What Does Faithfulness Look Like When the World Feels Broken?
"Mankind, he has told each of you what is good and what it is the Lord requires of you: to act justly, to love faithfulness, and to walk humbly with your God.” - Micah 6:8
The Battle: Surviving the Outrage
This past year has asked a lot of me…
I was already someone working through what “work-life balance” even means, or “work-life harmony” as they started calling it in the military, because true balance is apparently a myth. I knew that navigating the tension between all the things pulling at me was something I needed to get better at. I just didn’t know how yet.
Then came the layers that I didn’t plan for. Leaving active duty without a clear next step, just a sense that God was calling me out and that I needed to follow. Learning what it means to be a stay-at-home mom after being someone who ran on urgency and overdrive and over responsibility. Learning what it means to be a veteran, to move from the structure and familiarity of military life into the comparatively quieter and more disorienting civilian world. Those things alone would have been a lot to work through.
Then I turned on the news…
I found myself wrestling with how easily politics, media, fear, outrage, and even religion can shape the way we see people. I started noticing how quickly compassion gets lost when people become categories instead of human beings.
I watched public conversations unfold that left vulnerable people carrying the heaviest burdens, and I struggled to reconcile some of it with the Jesus I was learning about in scripture. I saw a pace of wrongdoing that outstripped the pace of accountability. A cost of living that keeps climbing while working families feel increasingly stretched thin. And something that I found genuinely difficult to sit with: people using the language of Christianity while displaying very little of the character of Christ.
I found myself whiplashing back and forth between righteous anger, cynicism, deliberate ignorance, and a quiet hope that someone else will handle it. I feel guilty for the numbness, then exhausted by the guilt. It feels like a power tactic–a deliberate attempt to wear me down until I’m too tired to fight or too numb to care.
Meanwhile, life keeps going. Bills.Trying to raise my son through the best version of myself (through God’s strength, that’s for sure). Seasons of solo-parenting. Counting the dollars to spend on what groceries are critical to buy and which to forego this week in light of the tanks of gas needed. What priorities I ought to let go because they aren’t immediate dumpster fires, like a follow-up with the doctor or addressing that check engine light. I’m just trying to survive my own life.
Somewhere in the middle of all of it, I began asking this question: Am I supposed to be doing more than surviving my own life to be a good Christian? If so, what does that even look like?
Listen, I didn’t need a perfect theology of outrage. I needed a way to stay human and rooted in God when the world felt too loud to think clearly. I needed to know if Scripture gave me a way to be honest about my grief and still faithful in a world that feels too broken to hold. What I found was not a command to harden myself, but an invitation to bring my confusion to God and let Him shape what faithfulness looked like next.
The Measurement: Looking at Jesus’ Pattern
When I started actually reading about Jesus–not just hearing about Him–I kept noticing a pattern. Jesus consistently moved toward the people everyone else avoided.
The Samaritan woman in John 4 was considered an outsider in nearly every way: ethnically, religiously, socially, personally. Jews avoided Samaria altogether, yet, Jesus stopped to speak with her anyway. Not briefly, not reluctantly, but deeply. He had one of the longest recorded theological conversations in the gospels with her where he revealed himself to her as the Messiah before he openly did so for almost anyone else.
In John 9, he healed a man born blind after his own disciples tried to frame the man’s suffering as someone’s fault. Jesus rejected the premise entirely and healed the man anyway. Where others saw blame, he saw a person.
Then there’s the Roman centurion in Matthew 8–a military officer belonging to the empire actively oppressing the Jewish people. He came with humility, asking Jesus to heal his servant who was paralyzed and suffering. Even there, Jesus said that he had not seen faith this great in all of Israel and healed the servant without ever going to the house. Jesus responded to humility and faith with compassion, rather than hostility.
I’m no theologian, but I can read a pattern. Again and again, Jesus crossed the lines people were convinced God himself would never cross: ethnic lines, moral lines, social lines, political lines, and religious lines. Loving people the way Jesus did does not mean abandoning discernment or truth. It means refusing to let fear, pride, or contempt decide who is worthy of compassion.
The question that stayed with my heart after reading these stories was simple: if this is who Jesus went to, what does that mean for how I see the people I read about in the news?
The Pivot: The Permission I Didn’t Know The Bible Gave Us
Here is something I did not know until recently:
The Bible has a whole category of prayer built around grief. It’s called lament, and it is not a minor thread. It runs through the Psalms, the book of Lamentations, the prophet Habakkuk, and dozens of other places throughout scripture. Psalm 13 opens with the words, “how long, O Lord, will you forget me forever.” Habakkuk spends an entire book essentially asking God why he isn’t stopping the injustice happening right now in front of him.
I grew up knowing these songs existed, but they went in one ear and out the other. It wasn’t until I started sitting with this question about heartbreak and the news that I understood why they matter.
Lament gives you permission to feel.
It says that bringing your grief, your anger, your exhaustion, your confusion to God is not overburdening him. It is not wrong. It does not mean you have lost your faith or that you need to earn your way back into his good graces. It means you are in relationship with a God who can handle every honest thing you bring to him.
We talked in the first article about agape love, that radical unconditional love that fallen humanity could never have invented on its own. That same love is what makes lament possible. A God who loves you that way is not going to turn away when you show up broken and angry and not okay. He meets you where you are and He walks you through the dark tunnel, rather than waiting for you at the other end of it.
There is an important distinction worth naming here. Lament is not despair. Despair walks away from God. Lament cries out to him. The difference is the relationship with Him. In every psalm of lament, the writer pours out their grief and then anchors back to who God is, not because the circumstances have changed, but because the relationship holds even when everything else feels unstable.
You are not wrong for grieving what you are seeing in the world. You are not weak for feeling it. You are doing what the people of God have always done–bringing the world to the only one who can actually hold it.
Scripture gave me language for the very feelings I was afraid were “un-Christian.” Once I realized that lament was allowed, the next question became: What does faithful action look like when I cannot fix the very things I am grieving?
The Breakthrough: Faithfulness Does Not Require a Scale
So what do we actually do with all of this?
That’s the question I kept circling back to. Okay, Jesus went to the margins. Okay, lament is allowed. But I still have a newsfeed full of things I cannot fix and a life full of demands that don’t pause for my outrage. What does faithful engagement actually look like from here?
I found a compass in Micah 6:8:
He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.
These three requirements aren’t a new set of burdens, but the way we reclaim our peace.
I want to be honest about what I think these mean in practice because I don’t think they necessarily require you to become an activist or join a movement or show up at a rally, though those things can be expressions of them. I think they start much smaller and much closer than that.
“Do justice” means paying attention to why people are hurting, not just that they are hurting. It means asking the harder questions underneath the surface one. When I see someone struggling, I can ask what happened to them, not just what is wrong with them. That shift in how I see people is itself an act of justice. It starts in my own interactions, in my own neighborhood.
“Love mercy” means tending to the immediate need in front of me–the specific person, not the abstract problem. It means I don’t have to solve the whole housing crisis to help the woman in my community who needs a meal. Mercy is personal and particular. It is agape love with sleeves rolled up.
“Walk humbly” is what keeps the other two honest. It is the reminder that I do not have all the answers, that my perspective is limited, that I can care deeply about justice and mercy and still get things wrong. Humility is not passivity. It is the posture that keeps righteous anger from curdling into self-righteousness.
Together, these three things give me a way to engage with a broken world without being consumed by it. Not because the world is any less broken, but because I know what my part is and what it isn’t.
The Battle Won: Walking Humbly in the Daily Grind
I want to be clear that I am not writing this from a place of having it figured out. I still fall into dead zones where I don’t talk to anyone and draw inward. I still toggle between outrage and numbness. I still have weeks where surviving my own life is genuinely all I can manage. But in the seasons where I have had capacity, I have tried to put my hands to things that match what God has put in my heart. I am learning that faithfulness requires showing up with what is actually in my hand. For me, that looks like volunteering with a ministry that shares the actual Gospel, or helping city leaders listen to communities often left out of the room. These aren’t grand gestures that fix everything, but they are the parts God has put in my hand.
Your answer will look different from mine. Your capacity, your calling, your gifts, your season–those are yours.
I still don’t have the capacity to carry every burden I see in the news, and I don’t think God is asking me to. I do think He is asking me to be faithful with the part that is mine: to lament honestly, to see people as human beings, and to walk humbly in the places where my life actually touches others.
In this way, I am not just surviving anymore–I am abiding in my Father.
Sisterhood Discipleship Questions
How to Use These Questions
Hi Sis! No wrong answers here. Sit with them privately, journal, or share in the comments below–whatever feels right for where you are today. If you share in the comments, speak from your own experience. Curiosity and doubt are welcome. Honest and messy are welcome. We’re not here to perform our faith, but to grow in it together.
Have you ever felt emotionally torn between compassion, outrage, numbness, exhaustion, or wanting to completely disengage from the world? What did that tension feel like for you?
The article talks about how quickly people become categories instead of human beings. Have you noticed that happening in your own thinking, online spaces, or public conversations? How do you think Jesus challenges that tendency?
Which story about Jesus in this article stood out to you the most, and why do you think it impacted you?
Before reading this article, what did you think lament was? Has your understanding of grief, anger, or bringing honest emotions to God changed at all?
The article says, “Lament is not despair. Despair walks away from God. Lament cries out to Him.” What do you think the difference looks like in real life?
Which part of Micah 6:8 feels the hardest for you right now: acting justly, loving mercy, or walking humbly with God? Why?
The article suggests that faithfulness may begin much smaller and closer than we expect. What is one small area, relationship, or situation in your actual daily life where you feel God inviting you to practice justice, mercy, or humility?
Have you ever felt pressure to “fix everything” in order to be a good Christian? How does it feel to consider that faithfulness may look more like obedience in your actual sphere of influence rather than carrying the whole world?
What helps you stay soft-hearted without becoming emotionally consumed by everything happening around you?
The article ends with the phrase, “I am not just surviving anymore–I am abiding in my Father.” What do you think the difference is between surviving and abiding?
