When It Feels Like You’re Moving Backward Instead of Forward
Have you ever felt like you’re making good progress in your life, only to be met with setbacks?
Maybe you have shifted your mindset, set new goals, taken personal accountability only to feel like your best efforts are met with disappointment or unexpected expenses?
Have you felt like you continue to work so hard but you’re not moving forward at the pace you would like to, and you don’t understand why.
You’re doing the right things, you’re checking all of the boxes and are intentional making good choices in every area of your life. You’re not perfect, but you are truly putting your best foot forward.
It is difficult in those moments to see anything but a disappointing setback and you wonder to yourself how you’re going to fix it or make it work.
My husband and I recently got a mini-van for our growing family. We were blessed by a friend of ours who sold it to us at an incredibly reduced rate and it has ben the biggest blessing in our lives.
Recently I was leaving the store when I got in the van and it was having a hard time turning over. To keep a long story short, 2 batteries and 1 alternator later the van was finally fixed.
It would be very easy to view that experience in a solely negative light, but I’ve learned a thing or 2 over the years about how God works. So many of His blessings are concealed in difficult circumstances, we just need eyes to see them.
What if the biggest setbacks in your life are actually redirections to something better?
Why Setbacks Feel So Frustrating
As humans we want to make consistent progress in our lives. We want to see that the work we put in is moving us forward towards our goals.
If you grew up in the West, you have been conditioned to think this way. In the U.S. you go from Elementary, to Middle, to High School. In sports you start in little league, then junior varsity, then varsity.
There is a system by which we live our lives here and when anything happens outside of that system it can create a deep sense of frustration because we believe that that’s not how things should go.
If we were to apply our western way of thinking to any Bible character none of their lives would make any sense.
How does it make sense for Abraham to have a child when he is old?
How can Gideon win a war with 300 men?
How does a dead Man rise again?
We believe in a certain order to things. But when something threatens that order or looks out of place it’s jarring to our system and we rack our brains trying to figure out why.
Most times I think we’re asking the wrong questions, and we’re viewing our circumstances through the wrong lens. I’m not a photographer but are many different lenses that they use in order to get the image that they want. If you use the wrong lens the image that you see will be distorted.
So what lens should we be looking through?
You have to look through the lens of faith.
The Hidden Blessings in the Setbacks
If you’ve ever had to replace your alternator in your vehicle, especially if you have a large vehicle, you know that bill isn’t cheap. The van that we have has been such a blessing to our family, but then something like this happens, and you wonder if you made a mistake.
Your blessing couldn’t possibly come with any challenges? Or could it?
I choose to believe that having car trouble was a blessing. That may seem like a backwards way to view it but this is the lens that I use.
For example:
Distorted Lens: Maybe it was a mistake to get this van.
Faith Lens: God provided this van for our family at the perfect time.
Distorted Lens: I can’t believe that I had car trouble in the parking lot at Target in the middle of winter, this is so inconvenient.
Faith Lens: I am so blessed that I wasn’t on the highway when this happened, and that my children weren’t stranded with me, they were safe at home.
Distorted Lens: Having to spend this money came at a terrible time, it’s ruining my financial goals and will take hours to fix.
Faith Lens: If God provided the blessing, He will provide the means to care for the blessing, as He has done all this time.
I read a verse this morning in my devotional that I think fits perfectly here.
…we felt we had received the sentence of death. But this happened that we might not rely on ourselves but on God…
One of the ways that God uses setbacks is to teach us to rely on Him. The Bible says that faith without works is dead, and one of the ways we can exercise our faith is in these moments of hardship or setbacks is to choose in those moments to turn our minds towards Him.
Resisting vs. Embracing: What Setbacks Reveal About Our Faith
I want you to ask yourself, what is your first reaction when you come up against a setback? What is your emotional state like when you go through these experiences?
It is solely disappointment or frustration or anger? Or does your faith outweigh the negatives that you see?
Setbacks are not just meant to teach us to rely on God and exercise our faith. They also expose the areas where that reliance and faith is lacking.
Have you ever had that experience where you came up against a problem or internal feeling that you hadn’t dealt with in awhile, and you were confused because you thought that you fixed that thing already? Maybe God was exposing where you have more work to do.
Maybe your first thought when it comes to your finances is full faith, you know that God is going to handle it as you are a good steward. But when it comes to your relationships, that’s another story.
The setbacks in our lives can reveal to us where we are lacking, but if we view those circumstances with a distorted lens we will miss the message.
The setbacks in our lives also reveal to us how we view God. If you’re stuck with a bill that you didn’t expect, and all you can see is the lack of progress in your finances, you can ask yourself a question. Do you believe that God will provide for you? Or do you believe it’s all up to you?
That’s not to negate the effort that we must put in. We play a role in being good stewards of the things that God has given us. But even as we’re growing and learning in the different areas of our lives, do we believe that God will show up? How do you see God? And what is your setback revealing about your level of faith in Him?
When you come up against a problem instead of asking why me? Ask what is this trying to show me?
I think there are few people in the Bible who had more setbacks than Job. The man lost his children, his finances and his health. And at the end of it all he says,
Then Job replied to the Lord: “I know that you can do anything; and no one can stop you…I was talking about things I knew nothing about, things far too wonderful for me…I take back everything I said, and I sit in dust and ashes to show my repentance.”
Job 42:1-4
The thing about Job is he lost everything for what appeared to be no apparent reason, but his heart was postured in faith and humility.
We can learn a lot from our setbacks, but there are even some we may never get an answer to, what is the state of your faith in those times? And can you still “consider it pure joy…whenever you face trials.”?
How to Shift Your Perspective When You Feel Stuck
None of us are born with the innate ability to look through the lens of faith at our circumstances. That is a practice of renewing your mind that takes time.
How do you go about shifting your perspective?
- Repair your view of God
This is where the lens of faith starts. Understanding how you see God in the first place is the beginning of shifting your perspective.
Many of us have an understanding of God through our upbringing, or our experiences in the church, that are simply inaccurate. We may be expecting Him to do things or show up in a way that He never said He would.
When you examine your beliefs you have to backtrack and understand where they came from.
Go back to the source, open His word and find out what He says about Himself. We must adjust ourselves and our expectations to Him and His Word.
- Resolve to trust God
Faith is a choice, not a feeling. It is in those moments when we cannot understand why something is going on that our faith is tested, and it is in those moments that we must make a decision. Will I trust or not?
I want to preface this by saying, I don’t believe that means doing nothing.
Sometimes we use faith as a cop-out for not putting in the work.
Just because you stamp “God’s going to work it out” on something, doesn’t mean there isn’t something that you can do.
Last time I checked, when David was anointed king, he didn’t wait around for someone to bring him his throne, he had to fight to survive and put in the work.
Ruth and Naomi were widowed and hungry, they didn’t wait for someone to show up at their door with food. Ruth went outside and got whatever work she could to feed themselves, and it is through that humble work that she eventually received her blessing.
- Reframe the issue
Reframing can take a lot of practice. Many times we react poorly in the middle of a setback and then have to reframe the issue through the lens of faith on the back end.
Reframing is active, not passive.
For example: I was let go from my job while I was pregnant with our twins. I wasn’t sure what we were going to do, and I had a good cry on the way home that last day. But what I didn’t know was that a month later due to complications I would need an emergency C-section to save our lives.
I couldn’t have known that a month earlier, and having that job would have made things much more complicated. Instead, for a month I was able to rest and take better care of myself. And for the 2 months total that they were in the NICU, I had the time to be able to see them, while also taking the time to recover without the mental stress of having to go back to that job.
Believe me that reframe did not happen in the moment, but as I switched my lens, I chose to believe that it was a blessing in disguise, and over time I saw more and more how that was true.
Reframing can be done in both the major circumstances or the small ones, like being stuck in traffic or missing an exit. There is so much in the delays and “setbacks” that God is protecting us from that we will never know, and having that perspective allows us to hold onto that lens of faith.
- Repurpose the lesson
Repurposing starts with gratitude.
So what do I mean by repurpose?
Let’s stick with the van story.
One lesson from this “setback” was understanding that while it may have been inconvenient, I and my family remained safe, and it was a blessing that the car trouble didn’t happen on the highway or while the children were with me.
Another lesson to be taken out of it was to make sure to get AAA. That was an oversight, and had I been stuck far from home or on the highway, that would have been a great resource to have. If my dad is reading this he’s probably shaking his head about me not having AAA, but I digress.
So in this one circumstance there were many blessings and many lessons. And one of the beautiful things about life is how much we can learn and grow from the simple things that happen every day.
Trusting That God’s Plan Is Bigger Than the Setback
Don’t let any circumstance or lesson go to waste, cause God can and will use it all for your benefit if you have the right perspective.
It can be so difficult to look ahead in faith when we look at the negative setbacks that are happening to us. But when we consider Who we’ve put our trust in and His track record we can ease the frustration that we feel.
God is always at work, and whether we see it immediately or not, it is in our favor.
The Choice to Trust Instead of Resist
All of us have a choice. We can choose which lens we pick up, we can choose to renew our minds and reframe our setbacks. All of that is a choice that we can make.
You can choose to trust or you can choose to sit in your feelings about how things aren’t going the way you want them to.
There is a lot that happens in our lives that we can’t choose, but how we respond is up to us.
And you may not think that you have the strength to choose differently, but when you have faith, you don’t have to do it alone.
There is a strength and and endurance that God can give you, and all He says to do is ask.
Learning to reframe will take work, but it is a work that is worth it.
How have you seen God work through the setbacks in your life, and what lessons did you gain from them? Share below, I would love to hear your stories.
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