What If You Don’t Trust God Anymore?

Or Are Too Pissed at God to Pray?

A few days ago, Billy Crystal said something in an interview that stopped me and dropped me. Crystal has had an emotionally brutal couple of years. In January 2025, the Pacific Palisades fire destroyed his home where he and his wife, Janice, had lived for forty-six years. Then, in December, his longtime friend Rob Reiner and Rob’s wife, Michele, were murdered in their home and their son has been charged with their murders.⁠

During an interview with CBS Sunday Morning, Tracy Smith reminded Crystal that in his earlier Broadway show 700 Sundays, he talked about conversations he had with God. Then she asked whether he had been talking to God over these last couple of years. He said no. Why?

“Cause I don’t trust Him. Too many bad things have happened.”

I’m a pastor. You might expect me to explain why Billy Crystal is wrong. Nope. I don’t think he is. At least, I don’t think he is wrong to say it and feel it. If your house burns to the ground, your friend is murdered, somebody you love dies far too young, your spouse gets sick, your child suffers, or life simply delivers one blow after another, there may come a point when all the things you have been told about God collide with what has happened to you.

And sometimes what comes out of that collision is: I don’t trust you anymore. We church people can get awfully nervous about sentences like that. We want to explain. Defend. Correct the theology. Remind somebody that God has a plan.

But I believe the more faithful response is: Say it and pray it to God. If you are angry with God, be angry with God. If you do not understand God, say you do not understand. If you feel abandoned, betrayed, furious, confused, or unable to pray, name it and claim it. If Jesus can say, ‘My God, my God why have you abandoned me?” we certainly can, too.

Pretending to trust God when you don’t is not faith. It is B.S.

Of course, underneath Billy Crystal’s words is an assumption that a lot of people make because they have heard some version of it for years:

It is all part of God’s plan. God is in control. Everything happens for a reason. You just have to trust.

I don’t believe that. If the murder of Rob and Michele Reiner, or the murder of six million Jews in the Holocaust, was part of God’s plan, then God is a monster and Billy Crystal is right. Nobody should trust a God like that.

But I do not believe God plans murder, cruelty, abuse, war, genocide, or the thousand other ways we hurt ourselves and each other. If we have any meaningful freedom at all, then our choices have to be real choices. Real choices mean we can choose things God does not want. We can choose things that horrify and anger God. We can do things that break God’s heart. Otherwise freedom is not freedom. It is theater. And the Old Testament is filled with moments where God seems to be saying, in one way or another, “WTF are you doing!?”

There is also plenty in life that has nothing to do with human choice at all. Fires destroy homes. Our bodies fail us. Cancer grows. Tornadoes tear through towns and leave people standing in the wreckage. There is suffering no one chose and no one deserved. I do not believe every tragedy comes with some hidden divine purpose tucked inside it waiting for us to discover.

So if God is not controlling every event, why turn to God at all? Because control is not the same thing as presence. I do not believe God is sitting somewhere above us pulling every string like a master puppeteer.

I believe God is with us. God grieves with us. God is present in the rubble, the hospital room, the funeral home, the empty house, and the long night when nothing makes sense. And I believe God is always working—through us and around us—to resist what destroys life, to heal what can be healed, to change what can be changed, and to call us toward something better than what we so often choose.

That is a very different God from the one who plans the tragedy and then asks us to trust the plan. It is the difference between a God who causes the wound and a God who sits beside us when we’re bleeding. Trust after tragedy is not believing God controls everything. It starts with discovering that God is with us in the tragedy, even when we’re pissed at God.

That kind of trust looks different. It does not require us to explain the fire, defend the murder, or pretend the cancer happened for a reason. It does not require us to smile through clenched teeth and say, “God has a plan.” Sometimes trust looks like showing up angry. Sometimes it looks like saying, “I don’t understand you.” Sometimes it looks like silence. Sometimes it looks like not praying for a while.

And sometimes it looks like doing exactly what Billy Crystal did:

I don’t trust you right now.

The Bible is full of people talking to God that way. The Psalms complain, accuse, question, rage, and ask where God has gone. Job spends most of a book arguing with God. Jeremiah gets angry with God. None of them clean it up before they pray. In fact, their complaints, questions, and anger are their prayers.

Apparently God can handle the truth. I believe that is where trust starts again. Not with pretending or explaining. Not with forcing ourselves to believe something we do not believe. Just telling the truth about where we are and discovering that God is still there; still listening, grieving and loving. Still working through people who run toward the fire, sit beside the hospital bed, bring food, hold a hand, challenge injustice, rebuild what was destroyed, and refuse to let suffering have the last word.

I do not trust a God who causes the wound and then asks me to call it a blessing. I do trust a God who stays, grieves, and loves.

Remember

God doesn’t have to be in control to be with us.

One Step Forward

If you are angry with God, stop trying to clean it up. Say what you think and feel. Write it down. Pray it. Shout it in the car if you need to. You do not have to sound pious or religious or use Elizabethan English. You just have to be honest.

Consider This

What if telling God the truth about your anger is not a failure of faith, but a way faith survives?

Until next week, remember: you do not have to trust a God who plans your pain. But you may discover, even amid suffering, a God who refuses to leave you, who loves you, and who suffers with you.

Peace,

Tom