Nobody sat you down and explained the terms.
You absorbed them slowly. In Sunday school classrooms, in the way certain prayers were prayed, in the stories that got told from the front and the ones that did not. In the quiet observation of which kinds of faith were celebrated and which were never mentioned. In the unspoken assumption, accumulated over years, of what a faithful Christian was supposed to feel and produce.
The script had a shape. Pray faithfully and your prayers will be answered. Raise your children well and they will stay. Serve the church and the church will hold you. Trust God and the story will resolve. The script allowed for waiting and for seasons of testing, but it moved, always, toward the testimony. Toward the sunrise.
You did not choose this script. You lived inside it long enough that it became the air you breathed. And then something happened that the script could not account for. The child did not stay. The prayers went unanswered. The church did not hold you. The story did not resolve.
The first thing many of us did, before the grief and before the honest reckoning, was search the script for the broken clause. What had we done wrong? Where had we failed to meet the terms? Because if the contract had been broken, surely the failure was on our end. God does not break contracts. That is not how the script works.
The scripts we carry shape our self-blame as thoroughly as they shape our expectations.
You did not fail to meet the terms. The contract was never real, and God did not sign it. The prosperity gospel signed it, along with the anxiety of well-meaning Sunday school teachers and a Christian culture more comfortable with resolution than with lament. The God of Job and of Gethsemane never promised that faithfulness produces the story you wanted. He let his own Son pray, "Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done" (Luke 22:42). The cup did not pass.
What God promised is harder to hold and more solid. Presence in the suffering rather than exemption from it. A Saviour who carries his own marks and does not need yours erased before he will sit in the room with you.
Naming the script is the first honest thing you can do with it. Seen in daylight, it turns out to be a layer that accumulated over the gospel, well-intentioned and genuinely believed and unable to hold the weight of a real life.
You do not have to perform your way back into God's favour. You were never performing your way there in the first place.
The contract was not real. The grace underneath it is.
