The Impasse Series (1/4): The Father's Heart

Christy Crites
Jun 2
7 min read

Updated: Jun 9

I am doing something new for the next four blog posts. I am taking 40, you read that right, FORTY of the tough questions that people ask about God and answering them. These blog posts pair with an episode of Honeyed Candor as well. I will link the other 3 blog posts as they release each week, at the bottom of the page. What I have done is taken the forty questions and divided them into four broad categories: The Father's Heart, The School of Love, The Cost of Belief: The Surrender, and Christianity on Trial. There are questions that stop people cold. Not because they're unanswerable, but because the answer requires something most of us aren't ready to give: a willingness to trust someone whose logic we don't always follow.

This is the first post in a four-part series called The Impasse. These are the questions people bring to the edge of faith and can't get past. I'm not going to give you a soft answer or a Sunday school deflection. What I'm going to do is be honest and anchor every answer in the same lens: God is sovereign, and He is our Father.

That matters more than it sounds. Because the moment you understand that God relates to us as a Father not a vending machine, not a distant judge, not an indifferent force the questions below start to look different. Not easier. Different.

A father's logic doesn't always look like love in the moment. But it is.

1. Why do prayers seem to go unanswered?

Prayer isn't a vending machine. The assumption behind this question is that "unanswered" means "ignored," but there's a third option between yes and no and that is not yet, or not that. If there's a God who actually knows more than we do about what we need and when, then getting every prayer answered exactly as asked would actually be a problem, not a feature. The parent who gives a child everything they cry for isn't loving — they're indulging. Silence is not the same as absence.

2. Why does God feel absent when I need Him most?

Feeling and fact aren't the same thing. In the depths of grief or crisis, every relationship feels distant including human ones. The saints throughout history all described seasons of profound divine silence, not as evidence of abandonment, but as the place where faith either deepens or dissolves. If God only felt close when life was comfortable, you'd rightly wonder whether the feeling was just emotional weather. Jesus is near to the brokenhearted. It's a matter of asking vs. anger. Think about it. Our relationship with Jesus is part Him chasing us, and part us chasing Him. If we withdraw, He is respectful. A lot of the time, the answer that we are seeking when we think He isn't near isn't the answer He is trying to give us. It's usually exactly what we need to hear... not what we want to hear. It's a matter of trusting Him no matter what.

3. Why do bad people often prosper while good people suffer?

They often do, and on the surface that's a genuine scandal. But "often" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Short-term metrics are unreliable. Many people who seem to prosper through corruption, cruelty, or indifference carry private devastations that don't show up in their portfolio. The person who lives poor and kind and the person who lives rich and ruthless haven't necessarily received their final verdict. God is our heavenly Father. The gifts — even prosperity — are given to us without repentance. That's why evil people prosper. On the day of judgment, before they're sent to Hell, they'll feel so much remorse and regret because they didn't use what they were given to further the Kingdom of God or for their divine purpose. It's a matter of: everyone is given their portion, out of the goodness of God's heart, and some people are like the prodigal son and burn through it all, or like the servant with one talent who buries it and does nothing with it. God makes it rain on the evil and the good. They'll get their punishment eventually... it's just that sometimes we don't see it.

4. Why doesn't God make His existence more obvious?

What would "more obvious" actually look like and would it produce what you want? A God who proves Himself through spectacle produces awe and terror, not love and trust. Some philosophers argue that a God who overwhelms every objection removes the very freedom that makes a real relationship possible. The question of whether God exists is hard enough that brilliant people land on both sides, which may itself be the point. It requires something from you.

5. What happens to people who never hear the Gospel?

This is a question that Christianity has wrestled with seriously and arrived at different places. What virtually every serious tradition agrees on is that if God is genuinely just, people are not condemned for what they never had access to. Judgment is calibrated to what one has been given. The instinct that this must be fair isn't just wishful thinking, it's a moral demand that points toward what kind of God would be worth believing in at all. However, every person on the face of the earth will be given the choice to believe in Jesus by the time they die. I can only prove it through testimony and my knowledge of God's character. He says that He wishes none would perish but all would live with Him in eternity. Jesus physically appears to native tribes all the time. He does the same in Asia and the Middle East.

6. Why does God seem hidden?

The philosopher Pascal called this "the hiddenness of God" and argued it was actually evidence of a God who values faith over compulsion. If the divine presence were so overwhelming it left no room for doubt, the result would be capitulation, not love. Hiddenness creates the space where trust is possible. That said, many people who genuinely seek report eventually finding something. The hiddenness may be less complete than it initially appears.

7. How can a loving God allow Hell?

The traditional answer is that Hell is not so much imposed as chosen, the final and permanent solidification of a direction someone spent their life moving in. C.S. Lewis put it plainly: the door of Hell is locked from the inside. Love that forces itself on the unwilling isn't love. If someone spends their entire life wanting nothing to do with God, grace, or goodness, the loving response may be to honor that choice permanently rather than override it. The second piece of this is pure understanding of scripture. There's such a thing as a second death, and it's actually mercy. Those who do not take the mark of the beast but have died apart from God are instantly released at the final judgment. Those who do accept the mark of the beast will spend eternity in Hell with Satan and his demons. That's just what scripture says. I didn't write it.

8. Why would God create people He knows will reject Him?

Because the alternative is not creating them and non-existence is not a gift you give anyone. The ones who do choose relationship, love, and goodness also wouldn't exist if God only created those who would comply. There's also the possibility that divine foreknowledge and the granting of genuine freedom mean that the outcome of a free choice, while known, is still genuinely the person's own.

9. Why does God allow innocent people to die young?

There's no answer to this that doesn't feel thin when you're in the middle of it. The most honest thing is: we don't fully know. What can be said is that a short life isn't necessarily an incomplete life and that the measure of a life isn't its length. And if death is not the final word, dying young is not the worst thing that can happen to a person, even though it devastates those left behind. We are all given the exact same opportunity here on earth and that is one human lifetime.

In Summary

There's a common thread running through every question in this post: we expect God to operate on our timeline, by our logic, with our definition of fairness. But a Father who sees every moment simultaneously — beginning, middle, and end — isn't going to justify every decision to a child who can only see the room they're standing in right now.

That's not blind trust. That's honest trust. The kind that says: I don't understand this, and I'm choosing to believe you're good anyway.

That's where faith actually lives; not in the absence of questions, but in the decision to keep walking toward the One who has the answers, even when He hasn't handed them over yet. If you want to go deeper on any of these questions, there is a Honeyed Candor Podcast episode that pairs with this blog post. It, along with the other 3 Impasse Series episodes, are linked below. As they go live each week I will update the list. → Follow on Instagram @purelycece for real-time insight and unfiltered conversations

→ If you're ready to do the work, my book Escape Artist: The Fight for Freedom From Trauma will guide you through the process of breaking patterns and stepping into freedom. On Sale now everywhere books are sold.

→ If you need to go even deeper, I have written Escape Artist: The Workbook that will guide you through deeper reflections and healing. Available now on Amazon.

You don't have to figure this out alone.