There is something I have been noticing. It tends to surface after the prayers have been prayed, faith has been exercised, people have contended—and the ending still isn’t the one everyone asked for.

Eventually, someone starts looking for the variable. Maybe there wasn’t enough faith. Maybe doubt got in the way. Maybe someone didn’t believe hard enough.

I have heard enough variations of that idea to think it is worth naming. Somewhere along the way, some corners of the Church created an equation Scripture itself never gave us:

Desired outcome = sufficient faith.
Undesired outcome = insufficient faith.

To be fair, the equation did not appear from nowhere. Jesus tells us to believe when we pray. James warns about asking while doubting. Hebrews tells us that without faith it is impossible to please God. The Gospels even contain moments when Jesus directly confronts unbelief. Those passages matter. Faith matters. Unbelief matters.

I believe God hears us when we pray. I believe He draws near. I believe He heals, restores, delivers and intervenes. I believe we should ask boldly, contend earnestly and invite God to expose unbelief wherever it has taken root in us. But Scripture does not permit us to turn those truths into a formula.

There is a garden just outside Jerusalem where that formula falls apart.

The Cup Didn’t Pass

Jesus entered Gethsemane in anguish and prayed, “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me.”

Then He prayed again. And again. Luke tells us that His anguish intensified and that He prayed even more earnestly.

The cup did not pass.

Was the problem Jesus’ faith? Of course not. Jesus’ faith was perfect. And somehow, perfect faith looked like weakness that night. It looked like anguish, persistence, dependence and surrender:

“Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done.”

The unanswered request was not evidence of deficient faith. His persistence was faith. His surrender was faith. His trust in the Father while standing inside unbearable anguish was faith. That distinction matters.

Sometimes we treat surrender as the fine print beneath believing prayer—as though “Your will be done” is what we say when we are afraid to expect too much. Gethsemane suggests something very different.

Surrender itself is an expression of faith.

Prayer is worship because prayer acknowledges something fundamental: God is God, and I am not. He invites our participation. He teaches us, encourages us and empowers us. He tells us to ask. But partnership is not parity. God did not surrender His sovereignty when He invited us to pray.

When Faith Becomes About Us

This is where an inflated theology of faith can subtly shift the center of gravity. Faith stops being trust in God and begins becoming confidence in our ability to produce an outcome: my faith, my declaration, my certainty, my ability to receive.

Eventually, God begins looking less like Father and more like a mechanism: apply sufficient belief and receive the requested result.

But faith is not currency. God is not a genie. Grace is not wages for believing correctly.

Paul learned this when he repeatedly asked God to remove his thorn. The thorn remained. Christ answered, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Apparently grace can be sufficient even when the thorn remains.

Romans 8 tells us something similar. The Spirit helps us in our weakness, even when we do not know how to pray as we ought. Notice where grace enters the story—not after we overcome helplessness, but inside it.

Even the desperate father who cried, “I believe; help my unbelief!” discovered that Jesus was willing to meet a man whose faith and doubt somehow occupied the same sentence. Helplessness is not a disqualification from grace.

That should make us extraordinarily careful about placing additional weight on people who are already suffering. There is enough vulnerability in asking God for something we cannot fix ourselves. When the answer does not resemble what was prayed for, the Church should be very cautious before adding an indictment to the grief.

Same Faith. Different Outcomes.

Hebrews 11 makes that caution unavoidable. Some people, through faith, conquered kingdoms, escaped the sword and received back their dead. Others, through faith, were imprisoned, tortured, afflicted and killed.

Scripture commends them all. Same faith. Different endings.

Faith was never intended to function as a mechanism through which we control God. It is trust in God.

That is why the words of the three Hebrew exiles in Daniel remain so powerful. They believed God was able to deliver them from the furnace. And then came the words that kept faith from becoming entitlement:

“But if not…”

God is able. But if not, He is still God.

That is not unbelief. Sometimes it is one of the bravest expressions of faith available to us.

Don’t Put Their Faith on Trial

So ask. Believe. Contend. Keep praying when the answer has not come. Ask God to expose unbelief and deepen your trust. Believe that He can intervene in ways only He can.

But when someone else’s cup does not pass, resist the temptation to put their faith on trial.

Sometimes grace removes the thorn. Sometimes grace becomes sufficient while it remains. Sometimes what God is doing becomes clearer years later. And some answers may require eternity.

Romans 8 does not promise that we will understand everything that happens to us. It promises something larger: that God is at work even while creation groans.

Our faith is ultimately in the Lord—not our ability to secure the outcome we prayed for.

God is able. And even if not, He is still God.

Gethsemane led to a cross. And for a little while, the cross looked like the end of the story.

It wasn’t.

There are phrases you forget. Others hang around.

This one came from a leader two gigs ago. Years later, it still hasn’t left:

“An above-average series of unfortunate events.”

Interesting way to put it. Especially when you know what the “events” were.

My daughter had died.

Jubilee spent 393 days in the NICU. For more than a year, our family learned to live somewhere between home, work, church and a hospital room. Then she was gone, and we had to figure out how to live in a world that kept moving without her.

Money was tight. Really tight. I kept working. Kept functioning. I donated plasma on my lunch breaks for extra money until one day I nearly passed out afterward. Something inside me was running out of road, and I didn’t understand why.

I know more now.

Earlier this year, my spectrum results came in. Suddenly, parts of my life that had never quite made sense started talking to each other. The masking. The exhaustion. The mental real estate consumed by unresolved conflict. The invisible cost of navigating environments that seemed to cost other people almost nothing.

Then I looked back at that season: bereavement, financial pressure, neurodivergent burnout. All stacked on top of each other before I even had the language to understand why my own wiring made some of that weight so costly to carry.

So, sure. “Unfortunate events.” Might as well call a hurricane an above-average amount of wind and rain.

I don’t believe that leader was trying to be cruel. I can’t know everything behind the words. But intent isn’t really why the phrase stayed with me. It stayed because language can be technically defensible and still be painfully inadequate for the human being standing underneath it.

That’s where I’ve landed on something I wish more leaders understood:

Context isn’t the enemy of accountability.

I haven’t always communicated as clearly as I could have, and I certainly haven’t navigated every professional situation perfectly. Being neurodivergent doesn’t absolve me of responsibility. Neither does grief. But context isn’t an escape hatch from accountability. Understanding someone more fully makes accountability more accurate.

If somebody who was once engaged suddenly isn’t, get curious. If performance changes after catastrophic loss, get curious. If someone trusts you enough to disclose a disability, get curious.

Not “What’s wrong with this person?” but “What’s happening to this person?”

I’ve started calling that holy curiosity.

There was real kindness during Jubilee’s 393 days. Coworkers gave their time. People helped me get to the NICU. My employer gave our family flexibility during an impossible season. Distance has helped me appreciate those things more, not less.

I’m also a words-of-affirmation person. Looking back, I can see times when I was waiting for care to arrive in the language I understood best while missing some of the ways people were already speaking it. That’s mine to own.

But kindness and understanding aren’t necessarily the same thing. The fairest way I know to say it is this: I received more kindness than I knew how to appreciate at the time, but less intentional understanding than I needed.

We also understand neurodivergence differently than we did when I was growing up. People like me can make it through school, relationships and entire careers without understanding why seemingly ordinary environments exact such an extraordinary internal cost.

We know more now. That should make us more curious now.

We talk about grace. Truth. Mercy. Restoration. Bearing burdens. Eventually those words have to clock in. They have to survive somebody’s grief affecting performance, somebody’s disability complicating communication, somebody making a mistake, somebody becoming inconvenient.

Jesus had a way of refusing to reduce complicated people to the most immediately visible thing about them. He noticed. He asked. He moved toward suffering.

Maybe that’s where better leadership begins too.

There is another place where this conversation matters just as deeply: the church. Faith communities can be remarkably good at showing up when tragedy arrives. But what happens when the meals stop, the crisis passes, and grief or special needs simply become part of a family’s everyday life? That’s where I want to go next—in Part Two, When the Church Moves On.