E24 | When “Why” Becomes the Room You Live In | I Never Got My Why - Part 2

Why do some questions stay with us long after the moment that created them?

In Episode 2 of I Never Got My Why series, Tennille explores what happens when heartbreak, disappointment, and unanswered prayers stop being something we experience and start becoming the emotional place we live.

Through the story of Naomi in Ruth 1, personal reflections, and an honest conversation about the gap between knowing truth and trusting it, this episode is for the woman who feels stuck in grief, waiting, or the unanswered question she cannot seem to move past.

Inside this episode:

• Why grief can become an emotional home

• The story of Naomi and what Scripture teaches about bitterness

• The difference between visiting pain and living there

• Functioning publicly while grieving privately

• The gap between the mind and the heart

• Why slow healing is not spiritual failure

• Hope for women who still have unanswered questions

Transcript

Speaker 0:00

Have you ever looked up and realized you've been living in the same question for months? Maybe years? You wake up with it, drive to work with it, carry it into conversations, bring it into church, bring it into prayer, bring it into bed at night. Why? why did this happen? Why didn't God stop it? Why can't I move on? Eventually, the question stops being a question. It becomes a room, and some of us have been living there so long we forgot there was a door I want to describe something, and I want you to tell me if you recognize it. Not out loud, Just inside your mind. It starts with the question. You are asking why? Genuinely asking, hoping something will shift, hoping the answer will come, hoping one morning you will wake up and the weight will be lighter. And then slowly, without you deciding to, the question stops being a question. It becomes a room. You know the walls, you know the corners, and you know exactly what thought leads to which other thought. You've walked this floor so many times, you could do it in the dark, and in some seasons you do. For me, sometimes that room followed me everywhere, into staff meetings, into lesson plans, into classrooms full of middle schoolers who still thought my story was headed toward a wedding. Meanwhile, I was trying to teach story arcs and character identity while privately grieving a life I thought I was about to have. To be carrying grief in spaces where people are still celebrating the version of your story that no longer exists. This is a particular kind of heartbreak. because if the question becomes your home, eventually it starts deciding what you believe about God, about yourself, and about the future. You've walked this floor so many times you could do it in the dark, and in some seasons you do I'm not here to rush you out of that room. I want to say that clearly and plainly because the world is very quick to tell you that staying in pain too long is a spiritual problem. That if you just had more faith or prayed more specifically or found the right verse or finally forgave, you would not still be here. That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that there's a difference between visiting the room and living there. And it matters because one of them has a door, and one of them has started to feel like it does not. The woman who is visiting the room goes in, feels the weight of the question, and comes back out again. Not perfectly, not without tears, but she comes out. the woman who has moved in doesn't always know when it happened. She didn't decide to stay. She just looked up one day and realized she hadn't left in a very long time. And if that is where you are, I need you to hear something before I say anything else. God didn't correct Naomi for naming her bitterness out loud. Scripture feels different when you stop reading it like a finished story and start reading it like people who were living in the middle of one. You may know the story of Ruth. The whole book carries her name. But before Ruth ever entered the picture, there was Naomi. In Ruth chapter one, Naomi returns to Bethlehem after losing her husband and both of her sons. She was in a foreign land with two daughter-in-laws and no plan and no explanation. And when she decided to return home to Bethlehem, the women of the city saw her coming and called out to her. They said, "Is that, is this Naomi?" And she stopped them. She said, "Do not call me Naomi. Call me Mara." Naomi means pleasant. Mara means bitter. She was so honest about her grief that she renamed herself after it. She changed her own name to Bitter publicly in front of her community because she needed her pain to have a name, and she wasn't going to pretend otherwise. And the book of Ruth didn't stop there to correct her. It didn't insert a narrator saying, "Now Naomi was wrong to feel this way." It, it didn't rush her to the next chapter where things got better. The story kept moving with her in it, bitter name and all. so I think about that a lot when I'm talking to women who feel like their grief has gone on too long. Like they should be further along by now. Like their faith should have moved them past this already. Naomi wasn't disqualified from the story because she named her bitterness out loud. She walked right into the rest of the story with it, and the rest of her story is one of the most beautiful turns in all of scripture. But we're not there yet, and that's the point. Let me tell you about the gap. There is a gap that nobody talks about enough, And I think it's responsible for a lot of unnecessary shame in women who are trying to heal. The gap is this. Your mind can know the right answer while your heart is still asking the wrong question. Your Bible study teacher told you the truth. Your mentor told you the truth your pastor preached the truth, and you understood it. You could repeat it back. You could even share it with someone else who needed it, and you went home and cried for the same reason you cried the weeks before. I can't tell you how many times I sat in Bible study hearing exactly what I needed to hear, nodding, underlining scripture, writing notes in the margins, and then driving home with the same ache sitting in my chest. Not because the truth was wrong, but because my heart was moving slower than my mind. That's not hypocrisy. That's not spiritual failure. That's not a sign that the Word is not working. That is the gap between the mind and the heart, and the gap is real, and the heart moves slower than the mind every single time. Proverbs chapter three, verse five says, "Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding." The heart and the understanding are named separately in that verse because they are not the same thing, because they move at different speeds, because the person who wrote that knew that a woman could understand truth in her head and still be working on trusting it with her chest. Your mind knew. Your heart was still catching up. I remember standing in the parking lot after Bible study while my Bible study teacher stayed with me long after everyone else had already gone home. And she was patient with me, so patient, trying to help me untangle the hurt, trying to help me see what God was doing underneath all of it. The truth is, all I wanted was my why. I wanted the relationship restored. I wanted the ache to stop. I wanted the story to go back to the version I had already imagined in my head. And there were other moments too, sitting across from my mentor while she gently tried to help me get to the deeper root of why this heartbreak had undone me so completely. And I could hear her. I could understand the words she was saying. But my heart was still sitting Inside the question. That is a gap. The gap between hearing truth And emotionally being able to live inside it yet. And And maybe that's where you still are. I moved into the room for a while. I'm not going to give you every detail today because this series has space for that to unfold slowly. But I want you to know that I've stood where you are standing. I've sat in services where the teaching was exactly what I needed and gone home to the same unresolved ache. I've journaled the right answers. I've prayed the right prayers. And then I let the question find me again in the quiet. The room is real. I know what its walls feel like. There were mornings I stood at my classroom door smiling at students while my coworkers looked at me and immediately knew something was not right, that I was not okay. Even with the smile, even with the lesson plans printed, even with me trying so hard to function normally. Grief has a way of leaking through people No matter how carefully they try to hold themselves together. Part of what exhausted me most during that season was trying to look okay while emotionally living somewhere completely different. I know what it feels like when the room starts feeling familiar, when the grief becomes routine, when the overthinking becomes muscle memory, when the pain starts arranging furniture inside your life and calling itself home. And I also know there's a door, not because I was spiritually stronger than you, but because the God who sees does not leave women in rooms forever. We are going to find that together over the next episodes in the series, but not today. Today, we are just naming where you are So I want to check in on something before I close today. If today's episode felt a little too familiar, I created something for you. It's called the I Never Got My Why guide. I wrote it for the woman who keeps circling the same question and cannot seem to find her way out of it. It's free, and you can download it through the link in the show notes. And if you would like to explore these conversations in community, registration is also open For the Why did this happen? Bible study. Throughout June, we'll be walking through these questions together, looking at what Scripture says about disappointment, waiting, grief, and the stories God is still writing. You'll find that link in the show notes as well. if this conversation resonated with you, come join me on Substack. That's where I'll share essays and reflections for women walking through seasons just like this one. The link is in the show notes. And if you have a friend or someone that you know that needs to hear this podcast episode, please feel free to share it. And I'll be back Tuesday with episode three. You are not the only one who asked. Because when you start reading Scripture closely, you'll discover that some of the God, some of God's most faithful people ask the same questions you're asking right now. I'll see you Tuesday. And before you leave, I want you to know you are seen even here, even now, even in the why