I was Disappointed in God and Lost My Faith with Jason Gray

I was Disappointed in God and Lost My Faith with Jason Gray

In this video, Jason Gray shares his story of how he lost faith in God. He talks about what led him to the place where he felt abandoned by God and why it was difficult for him to regain faith after that point.

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Jason Gray Transcription:

My experience of God for most of my life had always been that he always saved the day that he would show up sometimes in the 11th hour. But he’d always show up and save the day and that I was upheld in his victorious right hand.

When my marriage was falling apart, I cried out to God and I was, I was anxious and afraid and all those things, but when he didn’t show up the way that I wanted him to, it really shook me. It broke my ability to trust him. I realized that, oh, I don’t think things worked the way that I thought they had. And that was the beginning of the unraveling of my faith.

You know, it called a lot of other pieces into question. It felt like my belief was, uh, was moving away from me. And, and so I would have like a half hour where all of a sudden, oh, wow. I don’t, I don’t believe anymore. I don’t have, I don’t have a faith in me, but then, oh no, it’s, it’s there still, you know. And I very much didn’t wanna lose my faith. You know, it was a comfort to me. My life was built around it. My career was tied to it. It would be very inconvenient among other things. It’d also be very sad and catastrophic.

So I guess in my mind, I had always suspected that anybody who lost their faith kind of wanted to lose it, maybe because they wanted to be their own God or do things their own way, you know, that there was some kind of agenda attached to it. And that wasn’t how I experienced it.

Jason Gray Transcription:

I desperately did not want to lose my faith and was doing all the things I knew to keep it alive. I was spending time in prayer in the word I was, you know, all the things you’re supposed to do. But I couldn’t keep it from slipping away from me. And a half-hour would turn into an hour and then like two hours. And then I’d have a whole day where I’m like, there’s no faith in me. Like the light is turned off inside of me.

“Oh, shoot, what do I do with this? Is it gonna come back?” And having wrestled with depression? I had learned, you know, you don’t make a decision when you’re in a certain emotion, cuz if you just wait, a new emotion will come along afterward. If, if you don’t hold hands with it, if you just allow it to keep moving, there’ll be a new feeling behind it after about six months or so, it started to feel like, “I don’t think this is coming back.”

And so I started to make a Plan B, like what am I gonna do post my Christian music career around that time, I was, uh, asked to go on tour with Brant Hansen. Who’s a radio personality. I remember having a conversation with his wife cuz she was on the road with us about how, how scripture for a long time had been dead to me and I’d open up the Bible and try to read it and just felt dead. And was just painful and would make me angry when I would read it, you know, so I’d stopped. That was in Cincinnati. We went to bed that night in our hotel rooms and I woke up in the next morning and saw that there was an interview with Bono and Rolling Stone and oh, you know, like I always like to read his interview.

So let’s open that up. I’m, I’m laying in bed reading this Rolling Stone interview with Bono of the band U2. In the interview, he’s talking about his faith and he’s talking about a Psalm that he loves from The Message Bible and asks the interviewer if he can read him the Psalm, you know, and, uh, and reads it. And it’s, it’s in the interview. So I’m reading the Psalm from the scriptures that have been dead to me for a long time.

If you’re wrestling with your faith there is help and hope.

It’s hard now, you know, but I think I’m healing and wrestling and I’m inclined to think that wrestling is a part of the healing.

Sometime after the divorce, I noticed that one of my sons who I had typically been very close with it just… I began to sense that there was a wall between us, you know, that whenever we were in the room with each other, there was some unspoken thing there, you know? And I began to perceive that, you know, I think it’s, I think it’s anger. But he wouldn’t talk with me about it maybe because he was afraid of how I would respond or he wondered if it was appropriate or wondered if I would listen, you know.

Who knows, but for whatever reason, he wasn’t talking with me about it until the day when he finally did.

And he, he just laid it all out there and by God’s grace, I was able to not be defensive and just listen. And it healed something between us and we’re doing, we’re doing great. But afterwards I realized, oh, you know what? That makes me realize that, I think I’m angry with my heavenly father about some things. I haven’t talked with him about it because he’s God, are you allowed to be angry with God?

I thought, okay, I think I need to have that moment with God. And I sat down with Him and told Him how I was really feeling. And I brought my heart as it was not as it should be… As I imagine it should be to Him. And, and we’re doing pretty good now, too.