What It Means to Find God in the Trenches

I want to tell you what the title of my book actually means. Because it is not what most people assume when they first hear it.

It is not a story about finding God after the hard thing was over. It is not a testimony about how I went through something terrible and came out the other side with a tidy lesson and a grateful heart.

It is a story about finding God in the middle. In the mess. In the season when nothing was resolved and nothing was healed and I was still very much in it.

That is the trench. And that is where He met me.

What a trench actually is

A trench is not a destination. Nobody chooses to be in one. It is where you end up when life does not go the way you planned, when loss stacks and grief compiles and the version of yourself you thought you knew starts to feel like a stranger.

I have been in several trenches. The loneliness of deployment. The grief of losing my mom. The particular, wordless heartbreak of loving children I could not bring home. The loss of a business I had poured myself into. The slow, quiet grief of losing pieces of my identity along the way.

None of those things were part of my plan. But all of them became part of my story. And it was in all of them, not after them, that I started to understand something about God I could not have learned any other way.

The God I thought I knew

I grew up in faith. I knew the right answers. I had the Sunday school version of a God who blesses and protects and answers prayers, and I believed it genuinely, as genuinely as a person can believe something they have never been forced to test.

And then life tested it.

And the version of God I had been carrying turned out to be too small for what I was walking through. Not because He was not real. Because the version of Him I was holding was one-dimensional. Manageable. Safe.

The real God is none of those things.

The God I found in the trenches is the one who sits in the dark with you. Who does not flinch at your anger. Who does not leave when your faith gets ugly. Who is present in the silence even when you cannot feel Him there. Who is doing something in the waiting that you will not be able to see until much later.

That God is harder to hold. But He is so much more real.

Finding is not the same as arriving

I want to be clear about something, because I think it matters.

Finding God in the trenches does not mean arriving at peace. It does not mean the grief is gone or the loss is resolved or the hard thing stopped being hard.

Finding means locating. It means looking for something and discovering it is closer than you thought.

In my hardest seasons, finding God looked like this: it looked like a moment of unexpected peace in the middle of grief. A scripture that felt written specifically for what I was carrying. A friend who showed up without being asked. A quiet knowing, underneath all of the noise and pain and uncertainty, that I was not alone.

That is finding. It is not a destination. It is a practice. A choosing, over and over, to look for Him in the place you are, not the place you wish you were.

What the trenches taught me

I would not have chosen any of it. I want to say that honestly, because I am not interested in wrapping my story in a bow that makes it look cleaner than it was.

I would not have chosen the deployments or the losses or the grief that stacked until I could barely carry it. I would not have chosen the seasons of silence, the prayers that seemed to go unanswered, the moments when faith felt like something I was holding together with sheer stubbornness.

But I also would not trade what I found there.

I found a God who is bigger than my doubt. I found a version of myself who is stronger and softer than I knew. I found that surrender is not weakness, that honesty is the beginning of healing, and that the trenches are not where God leaves us. They are where He meets us.

An invitation

If you are in a trench right now, I want you to know two things.

First, you are not alone. The God who met me in mine is in yours, even when you cannot feel Him. Especially then.

Second, there is still beauty here. Not the kind that erases the pain. The kind that lives alongside it. The kind that whispers, in the middle of everything that has not yet been resolved, that you are still held.

You can get the book wherever books are sold. You can invite Jen to speak at your church, conference, or podcast. And you can learn more about Jen’s story any time.

You do not have to figure this out alone. And you do not have to have it together to begin.