable, because asking God to change someone else is often much easier than inviting Him to expose something in us.
But what might happen if, instead of spending all our energy looking outward at what needs to change, we also started asking:
God, is there something in me You want to expose here? Is there something I’m carrying that You want me to release? Is there something I’ve believed that isn’t true? Is there a truth I know but haven’t actually been living like I believe? Is there something You’ve been asking me to do that I’ve been avoiding because I’m waiting for someone or something else to change first?
And I’d add one more:
Is there a way I can honor You in the midst of this mess?
That question changes things.
Because now we’re not merely looking for a way to survive until circumstances improve. We’re asking God to shape the way we live right here, while they’re still hard.
And then comes the harder part: being willing to listen.
God may show us something we’d rather not see. He may ask us to release something we feel entitled to hold onto. He may lead us toward forgiveness when resentment feels justified, courage when fear feels safer, or obedience when we’d rather wait until we know how things are going to turn out.
The circumstances may not change because we asked these questions.
But we can.
You Are Not Powerless Just Because You Can’t Control the Outcome
There is a tremendous difference between not being in control and being powerless.
You may have no control over what another person chooses. You may not be able to make someone understand, apologize, stay, change, heal, agree with you, or do what you believe is right. You may not be able to change the diagnosis, undo what happened, force an opportunity to work out, or make your life look the way you thought it would.
But there is still a life for you to live in the middle of all of it.
You can ask God for wisdom about your next step. You can tell the truth. You can establish a boundary. You can stop chasing someone’s approval. You can refuse to let another person’s dysfunction become the organizing principle of your life.
More importantly, you can allow God to confront the things growing inside of you that you don’t want to carry forward. You can choose to keep drawing near to Him even when you don’t understand what He’s doing. You can ask Him to help you live in a way that honors Him even when you would never have chosen the circumstances in which you’re being asked to do it.
That isn’t pretending the circumstances don’t matter.
It’s refusing to give them authority over everything else.
If letting go of the outcome is the part you’re struggling with, Letting Go: A Workbook on Trust and Control will help you identify where control is showing up, understand what’s underneath it, and separate what actually belongs to you from what you’re trying to manage.
I Know What It’s Like to Desperately Want Someone Else to Change
Years ago, when my first marriage was falling apart, I desperately wanted my husband to change. I prayed for it. I wanted his choices to change, the situation to change, and more than anything, the ending to change.
It didn’t.
My marriage ended.
Just the other day I found myself thinking about how easily that experience could have sent my life in a very different direction. I could have become an angry, bitter woman. I could have allowed what someone else did to reshape the way I saw myself, other people, marriage, or even God.
I’m not saying I stood at some dramatic crossroads and nobly chose a better path. I was devastated, and there was plenty I had to work through.
But by God’s grace—and, frankly, my own ridiculous determination to draw as close to Him as I possibly could—I started moving in a different direction.
The circumstances didn’t change. God changed me in the midst of them.
He did work in me that had nothing to do with pretending what happened was okay. He wasn’t asking me to call something good that wasn’t good. Instead, He began showing me that what happened to me did not have to determine what happened inside me.
I could acknowledge the hurt without carrying bitterness into the rest of my life. Someone else’s choices did not have to determine my identity. Losing the future I thought I was going to have did not mean I had to lose my hope too.
There was another path available to me, and by the grace of God, that’s the path I kept walking.
It has led to life and hope and joy and an internal peace I could not have imagined when everything first fell apart.
I couldn’t control what my husband chose. But his choices didn’t get to decide who I became.
Stop Waiting for Life to Change Before You Start Living
I think too many of us are waiting.
We’re waiting for the situation to resolve before we’ll allow ourselves to have peace. We’re waiting for another person to change before we’ll stop thinking about what they’re doing. We’re waiting for the answer before we move forward, for the uncertainty to end before we enjoy the life happening right in front of us, or for life to become what we wanted before we’re willing to call it good again.
But what if it doesn’t change?
I don’t ask that to be pessimistic. I ask because sometimes it doesn’t.
Some losses cannot be reversed. Some people never become who we hoped they would become. Some relationships remain complicated. Some physical limitations stay. Some prayers are answered differently than we wanted, and some questions remain unanswered for a very long time.
We cannot make our willingness to fully live—and to faithfully honor God with the life we have—dependent upon eventually getting the life we wanted.
Because the goal isn’t merely to survive our circumstances or squeeze some happiness out of life in spite of them. As followers of Jesus, we have the opportunity to honor God right in the middle of a story we would never have written for ourselves.
That’s a very different kind of victory.
Romans 5:3–5 reminds us that even suffering can produce perseverance, character and hope.
Biblical victory was never a promise that nothing difficult would happen to us. Jesus was pretty explicit about that. Victory is being able to stand in the middle of a life we cannot completely control and know that our circumstances do not get the final word.
They don’t get to decide who God is or what we believe about Him. They don’t get to dictate who we become. And they don’t automatically get to take every ounce of joy, hope, purpose, beauty, laughter, love, and goodness that is still available to us today.
We can grieve something and still laugh. We can wish something were different and still enjoy what is good. We can pray desperately for change and still live faithfully while we wait. We can have unanswered questions and still have peace. We can be deeply disappointed in our circumstances and deeply confident in God at the very same time.
We do not have to wait for life to become what we wanted before we begin living in a way that honors God with what we have.
Laura Story’s When God Doesn’t Fix It explores this same tension—what faith looks like when life doesn’t turn out the way we hoped. If this is something you’re walking through right now, you may want to check it out.
Maybe We Need a Bigger Definition of Victory
Keep asking God to change the things you want Him to change. I will too.
Ask Him to heal. Restore. Provide. Open doors. Change hearts. Bring answers. Do what only He can do.
But maybe our prayers shouldn’t end there.
Maybe we also pray:
God, how do You want to change me in this?
Show me what I can’t see. Expose what doesn’t belong. Help me release what I’m carrying. Give me courage for what is mine to do. Teach me to trust You with what isn’t. Show me how I can honor You right here, even in the middle of this mess.
And don’t let me become so consumed with waiting for my circumstances to change that I miss what You want to do in me—or the life You’re giving me right now.
Maybe the circumstances will change. Maybe they won’t. But either way, getting what you want isn’t the only way to win.
So maybe this week, instead of only asking God to change what’s happening around you, ask Him a different question:
God, how do You want to change me in this?
Then give Him enough room to answer.