God Doesn’t Always Take Away the Trial. Instead, He Joins You in It.

A sister asked if I’d speak at our Ladies’ Trauma Reboot Retreat from the perspective of one of the Trauma Reboot Truths. I said yes and chose Truth #12: God Doesn’t Always Take Away the Trial. Instead, He Joins You in It. Be a fly on the wall as I share how the Lord was with me during my painful marriage journey. For my readers, you can follow along below.

I remember the day. Another day my Bible was wet with tears that I could barely read the words on the page my body and face were slumped over. Groans of great grief sprang from me and though filled with a pain that cut as deep as a chasm, I was grateful. I was grateful for the testimony of Job. I was thankful that he had been chosen to walk through a trial that brought such anguish and despair of heart. A trial that caused unfathomable loss that left him and those around him speechless for days. And all I could mutter was “Job gets it. Job gets it.” In that moment, I felt so seen by the Lord. So thankful that He would have a saint go before me who I could identify with – who could identify with the depth of my grief and what I thought had been lost – my life, my hope, my marriage, my husband, and motherhood.

There was a time in my life I would have chosen numbness. Because in my mind it was better not to feel than to feel this. But I had learned my lesson that it is always better to feel. Always better to expose the wound and let every sting of alcohol hit it because that was the only way it would ever be healed. If you’re like how I was, then I know you hate feeling. Throw me to a sudden death of sensation, give me a pill that could erase every sensitivity – I want to be numb. I’d rather not feel.

But grief was my constant companion. It went with me to bed. It was there when I woke. And it tagged along throughout my day. I could not escape. At times I would wake up and think that this had been a nightmare. But it wasn’t. It was my life. A lifetime movie playing out before my eyes, and there was nothing I could do to get the scenes to stop rolling. It felt cruel. Unusual. And had I not known God, I would have surely thought I was abandoned and forsaken.

But He met me. Right there in my grief. Right there in my anguish. Right there in my loss that left me without words and instead wet windows once called eyes that dreamed. Though never dreamed of this.

And how did He meet me? He met me with a tender love that had the precision of a surgeon. I had chosen this wound. And He was going to use it to show me that I and it could be healed. It wasn’t quick. It was minutes upon minutes, days upon days, weeks upon weeks, and months upon months that I would have to live with the reality called my life. But can I tell you that at every turn, God got down on the floor I could not get up from with me. That He caught my tears and bottled them up because they were precious to Him. I was close to God because I needed Him like I needed my breath. I knew He was the only life support that could sustain me through this trial. And like David, days upon nights my food were my tears and His truth, as my enemy taunted me, where is your God now (Psalm 42:3)?

I remember one time my pastor had told us to imagine that just on the other side of the wall of our sanctuary, our Lord was praying for us. Because He was. Hebrews 7:25 declares that He always lives to make intercession for the saints. Somehow imagining His physical body bent over in fervent prayer for me was a comfort like nothing else could soothe. 

And I knew that He got it too. When I was first hit with a discovery that flipped my world upside down, I remembered my Savior’s anguished cry in the garden. “Father, if it be thy will, will you take this cup from me?” I remember the day a spiritual mother called and told me she had prayed if He would take my cup from me too. She said in a clear voice He responded back, “I will not. I will not.” Me and my Savior, sentenced to a cup we did not want to drink yet somehow Yahweh’s truth overrode the facts of our situation and the inconsolableness of our emotions – we were not forsaken. Just chosen to do a hard thing. Me, because of my sin. And Yeshua, because of mine and yours.

I made it to the other side of that trial. I’m now standing. I’m now stronger. Just the other day me and some ladies were walking through a chapter in The Well-Watered Woman and she said this about ironwood trees that found stability along the coast of sandy beaches where constant waves beat against them: “It turned out that the constant blowing of the wind and the crashing of the waves hadn’t just exposed the roots; the elements had made them stronger.” She went on to say that “the waves of life crash over us, too. They expose our roots – where our identity really stems from. Our core beliefs – whether true or false – become stronger and more fortified through the storms of life.”

I thought that was so powerful because it reminded me how I was able to remain in what seemed unbearable. It was what I believed – Who I believed God was and what I believed God had spoken to me. These were the anchors that kept me tied as that storm threw me, my emotions, my will, and my resolve to and fro. When I wanted to run. When I felt hopeless. The truth about Yahweh’s nature and the authority in which He spoke, commanded me to stop and hope again.

Now don’t get me wrong. I had all the same questions, doubts, fears, and frustrations of every other psalmist who had strummed our pain with their fingers.

• Why Lord, why? I had so many questions of why. Why did this happen? Why didn’t you show me sooner? Why didn’t you intervene? Why does she get to take everything from me? Why must I bear this pain? 

• How long Lord, how long? My eyes and heart were restless with endless tears and grief and I wondered when I’d wake up and the pain would be ceased. I wondered when his love would return to me – if it would even return. I wondered how long I had to keep pursuing and loving someone who was fleeing me and loving another.

• Where are you, Lord? So many people wonder where God is in the middle of their trial. I didn’t have this as an inner battle, but it was an attack launched against me. It was as if the enemy was constantly jeering at and taunting me with the words “Where is your God, now?” Heaping the humiliation from man upon me that there must be something unlovable and insufficient about her because look, look at her life now.

Some people have little to no concept of God as they are hit with the storms of life. Though, and thankfully so, some gain knowledge of and experience with Him as they do. While many others are lost at sea with nothing to stabilize their feet and rationalize their feelings. I’m grateful to have had some depth of relationship with God before He revealed to me that I would be taking a walk in His shoes of abandonment and betrayal. And a core belief that rooted me then and still roots me today is this: There is no other god.

Don’t get me wrong – I was an idolater for sure. Yahweh had exposed the idolatry in my heart of clinging to other things – even good things He had provided – instead of Him and properly placing all things and people where they needed to be. Like a few months before my husband shared his uncertainty of wanting to be married, Yahweh removed a friend whose presence and affection I had misplaced in my life. I remember a mutual friend who complained of her significant other and my now ex-husband always spending time together and having very little for us. In self-protection, I had calloused my heart towards feeling the absence of him and sought the companionship I would have desired from my spouse in my friend instead. I remember proudly saying in my heart, “Hmph, I don’t care if he’s not around, I have Julia.” Instead of fighting for and praying for my husband and marriage in those early days, I just succumbed to what was and found ways to appease the loneliness and abandonment that I felt before I knew that that was in fact what was happening.

But like Isaiah, it was in my friend’s removal that I looked up and saw God. Who I had abandoned in many ways like I had felt my husband was abandoning me. And there were many other hidden gods the Lord would soon expose as He used what I had chosen – my marriage, to humble and prune me so that He could make me new. Intellectually and theologically, I knew there were no other gods. But now the Lord would experientially teach me that He would have no other gods before Him (certainly this trial wasn’t the last time He’s taught me that lesson and while I’m still breathing, I’m sure I will experientially learn it again).

Yahweh had given me a word to seek reconciliation and not divorce. And though everything about my circumstances and inner turmoil tested His ask, I felt like Peter when Yeshua asked if he and the disciples would abandon ship too – “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.” I knew that God was God. And even if He was asking a hard thing, there would be no walking away from His beckoning call to become like Him and love like Him. So, who I knew Him to be and what I was constantly being exhorted at every turn by Him to do, was what I heeded and clung to until this too had passed.

There were many other roots that held me during this storm too. Like the character of God. I knew that He was good. So even though this didn’t feel good, didn’t look good, and the prospects of reconciliation didn’t appear good, I knew He would be and was good to me all throughout this testing and trying by fire.

In my lamenting of why Lord, how long Lord, and where are you Lord, I found a good Dad. I remember reading in the Word where the Lord would call people to lament, to mourn, to wail. Often over their sin and the sin of their people and land. I had never known what those words meant from theory to practice until this season of my life. And lament I did. Mourn I did. Wail I did. But God comforted and chided me in the measure in which I needed both. And this is what good dads do. They pick us up and hold us when we need to be held. And they sit us down and discipline us when we need to be corrected. Lamenting was a way in which God allowed me to express my anguish and for Him to meet me right in the midst of it.

I found in the despair and destruction of my life as I had known it, the most essential thing I needed was not my marriage reconciled, not my husband’s love returned to me, and not my heart dancing with the delight of new love. No, the most essential thing I needed was God. I needed His presence, His Word, His grace, and He offered them all freely. It was in the upheaval of my comforting dream and appeasements that I discovered this profound truth and never want to leave it again.

During that season, I remember passing a sign on the highway that read “We had to do it.” It was if a rhema word from heaven hit me, and I knew it was the Father, Son, and Spirit speaking to me. This upending and overturning of my marriage and idols were necessary. This would be the vehicle by which the Lord restructured my priorities, rebuilt my identity, and restored my purpose. It was a lot of body work. I had been in a collision. But He was my Repairer of Breaches and Broken Walls. He was God. God alone. He was good. Good alone. He didn’t take away my trial. He joined me in it.

He was God. God alone. He was good. Good alone. He didn’t take away my trial. He joined me in it.

When our Trauma Reboot Retreat had been put back on the schedule for this April, and I received the ask to speak again, I knew my only response must still be yes. Looking at my April calendar, I wondered where I would have the time to sit, ponder, and write what I would share with you from this Trauma Reboot Truth: “God doesn’t always take away the trial. Instead, He joins you in it.” God again came alongside me by helping me pen these words and doing so in the last quarter. This past week I received a few nuggets that steered the ending of what I began writing on Sunday and they were fitting additions to share with you in this message.

The first was a guide that walks you through how to lament. Whether for you or a friend who needs to know how to emote and grieve well that you might maintain your composure and posture, stay rooted, and experience healing, this little guide will help you. During my marriage by fire season, the pregnancy center where I worked had a board member come to one of our staff devotions; and he taught us how to use the Psalms to write our own lamentation. It was good to be reminded of that this past week when a coworker printed this handout and left it on the table. You all may tell Shelly thank you.

The second was an article one of my brothers we affectionately call Papa Paul shared with us for a change of pace from our typical Wednesday staff devotion – the Lord knows and moves all things. It’s a lengthy but good word about the goodness of God. To wrap up I want to read to you just the last section:

God of All Goodness

Scott Hubbard I Desiring God I April 23, 2025

‘God Is My Good’

When we say that God works our good, we look by faith to the day when the goodness present in our pain will be revealed. But in the meantime, the same God who gives me good and works my good is my good. “I say to the Lord, ‘You are my Lord; I have no good apart from you” (Psalm 16:2).

One of the most piercing, most beautiful affirmations of the goodness God is comes near the end of Psalm 73. The path to that place was a torturous one for Asaph the psalmist: For many bitter days, he could see only the good things others had that he didn’t — good things he imagined that God reserved only for righteous men like him. God did not seem good.

But then Asaph “went into the sanctuary of God” and saw what he had missed (Psalm 73:17). His hands, which held so few gifts, were nevertheless held by God: “I am continually with you; you hold my right hand; you guide me with your counsel, and afterward you will receive me to glory” (Psalm 73:23–24). In a moment, heaven became inhabited again by the God of surprising, surpassing goodness (Psalm 73:25).

And in the same moment, his idea of good underwent a radical change: “For me it is good to be near God” (Psalm 73:28). Before, he would have finished that sentence in any number of ways: “For me it is good to have comfort and plenty, respect and good prospects.” And so our own hearts have found a thousand ways to finish that sentence without reference to God. But when we see the hand that holds ours — a hand now bearing scars — and when we hear the counsel he gives and sense the glory he is, we cannot finish the sentence except as Asaph does: “For me it is good to be near God.”

God, the good Father, good Son, and good Spirit. God, the fountain from whom every gift flows. God, the one who created us to commune with him and redeemed us to rejoice in him. God, the definition of good and the one without whom nothing is good. Come valley, come darkness, come lack, come loss — if we get more of God, we have more good than all the earth has to offer besides (Psalm 73:25).

The day is coming when we will enjoy every good gift in a world made new. But for now, God alone knows which good gifts will lead us toward him and which will take us from him. And so he arranges, good God that he is, the perfect amount of pleasure and pain to keep us near him, show us more of him, and chase us home to him.