Blog #13: Is God Disappointed in Me?

Category: Question * 5 min read

It's the question under the question. The one you don't say in church but think on the drive home.

You don't ask it out loud because you already know what people would say. They would reassure you. They would quote a verse. They would mean well. And none of it would touch the actual place the question lives.

Because the question isn't really theological. It's intimate.

It's the question that rises up when you lose your temper at your child and catch yourself wondering if God saw it. When you skip church because you are too tired and then feel guilty for the reason, not the absence. When you haven't prayed in a while and don't know how to start again without acknowledging that you stopped. When you look at the gap between who you wanted to be by now and who you actually are, and you wonder who is keeping score.

That's the question. Not is God disappointed in me in some abstract theological sense. But am I the kind of person God shakes His head at when He thinks about me.

I want to sit with something carefully here.

The voice that tells you God is disappointed in you — whose voice is that, actually? Where did you first hear it?

For a lot of us, it did not come from God. It came from a parent whose approval had conditions. A church that measured spiritual maturity by performance. A season when we failed in a visible way and were made to feel the weight of it for years. A culture that trained us to believe that love must be earned and that slipping means starting over from zero.

Those voices installed themselves in our heads early, and we learned to speak to ourselves in their cadence. We learned to expect disappointment. We learned to brace for it. And eventually we projected that voice onto God, because that was the only voice we knew how to hear from an authority figure.

But that voice is not God. It is a recording.

And many of us have spent years listening to the recording and calling it prayer.

Here is what I have come to believe, slowly, over more years than I want to admit.

What God does with our failure is not what we fear He does with our failure.

We fear a tallying. A ledger. A quiet head-shake from a long distance away. We fear being seen at our worst and remembered for it. We fear that grace has a limit and that we have probably found it.

But every time Scripture shows us God responding to someone in their failure — not their theoretical failure, not their failure in parables, but their actual, specific, named failure — something else happens.

He goes toward them. Not away.

He feeds them. Asks them questions. Cooks breakfast on a beach for the man who denied Him three times. Meets the woman at the well who is on her sixth relationship and has a conversation with her that changes her life. Lets the one who betrayed Him kiss Him on the cheek without striking him dead.

That is not the behavior of a disappointed God. That is the behavior of a God who knew what you were before you knew it about yourself and came anyway.

This does not mean our failures don't matter. They matter. They shape us and they shape the people around us, and the real work of a spiritual life is the slow reckoning with what we have done and left undone.

But reckoning is not shame. And formation is not punishment.

The God who is actually there is not tapping His foot waiting for you to get your act together. He is not keeping a file. He is not counting the days since you last prayed with the same energy the enemy uses to count them.

He is closer than the voice in your head that says otherwise. He has been this whole time.

Why is it so hard for us to see ourselves the way our Father sees us?

We offer unconditional love to the people we love. Our children. Our parents. Our closest friends. We love them through the hard seasons, the mistakes, the repeated versions of the same mistake. We don't keep a ledger on them. We wouldn't know how to.

But somehow we cannot conceive that our Father — Abba — offers that same love to us.

Imagine this. You are sitting on your front porch and your phone rings. It's someone you love. A child. A sibling. A parent. Your closest friend. And they say, I need you. Can you come now.

Do you pause and replay every time they let you down? Every missed call, every hard word, every disappointment? Do you decide whether they have earned your response this time?

Of course you don't. You go.

But knowingly or not, those are the conditions we imagine our Father uses when we turn toward Him. We picture Him doing what we would never do to the people we love. We picture Him keeping score we would never keep. We picture Him hesitating when we are the ones who came running.

Your loved one is flawed. You are flawed. You still love them without qualification, and the love our Father extends is no smaller than the love He placed in you to give.

He is not waiting for you to be perfect, any more than you are waiting for your loved ones to be perfect. Yes, there is room for growth — there always is. But that is not how He sees you. That is not how He loves you. That is not why He sent His Son for you.

Whatever is heavy, you can bring it. The porch light is already on. He has been waiting for the call.

If something here resonated with you, The Direction Series was written for exactly where you are. I would love to invite you in — you can find it at directionseries.com.

The Porchlight is on. 🔆
© 2025 Wylette P. Tillman | Polaris Press LLC