God Meets You in the Messy

He is never looking for perfection.

God is not waiting for you to get it together before He draws near to you. He’s not standing at a distance until your faith is tidy, your emotions are managed, and your life is presentable. He already solved the perfection problem, once and for all, when He sent Jesus, the only perfect One, to take our place and redeem us back to Himself.

What God wants from you is your heart.

Not performance. Not hustle. Not striving.

Your honest, bruised, sometimes angry, still showing up, heart.

This is what I learned during the messiest years of my life.

The life I expected

In 1999 I married a preacher. I was so in love and so excited.

I walked into that marriage with my whole heart and a picture in my mind of what our life would be like, expecting to have a flourishing ministry together, sharing the gospel and helping hurting people find the Lord.

I wanted that life desperately, and asked God for it.

However, I may have been more in love with the idea than reality because that was not the life I lived.

Instead, I spent eleven years being made to feel like I was never enough. Not doing enough. Not being enough. Not saying the right things. Whenever something went wrong, I learned to expect that it was something I had done wrong or not well enough.

At the time, I couldn’t put my finger on why I felt that way. As a high-performer, I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t good enough. Publicly, I heard words that said I was enough. Privately, it was a completely different story.

We moved ten times in ten years, and with each move I packed up our home, settled our four children during those last several moves, and tried again to be whatever version of me might finally be enough.

Slowly and quietly, I lost sight of the woman God made me to be. I confused the voice of constant criticism and doubt with the voice of truth. When it became obvious that the marriage was ending and I was told, essentially, that the problem had been me all along, I felt like something that was used up and thrown away.

My heart was broken into a million pieces.

I was stuck 1,000 miles away from where my roots were, in a place where I felt like an alien.

The courtroom

The divorce took me somewhere I never imagined I’d be.

Inside a courtroom, listening to a version of myself I did not recognize. Accusations about my mothering, the one thing I had poured every waking day into for the last eight years. I sat there, dumbfounded, with no idea what to do or say. I felt like I was in a movie.

But I knew one thing about myself, and held onto it tightly. I would not lie. I would only tell the truth and trust God with whatever the truth could not immediately fix.

Things were not immediately fixed.

I had been a stay-at-home wife and mother for eleven years. When the marriage ended, I had no job, no house, no bank account, and no money of my own. I had a biology degree from eleven years earlier that I had no idea what to do with.

When that first custody decision was made, I was given every other weekend and one three-hour evening a week with the four children I had raised every single day of their lives.

Devastated was not a big enough word for how I felt.

I remember the shock in my body. I remember thinking, “God, where are You? I told the truth. I did the right thing. How can this be the outcome?”

What came next was a ten-year custody battle, in and out of the courtroom a total of eight times.

What God did in the wilderness

Those first four years could have destroyed me. They nearly did, some days. But looking back, I can see now what I could not see then.

God was not absent in that wilderness. He was building.

With almost nothing to my name and the unwavering support of very close family members, I put myself through graphic design school. I found a good job. I bought my first home, mine, with my name on it, a place where my children had rooms waiting for them.

Piece by piece, God rebuilt what had been dismantled, and He rebuilt me along with it.

My identity shifted from what it was to what it was supposed to be all along. God’s strong and beautiful daughter.

After four years, I was able to go back to court and file for custody. This time, I was awarded sole legal and sole physical custody of all four of my children.

I cannot describe that joy. My children were finally home.

Even then, I made a choice that I believe honors God to this day. I was fair with their father’s time, because my children didn’t need another parent keeping score. They needed to see what grace looks like with skin on.

I’ve spent the last sixteen years doing my best to live the truth in front of them, trusting God with how they see me, one ordinary faithful day at a time. That is a trust I have had to hand back to God every single morning.

Angry at God

Here’s the messy part of my messy story.

I felt angry with God. So confused and misplaced. Bitter and rebellious.

I didn’t understand why He didn’t save my marriage. Why He didn’t intervene sooner. Why the road had to be so very long.

There were moments when my prayers were more question than praise, and my faith felt like it was hanging by a thread.

There were times when I rebelled against all that I stood for and felt so lost.

But this is what I learned in those messy moments. God can handle my anger. He is not offended by my confusion, questions, or even rebellion. And He certainly does not withdraw from my mess.

Psalm 34:18 says, “The LORD is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit” (ESV).

Near.

Not near to the beautifully composed or near to the women with all the answers. Near to the broken ones.

I had every human reason to become bitter by what I experienced during those 20+ years. I could have walked away from my faith entirely, and honestly, some people would have understood.

But God kept meeting me in the middle of it, not because I performed well, but because His love for me was never conditioned on my performance in the first place.

“God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (Romans 5:8 ESV).

Christ came while we were all still a hot mess.

So despite everything I still don’t understand, I’ve made my decision, and I remake it every morning:

I will trust God in all things. I will keep seeking Him, and I will keep living for Him according to His Word.

Not because my story got easy, but because He never once left it.

Maybe your mess looks different from mine. A marriage that isn’t what you prayed for. A season of loss. A faith that feels more like questions than certainty. A quiet fear that you’ve been too angry, too inconsistent, too broken for God to want anything to do with you.

Listen. He is not looking for your perfect. He just wants your honestly given heart and desire to spend real time with Him, exactly as you are.

Come messy. Come angry if that’s what’s true for you today. Come with nothing but questions.

He will meet you there.

I am living proof.

With love and faith,
Rachel

If any part of this story is your story too, I’d be honored if you’d reply or leave a comment. I read every one, and I pray for the women who share. Much love.