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 didn't. In the quiet observation of which kinds of faith were celebrated and which kinds were never mentioned. In the unspoken assumption, accumulated over years, of what a faithful Christian was supposed to feel, produce, and experience.
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. Not always quickly. Yes the script allowed for waiting, for difficulty, for seasons of testing. But it moved, always, toward resolution. Toward the testimony. Toward the sunrise.
You did not choose this script. You simply lived inside it for 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.
And the first thing many of us did — before the grief, before the anger, 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 it was on our end. God does not break contracts. That is not how the script works.
This is one of the most painful features of the scripts we carry. They do not just shape our expectations. They shape our self-blame.
The problem is not that you failed to meet the terms. The problem is that the contract was never real. God did not sign it. The prosperity gospel signed it. The anxiety of well-meaning Sunday school teachers signed it. The Christian culture that is more comfortable with resolution than with lament signed it. But God, the God of Job, of Psalms, of Gethsemane, of the cross, never promised that faithfulness produces the story you wanted.
What God promised is harder and stranger and, in the end, more solid than the script. Presence in the suffering, not exemption from it. A hope that survives the wound, not one that prevents it. A Saviour who bears his own marks, not one who erases yours.
The first step toward something more honest is simply to name the script. To hold it up in the light and see it for what it is. It's not the gospel, but a layer that accumulated over the gospel, well-intentioned and genuinely believed and ultimately 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.
