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Photo: ©Pollyanna Ventura from Getty Images Signature via Canva.com
The problem is not that you want good things. The Bible celebrates godly desires. The problem is insisting that the fulfillment of those desires is the condition for your peace. When you become convinced that your circumstantial relief is the only path to spiritual rest, you have stepped onto a treadmill of futility. You run harder, faster, longer… and go nowhere. Yet the exhaustion convinces you that effort is working. If I just try harder, read more books, pray more intently, argue more persuasively, feel more guilt, or withdraw more stoically, maybe the situation will shift. But it doesn’t. And the more you push, the more disappointed you become.
That was the world Biff and Mable had lived in for more than a decade. Two well-meaning Christians trapped in a cycle that was killing their hope and calcifying their souls. Their marriage had become a predictable, unbreakable loop. Biff would shut down; Mable would ramp up. She exploded; he evaporated. It was the same collision every time, as predictable as the sunrise. And though neither of them would have used the phrase unchangeable situation, that is precisely what they were living in. And like most Christians in unchangeable circumstances, they saw no way out except through the other person’s transformation.
When they finally came to counseling, their postures said everything. Mable leaned forward, ready to fix Biff. Biff leaned back, ready to disappear. Their strategy was to try one more attempt at self-salvation. They hoped counseling would serve as a pressure valve, forcing the other person to behave. They wanted me to intervene as a referee, not a shepherd. They didn’t want discipleship; they wanted a miracle. After letting them talk for a while—talking that wasn’t so much communication as it was controlled combat—I finally paused the conversation and told them a simple truth: “Your plan isn’t working, and it will never work.”
I described their dynamic as two locomotives on the same track, barreling toward each other at full speed. You could hear the metal screaming on the rails. They braced for the collision. It happened. Wreckage everywhere. Then, miraculously, the trains didn’t stay derailed. They limped back to the station, fueled up, and tried again tomorrow. Same train, same track, same wreck. Ten years. No wonder they were hopeless.
Mable’s face said everything. She was weary. Not from working too hard, but from hoping too hard. Her expectations had become tyrannical. She wanted a godly husband. She wanted a marriage that didn’t always feel like a tug-of-war between silence and shouting. And she believed that these were righteous desires, which they were. But her righteous desires had become ruling desires, the engine driving her into Biff every time he disappointed her yet again. Few things in life sabotage the soul more efficiently than a godly desire turned into a god-like demand. That is the silent slope Mable had slid down. She didn’t want sin. She wanted good. But her soul had quietly rewritten the storyline of her life: “I will be at peace when my husband changes. I will rest when my marriage is fixed. I will be free when I get what I want.”
She didn’t see the danger because her desires were biblically correct. But desires don’t have to be evil to become idolatrous. You can idolize something God commands. You can worship something God affirms. The test is simple: Does its absence destroy your peace? What Mable couldn’t grasp was this: Your circumstances don’t have to change for God to change you. This was the same lesson Paul learned in 2 Corinthians 1. He wrote, “We were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself… But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God, who raises the dead.” Paul wasn’t embarrassed by hardship. He saw divine strategy in it. The Lord had engineered his inability to force him out of self-sufficiency. God scheduled weakness as a mercy, but most Christians don’t see weakness that way. We see weakness as failure. God sees weakness as formation.
What Mable thought was a marriage problem was actually a trust problem. She didn’t trust the Lord with her marriage because she didn’t trust Him with her heart. Her hope was tethered to Biff. And when your hope is tethered to a fallen human, you will always swing between anxiety and anger. That’s what she was living in. When I told Mable to stop reading her stack of “fix your anger” books, she looked confused. I could have told her how to manage anger. I could have given her tools, techniques, and triggers to watch for. I could have shown her how to count to ten, breathe deeply, journal more, pray more, and memorize scripture about patience. But all of that would have been a side quest, not a cure.
Mable wasn’t angry because Biff was passive. She was angry because she believed God owed her a different husband. She wouldn’t have said it that way, but her reactions revealed it. Any expectation that becomes a condition for your joy is a statement about God: “You are not enough for me unless You give me what I want.” Once a believer slips into that posture, bitterness is certain to follow. Maybe not immediately. Maybe not loudly. But inevitably. This is what makes marital disappointment so uniquely painful. If a person becomes disabled from an accident, they eventually come to terms with the permanence of their condition. Human beings tend to adjust better to unchangeable suffering than to maybe-changeable suffering. You can grieve finality. But hope that refuses to die becomes torment.
Mable’s anguish came from the possibility of change. Her husband could become a godly man, and she was right to desire it. But the fact that it was possible kept her chained to the belief that it was inevitable. And the more she fixated on his potential, the more enslaved she became to his failures. That’s why I told her, “You’re angry because you won’t accept the husband you actually have.” I wasn’t blaming her. I was trying to rescue her from the emotional slavery that conditional hope always creates. Her husband may never change. Her marriage may never feel tender or sweet. He may never shepherd the home. But that reality didn’t disqualify her from joy. It simply forced her hand: Would she root her joy in God or in her husband?
That is the question every Christian must face when trapped in an unchangeable situation. The human heart can shoulder remarkable pain, but uncertainty is another story. That kind of lingering “maybe” slowly exhausts the soul. This is exactly where Biff and Mable were living. They were caught in that murky space where hope and despair live together like unwelcome roommates. They believed God could change their marriage, but the absence of visible progress made them feel like God was withholding something they deserved. Their desire wasn’t sinful. Their demand was deadly, which is why Paul warned the Corinthians that they were losing heart by fixating on what they could see. Their entire emotional world was tethered to visible circumstances. That is exactly what happened to Biff and Mable.
Their eyes stayed glued to their spouse’s failures and the stagnant patterns that had hardened into habit. Every day felt like one more announcement that nothing had changed. Every silence from Biff felt like another indictment. Every raised voice from Mable felt like another crack in the foundation. Their despair wasn’t irrational. They were simply interpreting reality through the wrong lens. When your gaze settles exclusively on the outer nature of things, your circumstances begin to dictate your theology rather than God’s character informing your interpretation of them.
The writer of Hebrews highlighted men and women who endured impossible situations because they saw what was invisible. Their lives were dominated by a God-centered vision that refused to bow to earthly discouragement. They suffered torture, loss, persecution, fire, danger, and death, yet they persevered because they anchored their hearts in the promise of a better life. Their gaze was fixed upward rather than outward. Moses endured Pharaoh and Israel’s grumbling because he “saw Him who is invisible.” Without this unseen vision of God, Moses would have collapsed under the weight of his calling.
In the same way, every believer who lacks an “invisible vision” will eventually interpret God through the lens of discouragement, rather than interpreting discouragement through the unshakable Word of God. This is why it felt natural for Biff to shut down. He was interpreting his entire world through what he could see, and nothing he saw offered hope. And this is why Mable exploded. She stared at her circumstances and concluded that the only way to survive was to seize control. They weren’t wrong in what they observed; they were simply blind to what they could not see. The visible world made them feel like God was indifferent or absent. They didn’t realize their frustration came from living by sight rather than by faith.
Once you believe the visible is all there is, your circumstances become your god. That subtle shift explains so much about the anger beneath the surface of their marriage. Anger always reveals how we view the Author of our story. Biff’s quiet withdrawal was just as loud as Mable’s yelling. His silence said, “I cannot bear this story; therefore, I refuse to participate.” Mable’s volume said, “I refuse to accept this story; therefore, I will force it into something else.” Both reactions were forms of anger. One was external, and the other was internal, but both were rooted in a deep disagreement with God’s providential pen. Each spouse was trying to control the narrative because neither believed that God was good in what He had written.
When someone begins to insist that circumstances must change for life to be livable, pride is always lurking in the shadows. Pride doesn’t always look like arrogance. Sometimes it looks like wounded self-reliance—the belief that “I know what must happen, and God does not seem to be cooperating.” James called this pride, and he warned that God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble. Many believers imagine pride only in its flamboyant forms, but Scripture describes pride far more broadly. It includes any internal pressure to have God write the story differently. That kind of self-exaltation put Biff and Mable on a collision course with divine resistance. Their conflict with each other was merely the surface. Beneath the visible tension was a deeper relational collision with God Himself. They felt stuck because He opposed their self-reliant plans.
This is the danger many Christians fall into: believing that biblical desires automatically guarantee biblical outcomes. But that isn’t how God works. Jesus wanted to live, but His Father wrote a different narrative. Paul wanted the thorn removed, but God refused. Jeremiah wanted relief, but he was appointed to a ministry of weeping. When we forget that God reserves the right to withhold even righteous desires, bitterness becomes a natural reaction. Some of the most spiritually mature saints in Scripture lived lives marked by disappointment, and yet they flourished because their hope wasn’t tethered to outcomes.
Biff and Mable were so consumed with what they wanted that they couldn’t recognize what God was doing. Their frustrations felt rooted in marriage, but in reality, they stemmed from misplaced hope. Instead of seeing themselves as pilgrims traveling through a world of thorns and thistles, they were behaving as if God owed them comfort, predictability, ease, and relational harmony. Neither considered the possibility that God was using each other as instruments of sanctification, chiseling away the self-reliance neither wanted to acknowledge. Their marriage became a crucible, not because God was punishing them, but because God was forming them. He does His deepest work in places we would never choose. That is why the Lord left some of Israel’s enemies in the land, so Israel would learn to fight by faith. That is why He refused to remove Paul’s thorn to perfect Paul’s dependence. That is why He tested Abraham, wrestled Jacob, afflicted Job, disciplined David, and pruned the apostles.
If Biff and Mable were going to experience inner renewal, they would have to make a volitional shift in their thinking. They would have to stop expecting visible change and start trusting invisible purposes. This is the turning point for every believer in an unchangeable situation. Until you can say, “Even if nothing changes, Christ is sufficient,” you will live in emotional bondage. But once that confession becomes genuine, no longer forced, but embraced, you begin seeing your circumstances through eternal eyes. Suddenly, the story is no longer about your marriage changing but about you changing. The problem is no longer your spouse’s stubbornness but your own spiritual vision.
The narrative shifts from “my life is wasting away” to “my inner man is being renewed day by day.” And once Christ becomes central, unchangeable situations become bearable, not because the pain disappears but because God becomes more precious than the relief you long for. That is what Biff and Mable needed. It’s what every Christian needs. Faith is not the power to change your circumstances. Faith is the power to trust God when He doesn’t change them.
If your situation is unchangeable, or has been unchanging for so long that your heart feels threadbare, you must slow down and allow the Spirit to meet you in this moment. God is not indifferent to your pain. But He is also not obligated to fulfill your expectations, even when those expectations align with Scripture. The Lord often writes chapters we would never choose, but He never wastes the ink. This is where your battle lies: not simply in the difficulty of your circumstances, but in what you believe about the Author of your circumstances.
Before you rush into another day of frustration, hoping your spouse, child, parent, boss, church, or life finally shifts into something bearable, pause and answer these diagnostic questions with brutal honesty. These are not intellectual exercises. They are spiritual X-rays meant to expose the expectations, idols, resentments, or misplaced hopes that keep you stuck.
Take time to reflect on these questions. Write your answers. Pray over them. Invite someone you trust to speak into them. The Spirit does His deepest work not when circumstances shift, but when your internal posture bends in humility beneath God’s sovereign hand.
You cannot live the Christian life well if you are always looking horizontally, hoping people will finally become what you need them to be. Peace will not come when the situation improves. It will come when your heart bows. Some of the most profound transformations in Scripture occurred not because the situation changed, but because the person did.
- Joseph never got his family back the way he wanted.
- Moses never entered the Promised Land.
- Job never got his questions answered.
- Paul never lost his thorn.
- Jesus Himself prayed for another cup—but drank the one given to Him.
God does not always remove the burden. But He always offers Himself beneath the burden. And that is why your situation—hard as it feels—may be the most merciful thing God is doing in your life. He is not withholding good from you; He is revealing Himself to you in ways comfort never could. You will not see Him as “the God of all comfort” until you walk through real sorrow. You will not know His strength until yours collapses. You will not trust His sovereignty until you relinquish your illusion of control.
Your situation may not change tomorrow, or ever. But you can. And if you do, you will discover a kind of quiet strength, a resilient joy, and an eternal perspective that the world cannot steal and circumstances cannot crush. The invisible God becomes visible to those who refuse to live by sight. Lift your eyes. Take your hands off the wheel. And give your heart back to the One who writes better endings than you could ever script. Faith is not demanding a different story. Faith is trusting the Author in the story He wrote.
Rick launched the Life Over Coffee global training network in 2008 to bring hope and help for you and others by creating resources that spark conversations for transformation. His primary responsibilities are resource creation and leadership development, which he does through speaking, writing, podcasting, and educating.
In 1990 he earned a BA in Theology and, in 1991, a BS in Education. In 1993, he received his ordination into Christian ministry, and in 2000 he graduated with an MA in Counseling from The Master’s University. In 2006 he was recognized as a Fellow of the Association of Certified Biblical Counselors (ACBC).
