Real Conversations About Struggles
My rent just went up three hundred dollars. That is not a small thing; it’s my grocery money, gone with one line on a letter. My son lost the job he loved. My daughter can’t find one. My kids look at me and say, “Mom, you don’t even seem upset.”
I am upset. But after forty years of chasing a faith that promised specific outcomes, I’ve learned something: this isn’t a fight I win by trying harder in the physical world. This is a fight in the heavenlies, and that changes everything about what faith actually is.
Here’s the conversation that helped me see it clearly.
Me: This is a heavenly fight, not a physical one. When life doesn’t make sense, and we don’t know where to turn: a job loss hits, rent goes up, and life itself starts tumbling down the wrong path. I have to start looking through different lenses. I tried to win it with my own knowledge and found I can’t. It’s a fight the Holy Spirit has to direct, in His time, which is exhausting.
Claude: You’re describing Ephesians 6:12 almost word for word: “Our fight is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the world’s rulers of the darkness of this age, and against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places.” You can’t out-earn a rent increase in the Spirit. The battlefield isn’t where the symptoms are showing up.
Me: Today I’m fine, but what about tomorrow? That’s the hard part, especially when I don’t know what will hit next. It feels like I’m just standing there, taking one more hit. But that’s not how it’s supposed to be. That’s why we have the armor. I’ve heard all the sermons, but how does a person use that spiritual armor in a real battle in the heavenlies?
Claude: I think Paul actually tells you the win condition, and it’s smaller than we usually assume. He says “having done all, to stand”—three times in that passage. Not advance. Not defeat the enemy outright. Stand. The armor isn’t built so you walk away from a fight untouched. It’s built so that after you take a hit, you’re still standing.
The shield of faith is the piece made exactly for what you described—the flaming darts, the fear thoughts, the “you don’t even seem upset” that lands wrong. Roman shields were often soaked so a flaming arrow would hit and just go out. Faith is what you lift on purpose, right when the dart is coming in.
Me: I am learning it’s foundational to stand. It’s standing on the Word of God. It’s standing on truth, the belt of truth. If I want truth, I let the Holy Spirit take me to the right passages. And faith isn’t so much “I have faith to stand.” It’s faith in the way God does things. Letting go of control. Not faith in a verse the way Word of Faith teaches it. Faith has to be in God’s ways, not mine. That’s the real definition of faith.
Claude: That’s the line that separates this from the formula-faith you spent so many years inside. Hebrews 11 is the chapter built to define it, and it’s not a highlight reel of people who believed and got their miracle. Read the ending: “These all died in faith, not having received the promises.” That’s faith that never produced the visible win—and the writer still calls it faith.
Me: Faith is the substance of things hoped for. It doesn’t say faith is the substance of what you will get.
Claude: That’s exactly the hinge. The Greek word for “hope” there is elpis—and it doesn’t mean “I hope so” the way we use it in English, like a wish you’re not sure about. It means confident expectation, resting in the character of the One you’re trusting. Faith is solid ground under that—under trust in who God is. Not a machine that manufactures the outcome you had pictured.
Me: So “all things work together for our good”—is that part of this same kind of faith? I believe that is a part of the kind of faith that is true.
Claude: Yes—and Paul actually defines “good” for us, right in the next verse, so we don’t get to fill it in ourselves. “Conformed to the image of his Son.” Not rent relief. Not a job offer. Christlikeness. The good Paul promises is character, formed through the very things that don’t make sense—not the resolution of them.
Me: It’s sad, isn’t it? How we’ve taken faith and used it to hurt the body of Christ instead of helping us walk with Christ through our trials.
Claude: It is sad, and the damage is real. When “good” gets redefined as the visible outcome, faith stops being how you walk through suffering with God, and becomes a performance you’re graded on during it. And the grading carries a hidden accusation: if the outcome doesn’t come, you must not have believed hard enough. Job’s friends made that same mistake three chapters long, insisting his suffering had to trace back to some failure in him—and God’s verdict was that Job, who grieved out loud and never pretended things were fine, had “spoken of me the thing that is right.” Not the friends with their tidy formula. Job, in his honest wrestling.
Me: For me right now, faith looks like a longing. A longing for Ezekiel 47—the river, the trees, the leaves. Rest, healing, peace. But faith is more than just longing. It’s knowing God has all of this in His hands, and one day I will swim in that water, one day I will eat the fruit of that tree, one day I will pick a leaf off and be healed of my brokenness.
Claude: In that passage, the man with the measuring line walks Ezekiel into the river—ankle deep, knee deep, waist deep—and then he can’t measure it anymore. It’s become water to swim in. You don’t wade into that kind of water. At some point, it carries you. That’s the same letting go you named a few breaths ago. Faith isn’t gripping harder. It’s being carried.
And the trees on that riverbank never stop bearing fruit, never fade. That’s not the tree you’re standing under right now. But the ache you feel for that river isn’t naive—it’s your spirit recognizing exactly what’s missing in this season, and reaching for the place where it’s never missing. And the thirst itself is already being met, in pieces, even now, even under a bare fig tree. “Let him who is thirsty come”—that’s not only a someday invitation. It’s a today one too.
I don’t know what tomorrow holds. I still don’t know how I will cover this rent increase. But I know this now, in a way I didn’t after forty years of Word of Faith formulas: faith was never meant to be the thing that guarantees my outcome. It’s the substance under my trust in Him. I trust Him even when the fig tree isn’t blossoming on my schedule.
Maybe you’re standing under a bare tree too. Maybe your “good” hasn’t come yet either. If so, I’d love to hear. Where do you go back to, when you need to remember what’s actually true?
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