The hardest moment was not the difficult news, but hearing positive news about someone else two days later and noticing what rose up in me before I could stop it. In times like these, it can be difficult to hold on to faith when life feels unfair. It was hearing such news about someone else two days later and noticing what rose up in me before I could stop it.
Not grief. Something meaner. A voice asking why them and not me and a second voice immediately ashamed of the first one.
If you are somewhere in that, this piece is not exactly about grief. Grief is about something missing. The topic is about something worse arranged: the sense that the shares were handed out wrong, that effort and outcome came apart, and that God watched it happen.
That specific feeling does something to faith that ordinary sorrow does not. It helps to understand why.
Unfair Is Not the Same as Sad
Sadness can sit alongside faith without much friction. You can be devastated and still feel held. People do it constantly.
Unfairness works differently, because it is never only about you. It requires a second person. Someone who did less and received more. Someone who was careless and stayed safe.
A colleague who lied and got the role. A cousin who never wanted children and has three.
The moment a comparison enters, the question changes shape. You stop asking why the events happened and start asking why this event happened to you and not to them.
That second question is much harder to pray, because it has an accusation folded inside it, and the accusation is about God’s judgment rather than your circumstances.
If what you are carrying is closer to absence than to comparison, the more useful piece is about how to trust God again after loss.
This one stays with the comparison problem, because it needs a different answer.
The Rule You Did Not Know You Were Following
Here is the part that surprises people.
Almost everyone carries an unspoken rule that outcomes track behavior. Good effort earns good results. Carelessness eventually costs something.
You did not decide to believe the truth. It settled in early, and you have been planning your life around it ever since.
Social psychologist Melvin Lerner gave this rule a name in the 1960s: the belief in a just world. His experiments found something uncomfortable. When people watched someone suffer for no reason and could not help, they concluded the world had purpose.
They concluded the sufferer must have deserved it. Lerner called the belief a fundamental delusion, and he meant it literally. People will rewrite what they saw rather than let it go.
So when life turns unfair, two things break at once. The circumstance and the rule are what break down. And because you never articulated the rule, its collapse does not feel like a corrected idea. It feels like the floor moving.
What Jesus Said About Deserved Suffering
Now, here is the part that most Christian writing on this subject leaves out.
Jesus was handed the just-world assumption directly, more than once, and he rejected it both times without softening it.
In Luke 13:4, he raises the eighteen people killed when a tower collapsed in Siloam and asks whether they were worse offenders than everyone else living in Jerusalem. His answer is no. The tower fell. That is all.
Sit with how strange that is. The instinct to identify the cause, to make the suffering fit someone’s account, is so old and so automatic that his disciples reached for it in front of him. And he did not offer a better explanation. He refused the premise.
Which means the thing collapsing in you right now is not your faith. It is a rule that scripture never actually endorsed.
The Psalm That Says the Quiet Part Out Loud
There is a psalm for this exact feeling, and it is more blunt than most people expect.
Psalm 73 was written by Asaph, and the detail worth knowing is who he was. Not a bystander. He was a temple musician, one of the men responsible for leading Israel in worship. This is the church worship leader admitting what he actually thought on the drive home.
He says his feet had almost slipped. He says he envied the arrogant when he saw the prosperity of the wicked.
Then he lists what he noticed about them, and the list is petty in a way that will feel familiar: they seem healthy, they are not carrying the burdens everyone else carries, and nothing appears to cost them anything.
Then he asks the question underneath all of it. He wonders whether keeping his heart clean was pointless.
What Asaph admits, in order
He states that God is good. He believes it. That part never goes away.
Then, immediately, he says his footing nearly went out from under him.
He names the envy directly. No softening, no spiritual framing.
He questions whether his faithfulness bought him anything at all.
All of it stayed in the book. None of it was edited out.
Notice what the psalm does not do. It never claims the wicked were secretly miserable, and it never says Asaph misread the situation. They really were prospering. He really was suffering. The observation was accurate.
The shift comes later, and it is smaller than people make it sound. He goes into the sanctuary, and what changes is his time horizon, not his circumstances. He walks out with the same problems and a longer view.
What Holding Faith Actually Looks Like Here
So what do you do with a rule that has broken and a comparison you cannot stop making?
You do less than you think, and you do it more slowly.
I spent a long stretch trying to talk myself out of the envy, as if the feeling itself were the sin and getting rid of it were the assignment.
It did not work, and it added a second layer of failure on top of the first. Asaph did not talk himself out of anything. He said it plainly to God and kept going.
- Say the actual sentence. Not the sanitized version. The one with the name in it. Asaph’s prayer worked because it was accurate, not because it was respectful.
- Stop auditing your record. After unfairness, the instinct is to search your life for a cause or failure that would make the outcome make sense. That search is the just-world rule still at work. It has no bottom.
- Shorten the horizon you are judging by. Asaph’s relief came from taking a longer view, but you cannot force that on a Tuesday. What you can do is stop grading your whole life on this one comparison.
- Keep the practice even when the feeling is gone. He went into the sanctuary while still envious. The going came first. The clarity came after, and it came because he showed up unresolved.
None of that resolves the unfairness. It was not resolved for Asaph either.
What it does is stop the unfairness from costing you your relationship with God, the second avoidable loss.
What You Do Not Have to Accept From Other People
Unfairness attracts explanations. People offer them quickly and almost always kindly, and many of them are the just-world rule followers in better clothes.
You are allowed to decline these:
- Everything happens for a reason. This is the belief in a just world, framed as a source of comfort. It asks you to accept that the arrangement was correct, which is the exact thing you are struggling with.
- God is teaching you something. Maybe. But notice that such a statement is never said about the person who was spared. If the lesson only lands on the one who suffered, it is not a theory about God. It is a theory about you.
- Someone has it worse. True and irrelevant. Comparison is what hurt you in the first place. More comparison is not the cure.
- You just need more faith. Asaph had a full-time job in the temple. His feet still almost slipped.
None of this means the people saying it are wrong to care. It means the sentences are doing less than they appear to.
If your questions are broader than this one, here at Power of Positivity, we have a wider piece on common doubts about faith in God that addresses more of them.
When It Does Not Lift
Sometimes the comparison stops being an occasional intrusion and becomes the main thing you think about. You check in on the person. You rehearse the arguments. Months pass.
That is worth taking seriously and not as a spiritual failure. Persistent bitterness is heavy in a way that eventually costs you sleep, relationships, and the ordinary pleasure of your life.
Talking it through with a pastor, a counselor, or a doctor is not an admission that your faith fell short. It is the same instinct that sends you to a doctor for a fracture rather than praying the bone straight.
You Do Not Have to Call It Fair
Nothing here asks you to reach a verdict. The blame lies elsewhere: not on the person spared, not on the outcome, not on God.
What Asaph got in the sanctuary was not an explanation. He never received one. The wicked were still prospering when he walked out. What he got was a longer horizon and the willingness to keep showing up, and he wrote the whole embarrassing account down so that the next person would know it had been survived before.
Holding faith here does not mean agreeing that the arrangement was just. It means refusing to let an unjust arrangement take one more thing from you.
The tower fell. It was not a verdict. And you are still allowed to be here, asking.
The post How to Hold On to Faith When Life Feels Unfair and Unexplained appeared first on Power of Positivity: Positive Thinking & Attitude.