The Difference Between Belief and Reliance | Part One of Have We Created God in Our Own Image?
A Sunday Morning That Changed My Thinking
Billy Crystal did not say that God does not exist. He said, āI donāt trust Him. Too many bad things have happened.āĀ¹
That distinction stopped me.
On Sunday, October 11, I watched Tracy Smith interview Crystal about his new one-man Broadway show, 860. I had expected a conversation about acting, comedy, and the loss of his Pacific Palisades home in the January 2025 fire. Instead, the interview turned toward Godāand toward a question many people may carry privately but rarely state plainly: What does it mean to believe in God if you no longer trust God to help you?
Crystal was discussing 860, a show shaped by loss and other painful experiences. The conversation returned to 700 Sundays, his earlier one-man show about the limited number of Sundays he shared with his father before his fatherās death. In that production, he had spoken about conversations with God. Smith asked whether he still talked to God. Crystal answered, āNo, ācause I donāt trust Him. Too many bad things have happened.āĀ¹
I rewound the interview.
Here was a man I have admired for years, a public figure known for warmth, humor, and humanity, saying on national television what many religious people might hesitate to say even in private. I was surprised by the statement, but I was also surprised by how quickly I understood it. Crystal was not necessarily denying Godās existence. He was describing a breakdown in reliance. He may still believe God is there; he no longer expects God to show up for him.
Belief and trust are related, but they are not the same. Belief asks, Is God real? Trust asks, Can I depend on God when I need help? A person can answer the first question affirmatively and the second negatively. We understand that distinction in ordinary relationships. We may know that someone exists, recognize that personās abilities, and remember that personās past accomplishments, yet still decide not to rely on that person when circumstances become difficult. Knowledge of someoneās existence does not automatically produce confidence in that personās dependability.
Crystal is seventy-eight years old. That matters to me, not because age automatically produces wisdom, but because seventy-eight years contain enough experience to change what a person expects from life. Crystal has described losing his father when he was young, losing the home that held the memories of his family, and enduring the loss of people dear to him. He has also lived long enough to watch the people around him encounter experiences they would never have chosen. The statement I heard was not the challenge of a teenager casually rejecting an inherited belief. It sounded like the conclusion of someone whose expectations had been tested by a lifetime of loss.
I do not know Billy Crystal personally. I cannot speak for the whole of his Jewish faith, his private beliefs, or what he intends for his relationship with God tomorrow. His interview does not give me that authority. I can say only what I heard: he did not say God does not exist. He said he does not trust God. That difference reaches far beyond one interview.
It raises the central question of this essay: What happens when a person continues to believe in God but no longer relies on God for protection, intervention, or help?
I have spent much of my life thinking about that question. I have experienced loss, served as a minister of the gospel, stood beside grieving families, and listened to people ask where God was when they needed Him. I have also watched the suffering of people I will never meet through the constant stream of news. These experiences have taught me that the crisis of faith is not always a crisis of belief. Sometimes it is a crisis of trust.
That is the distinction I want to examine.
What Experience Has Taught Me
I have lost my father and my mother. My father died after living with heart disease and lung cancer. I have known people whose lives ended in automobile accidents and family members whose lives were overtaken by illness. A woman who once worked for me lost her life to domestic violence. These are not academic illustrations that I selected to make a philosophical argument more dramatic. They are part of the human experience through which I have come to understand grief, uncertainty, and the limitations of what we can control. I have never lost my home and everything in it to a fire, as Crystal and his family did. I cannot claim to know that particular experience. I can recognize the scale of such a loss, and I can understand why someone who has endured it might ask what became of the protection and help that people so often associate with God.
I have also served as a minister of the gospel, and that responsibility has brought me into some of the most joyful and most difficult moments people experience. I have participated in weddings where families gathered with every expectation of a hopeful future, and I have conducted funerals where families struggled to understand how that future had changed so quickly. I have counseled people after acts of violence, including the needless loss of a young man and the killing of a spouse. I have listened to people whose circumstances were overturned by the loss of work, a home, or their health, and I have seen the grief that follows the death of a loved one. The prospect of losing a child may be among the most agonizing experiences a parent can contemplate, and I would never presume to explain that loss away with a convenient religious answer. In these circumstances, the question people bring to a minister is not always a technical question about doctrine. Often it is an earnest and bewildered question about why help did not come and where God was when He was needed. I have witnessed the weight of that question in people who were not trying to reject their faith.
Even those who have not experienced a particular tragedy are witnesses to the suffering of others. The news reaches us in the morning and follows us into the evening. We see the aftermath of storms, wildfires, earthquakes, accidents, violence, and the destruction of homes and livelihoods. We watch families lose people they love. We see children and older people confronted by circumstances they did not choose and could not reasonably prevent. A person cannot watch these events indefinitely without eventually asking questions that are both moral and deeply personal. Where is God in all of this? Why was this not stopped? Why did help not arrive before the loss became irreversible? Where is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God described in the accounts of Moses and the deliverance of Israel? Those questions are not evidence of indifference toward religion. They arise precisely because religion has taught us to expect something from the Creator.
My perspective is therefore shaped by both sides of the pulpit. I know the language of comfort used in prayer and worship, and I know what it feels like to stand beside someone when those familiar words no longer seem adequate. I also know that people do not always ask their hardest questions aloud, especially when their religious community prizes certainty and treats doubt as weakness. We may urge someone to have faith and mean it sincerely, yet fail to recognize that the person is not disputing the existence of God at all. The person may be looking at a lost loved one, a home destroyed, or a family brought to the edge of despair, and wondering why the God whose power they have been taught to celebrate did not intervene. That is not a request for a sophisticated philosophical system; it is a question about the meaning of a relationship. If the person before us is struggling with that question, repeating the language of certainty may be the beginning of a conversation, but it cannot honestly be the end of it.
And then there is the suffering we have not experienced firsthand but cannot avoid seeing. A family in Nepal loses its home in an earthquake; a neighborhood elsewhere is damaged by a tornado; another community confronts flooding or fire. The events differ in origin, yet the need for rescue is recognizable wherever it occurs. The news follows us from morning to evening, giving us a window into the circumstances of people we will never meet. After many years, it becomes difficult to treat each report as an isolated exception to an otherwise secure promise of protection. I find myself asking whether someone must be unusually righteous, unusually faithful, or unusually favored to receive the intervention so often celebrated in religious testimony. And if there is such a qualification, who has told us what it is? If a person in need is not special enough to be rescued, are any of us entitled to expect special treatment when our own circumstances become desperate? I do not offer those questions as charges against God for having caused the events. I ask them because our descriptions of Godās power and protection seem to invite them.
Imagine a courtroom filled with witnesses, each describing what happened in a different place and at a different time. One speaks about a family lost in an accident; another recalls a fire that destroyed a neighborhood; another describes an illness, a violent crime, or a community trying to recover after disaster. The circumstances differ, and the people in the room do not all share the same religious convictions. Yet their testimony establishes one difficult fact: terrible things happened, and people needed help. I am not assembling this courtroom to accuse God of having caused these tragedies. That is not my argument. The witnesses are not attempting to prove that God started the fire, created the illness, or directed someone to commit an act of violence. They are asking another question. If God possesses the power to intervene, and if God is present and knows what is happening, why does the intervention so often seem absent?
Belief, Trust, and the Point at Which We Stop Asking
We understand this difference in our ordinary relationships. There may be someone in your family, among your friends, or in your professional life whom you know to be capable of helping you. Perhaps that person has helped you before. Perhaps you have seen that person help many other people. When you ask for assistance, you have good reason to think the person knows what you need and has the ability to respond. But suppose you ask repeatedly and that assistance does not come. At first you make excuses or assume the circumstances were unusual. Then you become disappointed. Eventually your expectations change. You may still respect the person and acknowledge everything that person can do. Nevertheless, you begin to make plans that no longer depend on receiving that personās help. The relationship has changed because reliance has changed.
Sometimes the end of that process is not an argument. It is simply a private decision: I do not need your help anymore. I will do it myself. Thanks, but no thanks. I do not offer that as Billy Crystalās explanation of his own words; it is the analogy his statement prompted in me. It helps describe the difference between deciding that someone is imaginary and deciding that someone is not dependable when you need assistance. A person may continue to acknowledge a Creator while reconsidering the expectation of personal rescue. What once felt like a conversation full of possibility begins to feel like speaking into silence. When we arrive at that point, the question is no longer confined to belief. It becomes a question about the terms on which we have understood our relationship with God.
There is a point in human relationships when asking why becomes less urgent than deciding whether to ask again. After repeated disappointment, people sometimes conclude that further petitions will only renew an expectation that experience has taught them not to trust. They may never receive an explanation for another personās failure to act; nevertheless, they may stop organizing their lives around the possibility that help will arrive. This is the part of Crystalās answer that has stayed with me. He was asked whether he had continued speaking with God, and he said he had not because he no longer trusted Him. He did not explain all of the beliefs, experiences, and reasoning that led him there, so I cannot claim to know his complete conclusion. But I can explore the human logic his words brought to mind: perhaps the deepest change is not that a person has finally answered the question ‘Why?’ but that the person has stopped expecting an answer or assistance. The individual begins taking responsibility for what must be done without counting on rescue.
I wonder how many people heard Crystalās words and recognized their own private experience. I do not know the answer. I know some believers have endured painful losses and become more devoted to prayer. Others continue to worship faithfully while privately admitting uncertainty about whether any intervention will come. Still others may stop making requests long before they stop participating in religious life. These are different responses, and they should not be confused with one another. Yet the possibility that many people have experienced this particular loss of reliance seems entirely worthy of examination. The important thing about Crystalās statement is not whether it represents a measurable majority. Its significance is that one person said publicly what others may recognize but rarely feel permitted to discuss openly.
The Father We Have Learned to Expect
Part of my difficulty arises from the language many of us have inherited. We have been taught to speak of God as Father. We have been taught that God provides, protects, hears petitions, and cares for those who turn to Him. The Gospel of Matthew presents Jesus teaching his followers to address God as Father and inviting them to ask, seek, and knock. I am referring to Matthew 6:9 and Matthew 7:7ā11 in the New King James Version.Ā² Such passages have profoundly shaped religious life, and understandably so. Fatherhood is not an abstract idea for human beings. It is a relationship from which we learn about care, responsibility, provision, guidance, and the responsibility to protect children when they cannot protect themselves. If we use that human relationship to understand God, we will naturally carry some of those expectations into our prayers.
The difficulty is that human experience also tells us that a fatherās love is not measured only by his capacity to fulfill every request. A responsible parent does not always remove every obstacle, and protection cannot honestly mean that children will never experience hardship. Thoughtful theologians have made those distinctions for centuries. But there is still a substantial distance between saying that God does not grant every request and confronting a situation in which a small act of intervention might prevent a devastating loss. If the divine Father knows, is present, and possesses the power that religious traditions attribute to Him, what should we reasonably expect when a family faces danger? We should not pretend this question is answered merely by reminding the grieving to have more faith. Nor should we casually insist that a tragedy demonstrates an absence of divine love. We must ask instead whether the expectations attached to the word Father have been understood accurately.
I am not trying to establish that God owes every individual a particular material reward. Nor am I suggesting that faithful people deserve better treatment than those who do not pray. In fact, I am troubled by the opposite assumption: that the person who survives an accident must have been selected for a special purpose while the people who did not survive were somehow less favored. A survivor may find genuine meaning in remaining alive, and I would not deny that personās gratitude. But gratitude is not an explanation for the entire event. If we call one outcome divine protection, we must be willing to confront the unanswered question of why that protection did not extend to everyone who needed it. Otherwise our account of divine intervention becomes selective: we celebrate the favorable outcome and leave the other outcomes outside the explanation.
The Questions Scripture Itself Permits
Some readers may assume that even raising these questions is disrespectful to God. I do not accept that assumption. The scriptures themselves contain voices protesting what appears to be divine absence. Psalm 44 recalls earlier acts of deliverance and then asks why God seems to have withdrawn from people who are suffering. The appeal in Psalm 44:23ā26, read in the New King James Version, is not a polite inquiry detached from lived hardship.Ā² It is the protest of people who remember one account of Godās activity and cannot reconcile it with their present experience. Job likewise refuses the easy explanation that suffering always corresponds to a personās wrongdoing. Those texts do not settle the matter of intervention. They demonstrate that the tension is ancient and that serious religious reflection has room for it.
There are also limits to what a single public statement can establish. Crystal did not present a philosophical system, and he did not announce that he had rejected the entirety of Jewish belief or practice. He spoke from his experience, in a conversation about loss. I am using that conversation as the starting point for a wider examination, not as permission to assign him convictions he did not express. The same caution applies to my own observations. I cannot establish that most religious people secretly feel the same way simply because the question seems so understandable to me. I can, however, make the question visible and invite an examination of the expectations underlying it. Our experience does not give us knowledge of everything God is or is not. It does give us reason to ask whether the religious picture on which we have relied adequately explains what we actually observe.
Life Before Belief, and the God We Have Learned to Expect
As I continue to think about Billy Crystalās statement, I find myself considering not only who he is and the life he has lived, but also his religious background, his personal understanding of God, and the reality that each of us experiences life differently. It is important to recognize that our experience of being alive comes before our ability to explain it. Long before any of us could read a sacred text, learn a doctrine, or give intellectual assent to a system of beliefs, we were already participating in life. Humanity was alive and asking questions about existence before the religious books and institutions familiar to us were established. Whatever our eventual explanation of the source of life, the experience itself was never waiting for our permission. I do not have to accept a creed to know that I am here. The truth of my existence does not depend upon whether I am able to describe it correctly.
I breathe, move, think, speak, and recognize that I am alive, even though I cannot command all the processes by which that life continues. I can put a hand on my chest and feel my heart beating, but I cannot simply order it to stop or to beat according to my wishes. I experience life within myself, and I encounter life all around me: in other human beings, in animals, in trees, and in forms too small to see without instruments. In my understanding, that reality points toward the Creator, the source of life itself. I recognize that another person can look at the same phenomena and arrive at a different philosophical or scientific interpretation. I am not asking readers to accept my conclusion as an experiment that has proved the existence of God. The question I am pursuing is more immediate: What relationship should human beings expect to have with the source of life when we do not fully understand either that source or our own existence?
We are dependent upon life before we know its origin, and yet we often behave as though our limited experience has equipped us to explain the character of the One we call its source. We borrow our expectations from familiar human relationships. We know what it means for a father or mother to care for a child, for someone we trust to provide assistance, for a person with authority to reward good conduct and punish wrongdoing. We then carry those expectations into our understanding of God. We imagine a relationship in which the Creator protects, provides, directs, and rescues us in ways we would hope a loving parent might. But if we do not truly understand the nature of the life we have received, how can we be so certain that the Creatorās relationship with us must operate according to these human arrangements? We may have confused the reality of our dependence upon life with a promise of intervention whenever our circumstances become dangerous or painful.
The habit of expecting rewards begins early. We tell children to clean their rooms, get good grades, follow instructions, show respect, and become good sons and daughters. Sometimes we promise a reward; sometimes we imply that good conduct will earn greater affection, freedom, approval, or protection. These are familiar features of parenting, and not all of them are harmful. But we can carry the same psychological arrangement into religion without examining it. We may begin to think that obedience, devotion, generosity, sacrifice, and service accumulate a kind of credit with God. When difficulty arrives, we hope that we have done enough to deserve favor. We may not describe it as a transaction, but in our expectations it can function like one: I have lived faithfully, prayed, given, and served, so surely the Creator will come through for me when I need help.
I have encountered different expressions of this outlook. Some people live with profound anxiety about salvation itself. They attend church, confess their failures, and still fear that if they died today they might not be accepted because they are not good enough, or because the last thing they did would not meet what they believe God requires. At another extreme are people who sincerely abandon wealth, comfort, and ordinary ambitions to devote themselves to serving others. They may travel on missions, live austerely, and give everything they possess to what they understand as God’s work. At yet another extreme, some identify their spiritual standing with visible success: their financial resources, position in the church, education, reputation, public service, or the impressive list of people they have helped. These paths are not morally equivalent, and I do not presume to know the motives of everyone who follows them. What concerns me is the expectation that might quietly attach to any of them: after all I have done, surely I have earned some measure of safety, deliverance, or special favor.
That way of imagining God can place us on a psychological roller coaster. When life goes well, we interpret success as approval; when life turns against us, we search ourselves for whatever we must have done wrong. We ask whether we failed to pray enough, give enough, serve enough, believe enough, or remain sufficiently obedient. Sometimes we are taught that we were placed here to be cared for by the One who created us. If that is so, we wonder why protection fails to arrive when the need is greatest. At other times we are taught that we were placed here to glorify God, accomplish great works, or demonstrate faith through service. Yet that understanding produces its own questions when a person trying to live faithfully loses a livelihood, a home, a family member, or health. If I am doing what I believe I was created to do, why does this happen to me? Why does it happen to those I love? Why does the wider world seem so full of people who need help that never comes?
I am not inventing these questions to make an argument against religion. As a minister of the gospel, I have heard versions of them from people dealing with circumstances more painful than words could adequately describe. I have been present at weddings and funerals, celebrated with families, and stood beside people trying to make sense of sudden and bewildering losses. Some sought an explanation; others were simply asking where God was when they needed Him. I am sixty-four, soon to be sixty-five, and I am not as old as Billy Crystal. But I have seen enough to understand why a man who has lived seventy-eight years, experienced personal loss, and witnessed so much suffering beyond his own household might say he has stopped trusting God. I was initially surprised that a person as recognizable as Crystal would express that conclusion on national television. I was not surprised that he might feel it. My own experience has taught me how deeply such questions can live inside people who still participate in religious life.
This conversation has also brought me back to an earlier essay I wrote, The Tree Knows.Ā³ That reflection began with the image in Psalm 1 of a tree growing beside a river, but it became something more personal: a meditation on a living thing participating in existence without having to construct a theological explanation for its own life. I imagined what the tree might know if it could speak. I observed that it receives sunlight, responds to wind, draws from the earth, and lives according to a nature I can study without completely inhabiting its experience. I was not claiming that a tree has human beliefs or that its silence proves a spiritual doctrine. I was trying to consider the possibility that other forms of life participate in a reality that human beings too easily complicate with explanations, fears, and expectations. What might a tree, an animal, or another living creature reveal about life simply by being alive? And what do we humans perhaps know through living that we refuse to accept because it does not fit the systems we have inherited?
I find myself wondering whether there is something like immortality wrapped inside mortality: not a conclusion I can demonstrate, but a possibility raised by the way life continues through changing forms while particular organisms appear, grow, and eventually disappear. We speak of God as eternal, beyond beginning and ending, and then look at our own fragile lives as though the two ideas must fit neatly into the same categories. I am asking whether life and its many forms are more mysterious than those categories allow. One hundred years from now, will I be here at all? What will have become of this body, of the experiences it has carried, and of the life that now animates it? I do not know. I am not presenting a new doctrine about what happens after death. I am recognizing how little I understand about the experience of being alive, and how much of my earlier confidence rested on explanations I inherited before I knew what questions to ask.
That may be the most important thing age is teaching me. I am changing my understanding, not issuing a declaration that God does not exist. I am reconsidering whether I have confused God with what I expected God to be. I am also learning to take seriously the experience of people who have reached a similar crossroads, even if they describe it differently or arrive at conclusions I would not share. I began that Sunday morning expecting to enjoy an interview with Billy Crystal. Instead, he caused me to examine assumptions I have carried for much of my life. I do not know where the inquiry will finally lead; the more I learn, the more I recognize how much I do not know. Sometimes I look at the certainty with which I once spoke and think, I don’t know a damn thing. But that is not a reason to stop asking. It is a reason to ask more carefully, beginning with the question that follows us into the next essay: if the God depicted in scripture intervened so visibly in human affairs, where is that intervention now?
Continue the Conversation
Thank you for taking the time to read and reflect. I write to help people think clearly about money, business, real estate, and lifeānot from theory, but from decades of lived experience. I invite you to read this essay as the beginning of a larger conversation about belief, trust, and the expectations we bring to our understanding of God.
If you are navigating a financial decision, building a business, considering homeownership, or simply trying to make better use of your time and resources, I invite you to engage further. You can read my blogs and essays free at EricFrazier.com, including the next installments of this series when they are published.
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References
Billy Crystal Says He Doesn’t Trust God
The Difference Between Belief and Reliance | Part One of Have We Created God in Our Own Image?
A Sunday Morning That Changed My Thinking
Billy Crystal did not say that God does not exist. He said, āI donāt trust Him. Too many bad things have happened.āĀ¹
That distinction stopped me.
On Sunday, October 11, I watched Tracy Smith interview Crystal about his new one-man Broadway show, 860. I had expected a conversation about acting, comedy, and the loss of his Pacific Palisades home in the January 2025 fire. Instead, the interview turned toward Godāand toward a question many people may carry privately but rarely state plainly: What does it mean to believe in God if you no longer trust God to help you?
Crystal was discussing 860, a show shaped by loss and other painful experiences. The conversation returned to 700 Sundays, his earlier one-man show about the limited number of Sundays he shared with his father before his fatherās death. In that production, he had spoken about conversations with God. Smith asked whether he still talked to God. Crystal answered, āNo, ācause I donāt trust Him. Too many bad things have happened.āĀ¹
I rewound the interview.
Here was a man I have admired for years, a public figure known for warmth, humor, and humanity, saying on national television what many religious people might hesitate to say even in private. I was surprised by the statement, but I was also surprised by how quickly I understood it. Crystal was not necessarily denying Godās existence. He was describing a breakdown in reliance. He may still believe God is there; he no longer expects God to show up for him.
Belief and trust are related, but they are not the same. Belief asks, Is God real? Trust asks, Can I depend on God when I need help? A person can answer the first question affirmatively and the second negatively. We understand that distinction in ordinary relationships. We may know that someone exists, recognize that personās abilities, and remember that personās past accomplishments, yet still decide not to rely on that person when circumstances become difficult. Knowledge of someoneās existence does not automatically produce confidence in that personās dependability.
Crystal is seventy-eight years old. That matters to me, not because age automatically produces wisdom, but because seventy-eight years contain enough experience to change what a person expects from life. Crystal has described losing his father when he was young, losing the home that held the memories of his family, and enduring the loss of people dear to him. He has also lived long enough to watch the people around him encounter experiences they would never have chosen. The statement I heard was not the challenge of a teenager casually rejecting an inherited belief. It sounded like the conclusion of someone whose expectations had been tested by a lifetime of loss.
I do not know Billy Crystal personally. I cannot speak for the whole of his Jewish faith, his private beliefs, or what he intends for his relationship with God tomorrow. His interview does not give me that authority. I can say only what I heard: he did not say God does not exist. He said he does not trust God. That difference reaches far beyond one interview.
It raises the central question of this essay: What happens when a person continues to believe in God but no longer relies on God for protection, intervention, or help?
I have spent much of my life thinking about that question. I have experienced loss, served as a minister of the gospel, stood beside grieving families, and listened to people ask where God was when they needed Him. I have also watched the suffering of people I will never meet through the constant stream of news. These experiences have taught me that the crisis of faith is not always a crisis of belief. Sometimes it is a crisis of trust.
That is the distinction I want to examine.
What Experience Has Taught Me
I have lost my father and my mother. My father died after living with heart disease and lung cancer. I have known people whose lives ended in automobile accidents and family members whose lives were overtaken by illness. A woman who once worked for me lost her life to domestic violence. These are not academic illustrations that I selected to make a philosophical argument more dramatic. They are part of the human experience through which I have come to understand grief, uncertainty, and the limitations of what we can control. I have never lost my home and everything in it to a fire, as Crystal and his family did. I cannot claim to know that particular experience. I can recognize the scale of such a loss, and I can understand why someone who has endured it might ask what became of the protection and help that people so often associate with God.
I have also served as a minister of the gospel, and that responsibility has brought me into some of the most joyful and most difficult moments people experience. I have participated in weddings where families gathered with every expectation of a hopeful future, and I have conducted funerals where families struggled to understand how that future had changed so quickly. I have counseled people after acts of violence, including the needless loss of a young man and the killing of a spouse. I have listened to people whose circumstances were overturned by the loss of work, a home, or their health, and I have seen the grief that follows the death of a loved one. The prospect of losing a child may be among the most agonizing experiences a parent can contemplate, and I would never presume to explain that loss away with a convenient religious answer. In these circumstances, the question people bring to a minister is not always a technical question about doctrine. Often it is an earnest and bewildered question about why help did not come and where God was when He was needed. I have witnessed the weight of that question in people who were not trying to reject their faith.
Even those who have not experienced a particular tragedy are witnesses to the suffering of others. The news reaches us in the morning and follows us into the evening. We see the aftermath of storms, wildfires, earthquakes, accidents, violence, and the destruction of homes and livelihoods. We watch families lose people they love. We see children and older people confronted by circumstances they did not choose and could not reasonably prevent. A person cannot watch these events indefinitely without eventually asking questions that are both moral and deeply personal. Where is God in all of this? Why was this not stopped? Why did help not arrive before the loss became irreversible? Where is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God described in the accounts of Moses and the deliverance of Israel? Those questions are not evidence of indifference toward religion. They arise precisely because religion has taught us to expect something from the Creator.
My perspective is therefore shaped by both sides of the pulpit. I know the language of comfort used in prayer and worship, and I know what it feels like to stand beside someone when those familiar words no longer seem adequate. I also know that people do not always ask their hardest questions aloud, especially when their religious community prizes certainty and treats doubt as weakness. We may urge someone to have faith and mean it sincerely, yet fail to recognize that the person is not disputing the existence of God at all. The person may be looking at a lost loved one, a home destroyed, or a family brought to the edge of despair, and wondering why the God whose power they have been taught to celebrate did not intervene. That is not a request for a sophisticated philosophical system; it is a question about the meaning of a relationship. If the person before us is struggling with that question, repeating the language of certainty may be the beginning of a conversation, but it cannot honestly be the end of it.
And then there is the suffering we have not experienced firsthand but cannot avoid seeing. A family in Nepal loses its home in an earthquake; a neighborhood elsewhere is damaged by a tornado; another community confronts flooding or fire. The events differ in origin, yet the need for rescue is recognizable wherever it occurs. The news follows us from morning to evening, giving us a window into the circumstances of people we will never meet. After many years, it becomes difficult to treat each report as an isolated exception to an otherwise secure promise of protection. I find myself asking whether someone must be unusually righteous, unusually faithful, or unusually favored to receive the intervention so often celebrated in religious testimony. And if there is such a qualification, who has told us what it is? If a person in need is not special enough to be rescued, are any of us entitled to expect special treatment when our own circumstances become desperate? I do not offer those questions as charges against God for having caused the events. I ask them because our descriptions of Godās power and protection seem to invite them.
Imagine a courtroom filled with witnesses, each describing what happened in a different place and at a different time. One speaks about a family lost in an accident; another recalls a fire that destroyed a neighborhood; another describes an illness, a violent crime, or a community trying to recover after disaster. The circumstances differ, and the people in the room do not all share the same religious convictions. Yet their testimony establishes one difficult fact: terrible things happened, and people needed help. I am not assembling this courtroom to accuse God of having caused these tragedies. That is not my argument. The witnesses are not attempting to prove that God started the fire, created the illness, or directed someone to commit an act of violence. They are asking another question. If God possesses the power to intervene, and if God is present and knows what is happening, why does the intervention so often seem absent?
Belief, Trust, and the Point at Which We Stop Asking
We understand this difference in our ordinary relationships. There may be someone in your family, among your friends, or in your professional life whom you know to be capable of helping you. Perhaps that person has helped you before. Perhaps you have seen that person help many other people. When you ask for assistance, you have good reason to think the person knows what you need and has the ability to respond. But suppose you ask repeatedly and that assistance does not come. At first you make excuses or assume the circumstances were unusual. Then you become disappointed. Eventually your expectations change. You may still respect the person and acknowledge everything that person can do. Nevertheless, you begin to make plans that no longer depend on receiving that personās help. The relationship has changed because reliance has changed.
Sometimes the end of that process is not an argument. It is simply a private decision: I do not need your help anymore. I will do it myself. Thanks, but no thanks. I do not offer that as Billy Crystalās explanation of his own words; it is the analogy his statement prompted in me. It helps describe the difference between deciding that someone is imaginary and deciding that someone is not dependable when you need assistance. A person may continue to acknowledge a Creator while reconsidering the expectation of personal rescue. What once felt like a conversation full of possibility begins to feel like speaking into silence. When we arrive at that point, the question is no longer confined to belief. It becomes a question about the terms on which we have understood our relationship with God.
There is a point in human relationships when asking why becomes less urgent than deciding whether to ask again. After repeated disappointment, people sometimes conclude that further petitions will only renew an expectation that experience has taught them not to trust. They may never receive an explanation for another personās failure to act; nevertheless, they may stop organizing their lives around the possibility that help will arrive. This is the part of Crystalās answer that has stayed with me. He was asked whether he had continued speaking with God, and he said he had not because he no longer trusted Him. He did not explain all of the beliefs, experiences, and reasoning that led him there, so I cannot claim to know his complete conclusion. But I can explore the human logic his words brought to mind: perhaps the deepest change is not that a person has finally answered the question ‘Why?’ but that the person has stopped expecting an answer or assistance. The individual begins taking responsibility for what must be done without counting on rescue.
I wonder how many people heard Crystalās words and recognized their own private experience. I do not know the answer. I know some believers have endured painful losses and become more devoted to prayer. Others continue to worship faithfully while privately admitting uncertainty about whether any intervention will come. Still others may stop making requests long before they stop participating in religious life. These are different responses, and they should not be confused with one another. Yet the possibility that many people have experienced this particular loss of reliance seems entirely worthy of examination. The important thing about Crystalās statement is not whether it represents a measurable majority. Its significance is that one person said publicly what others may recognize but rarely feel permitted to discuss openly.
The Father We Have Learned to Expect
Part of my difficulty arises from the language many of us have inherited. We have been taught to speak of God as Father. We have been taught that God provides, protects, hears petitions, and cares for those who turn to Him. The Gospel of Matthew presents Jesus teaching his followers to address God as Father and inviting them to ask, seek, and knock. I am referring to Matthew 6:9 and Matthew 7:7ā11 in the New King James Version.Ā² Such passages have profoundly shaped religious life, and understandably so. Fatherhood is not an abstract idea for human beings. It is a relationship from which we learn about care, responsibility, provision, guidance, and the responsibility to protect children when they cannot protect themselves. If we use that human relationship to understand God, we will naturally carry some of those expectations into our prayers.
The difficulty is that human experience also tells us that a fatherās love is not measured only by his capacity to fulfill every request. A responsible parent does not always remove every obstacle, and protection cannot honestly mean that children will never experience hardship. Thoughtful theologians have made those distinctions for centuries. But there is still a substantial distance between saying that God does not grant every request and confronting a situation in which a small act of intervention might prevent a devastating loss. If the divine Father knows, is present, and possesses the power that religious traditions attribute to Him, what should we reasonably expect when a family faces danger? We should not pretend this question is answered merely by reminding the grieving to have more faith. Nor should we casually insist that a tragedy demonstrates an absence of divine love. We must ask instead whether the expectations attached to the word Father have been understood accurately.
I am not trying to establish that God owes every individual a particular material reward. Nor am I suggesting that faithful people deserve better treatment than those who do not pray. In fact, I am troubled by the opposite assumption: that the person who survives an accident must have been selected for a special purpose while the people who did not survive were somehow less favored. A survivor may find genuine meaning in remaining alive, and I would not deny that personās gratitude. But gratitude is not an explanation for the entire event. If we call one outcome divine protection, we must be willing to confront the unanswered question of why that protection did not extend to everyone who needed it. Otherwise our account of divine intervention becomes selective: we celebrate the favorable outcome and leave the other outcomes outside the explanation.
The Questions Scripture Itself Permits
Some readers may assume that even raising these questions is disrespectful to God. I do not accept that assumption. The scriptures themselves contain voices protesting what appears to be divine absence. Psalm 44 recalls earlier acts of deliverance and then asks why God seems to have withdrawn from people who are suffering. The appeal in Psalm 44:23ā26, read in the New King James Version, is not a polite inquiry detached from lived hardship.Ā² It is the protest of people who remember one account of Godās activity and cannot reconcile it with their present experience. Job likewise refuses the easy explanation that suffering always corresponds to a personās wrongdoing. Those texts do not settle the matter of intervention. They demonstrate that the tension is ancient and that serious religious reflection has room for it.
There are also limits to what a single public statement can establish. Crystal did not present a philosophical system, and he did not announce that he had rejected the entirety of Jewish belief or practice. He spoke from his experience, in a conversation about loss. I am using that conversation as the starting point for a wider examination, not as permission to assign him convictions he did not express. The same caution applies to my own observations. I cannot establish that most religious people secretly feel the same way simply because the question seems so understandable to me. I can, however, make the question visible and invite an examination of the expectations underlying it. Our experience does not give us knowledge of everything God is or is not. It does give us reason to ask whether the religious picture on which we have relied adequately explains what we actually observe.
Life Before Belief, and the God We Have Learned to Expect
As I continue to think about Billy Crystalās statement, I find myself considering not only who he is and the life he has lived, but also his religious background, his personal understanding of God, and the reality that each of us experiences life differently. It is important to recognize that our experience of being alive comes before our ability to explain it. Long before any of us could read a sacred text, learn a doctrine, or give intellectual assent to a system of beliefs, we were already participating in life. Humanity was alive and asking questions about existence before the religious books and institutions familiar to us were established. Whatever our eventual explanation of the source of life, the experience itself was never waiting for our permission. I do not have to accept a creed to know that I am here. The truth of my existence does not depend upon whether I am able to describe it correctly.
I breathe, move, think, speak, and recognize that I am alive, even though I cannot command all the processes by which that life continues. I can put a hand on my chest and feel my heart beating, but I cannot simply order it to stop or to beat according to my wishes. I experience life within myself, and I encounter life all around me: in other human beings, in animals, in trees, and in forms too small to see without instruments. In my understanding, that reality points toward the Creator, the source of life itself. I recognize that another person can look at the same phenomena and arrive at a different philosophical or scientific interpretation. I am not asking readers to accept my conclusion as an experiment that has proved the existence of God. The question I am pursuing is more immediate: What relationship should human beings expect to have with the source of life when we do not fully understand either that source or our own existence?
We are dependent upon life before we know its origin, and yet we often behave as though our limited experience has equipped us to explain the character of the One we call its source. We borrow our expectations from familiar human relationships. We know what it means for a father or mother to care for a child, for someone we trust to provide assistance, for a person with authority to reward good conduct and punish wrongdoing. We then carry those expectations into our understanding of God. We imagine a relationship in which the Creator protects, provides, directs, and rescues us in ways we would hope a loving parent might. But if we do not truly understand the nature of the life we have received, how can we be so certain that the Creatorās relationship with us must operate according to these human arrangements? We may have confused the reality of our dependence upon life with a promise of intervention whenever our circumstances become dangerous or painful.
The habit of expecting rewards begins early. We tell children to clean their rooms, get good grades, follow instructions, show respect, and become good sons and daughters. Sometimes we promise a reward; sometimes we imply that good conduct will earn greater affection, freedom, approval, or protection. These are familiar features of parenting, and not all of them are harmful. But we can carry the same psychological arrangement into religion without examining it. We may begin to think that obedience, devotion, generosity, sacrifice, and service accumulate a kind of credit with God. When difficulty arrives, we hope that we have done enough to deserve favor. We may not describe it as a transaction, but in our expectations it can function like one: I have lived faithfully, prayed, given, and served, so surely the Creator will come through for me when I need help.
I have encountered different expressions of this outlook. Some people live with profound anxiety about salvation itself. They attend church, confess their failures, and still fear that if they died today they might not be accepted because they are not good enough, or because the last thing they did would not meet what they believe God requires. At another extreme are people who sincerely abandon wealth, comfort, and ordinary ambitions to devote themselves to serving others. They may travel on missions, live austerely, and give everything they possess to what they understand as God’s work. At yet another extreme, some identify their spiritual standing with visible success: their financial resources, position in the church, education, reputation, public service, or the impressive list of people they have helped. These paths are not morally equivalent, and I do not presume to know the motives of everyone who follows them. What concerns me is the expectation that might quietly attach to any of them: after all I have done, surely I have earned some measure of safety, deliverance, or special favor.
That way of imagining God can place us on a psychological roller coaster. When life goes well, we interpret success as approval; when life turns against us, we search ourselves for whatever we must have done wrong. We ask whether we failed to pray enough, give enough, serve enough, believe enough, or remain sufficiently obedient. Sometimes we are taught that we were placed here to be cared for by the One who created us. If that is so, we wonder why protection fails to arrive when the need is greatest. At other times we are taught that we were placed here to glorify God, accomplish great works, or demonstrate faith through service. Yet that understanding produces its own questions when a person trying to live faithfully loses a livelihood, a home, a family member, or health. If I am doing what I believe I was created to do, why does this happen to me? Why does it happen to those I love? Why does the wider world seem so full of people who need help that never comes?
I am not inventing these questions to make an argument against religion. As a minister of the gospel, I have heard versions of them from people dealing with circumstances more painful than words could adequately describe. I have been present at weddings and funerals, celebrated with families, and stood beside people trying to make sense of sudden and bewildering losses. Some sought an explanation; others were simply asking where God was when they needed Him. I am sixty-four, soon to be sixty-five, and I am not as old as Billy Crystal. But I have seen enough to understand why a man who has lived seventy-eight years, experienced personal loss, and witnessed so much suffering beyond his own household might say he has stopped trusting God. I was initially surprised that a person as recognizable as Crystal would express that conclusion on national television. I was not surprised that he might feel it. My own experience has taught me how deeply such questions can live inside people who still participate in religious life.
This conversation has also brought me back to an earlier essay I wrote, The Tree Knows.Ā³ That reflection began with the image in Psalm 1 of a tree growing beside a river, but it became something more personal: a meditation on a living thing participating in existence without having to construct a theological explanation for its own life. I imagined what the tree might know if it could speak. I observed that it receives sunlight, responds to wind, draws from the earth, and lives according to a nature I can study without completely inhabiting its experience. I was not claiming that a tree has human beliefs or that its silence proves a spiritual doctrine. I was trying to consider the possibility that other forms of life participate in a reality that human beings too easily complicate with explanations, fears, and expectations. What might a tree, an animal, or another living creature reveal about life simply by being alive? And what do we humans perhaps know through living that we refuse to accept because it does not fit the systems we have inherited?
I find myself wondering whether there is something like immortality wrapped inside mortality: not a conclusion I can demonstrate, but a possibility raised by the way life continues through changing forms while particular organisms appear, grow, and eventually disappear. We speak of God as eternal, beyond beginning and ending, and then look at our own fragile lives as though the two ideas must fit neatly into the same categories. I am asking whether life and its many forms are more mysterious than those categories allow. One hundred years from now, will I be here at all? What will have become of this body, of the experiences it has carried, and of the life that now animates it? I do not know. I am not presenting a new doctrine about what happens after death. I am recognizing how little I understand about the experience of being alive, and how much of my earlier confidence rested on explanations I inherited before I knew what questions to ask.
That may be the most important thing age is teaching me. I am changing my understanding, not issuing a declaration that God does not exist. I am reconsidering whether I have confused God with what I expected God to be. I am also learning to take seriously the experience of people who have reached a similar crossroads, even if they describe it differently or arrive at conclusions I would not share. I began that Sunday morning expecting to enjoy an interview with Billy Crystal. Instead, he caused me to examine assumptions I have carried for much of my life. I do not know where the inquiry will finally lead; the more I learn, the more I recognize how much I do not know. Sometimes I look at the certainty with which I once spoke and think, I don’t know a damn thing. But that is not a reason to stop asking. It is a reason to ask more carefully, beginning with the question that follows us into the next essay: if the God depicted in scripture intervened so visibly in human affairs, where is that intervention now?
Continue the Conversation
Thank you for taking the time to read and reflect. I write to help people think clearly about money, business, real estate, and lifeānot from theory, but from decades of lived experience. I invite you to read this essay as the beginning of a larger conversation about belief, trust, and the expectations we bring to our understanding of God.
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