If God is For Me, I Will Always Keep Going: Finding Faith When Grief, Loss, and Fear Come Against You

I didn’t open my father’s Bible looking for comfort. I opened it because grief has a way of pulling you back to the places where love once lived. I’m ashamed to admit that it was almost a decade when I decided to open his Bible. By then, I was experiencing a different kind of grief, I was fired after twenty long years at my job. No warning, no severance, just fired on a beautiful October morning. Getting fired from a job is a different kind of grief. There are no casseroles or condolences, just a lot of tears and confusion.

My father’s Bible is worn in the way only a life of faith can wear something down, creased pages, notes scribbled in the margins, faded yellow highlights, verses underlined in pen that was pressed hard, like he needed the words to stay put. I close my eyes and slowly run my fingers along the passages he returned to repeatedly, wondering what he was carrying when he read them.

That’s when I saw it.

“If God is for us, who can be against us?” Romans 8:31

I didn’t feel triumphant when I read it. I felt vulnerable, broken, and exhausted. I was angry, sad, enraged, all the emotions you feel when a job of almost two decades throws you away like yesterday’s trash. Losing my dad after a long battle with cancer made me question my faith. Losing career that became my identity and gave me structure really made me question my faith. My mind was looping through memories I couldn’t escape. My faith, suddenly fragile in a way I had never known. My grief didn’t arrive gently; it came like a force that knocked the breath out of me and dared me to try to stand against it.

“Keep going” felt like a cruel suggestion on the days I could barley get out of bed. I struggled to define myself in a world where the one thing that gave me structure had been ripped away from me. Not only was I unemployed, but my body was also betraying me. My lupus reminded me who was really in charge, and it wasn’t me anymore. Nothing made sense. I felt blindsided. I felt betrayed.

Romans 8:31 didn’t land as a victory slogan. It landed as a question. If God is for me…then why does the world feel so unbearably quiet now?

Grief has a way of changing how Scripture speaks. Verses you once read with confidence start whispering instead of shouting. But slowly, I began to realize this verse wasn’t promising me that my grief would vanish, that my body would obey me, or that the world would suddenly make sense. This verse is a reminder that even when everything is against you. Nothing-not loss, not illness, not fear-will get the final word.

For the first time in a very long time, I let the idea sink in: God is for me. He is not for a perfect me, not for a me that can stand tall on her own, but for the me who could barely breathe in the darkness.

That distinction mattered.

Grief came against me. Loneliness, doubt, fear, they all came against me in the middle of the night, when sleep refused to come and the reality of my loss felt too big to survive. I felt like a failure, an embarrassment. In the darkness of the night breathing felt impossible. Survival felt distant. Everything felt unbearable.

But none of them got the final word.

Keep going didn’t mean I was strong. It meant I was still breathing. It meant I was/am willing to show up another day even when my faith felt fragile and hope felt borrowed. It meant that trusting God being “for me” didn’t look like a rescue from my pain, but His presence inside my pain, quietly holding me as I walk my new terrifying path.

I know now that my dad knew that. I know now that’s why he highlighted it.

My father’s faith was never loud. It was steady and strong. The kind that continues reading even when answers don’t come quickly. The kind that holds on not because life is easy, but because letting go would cost more.

And now, when I look at that verse, I read it differently. If God is for us, who can be against us? Not as a challenge to the world, but as a gentle reminder to my own broken heart.

Grief doesn’t get to decide my ending. Loss doesn’t get to rewrite the truth of who God is. Pain may be walking with me right now, but it will never lead.

Keeping going, I’ve learned is an act of faith. Not the polished kind. The raw kind. The kind that shows up wounded, messy, and says, “I am still here.”

And some days that is courage.

So, I choose to keep going, not because I am fearless, but because I am loved. Not because nothing stands against me, but because nothing stands above the God who goes always before me.

My father’s Bible sits open now, not as a relic of the past, but as a witness to what endures.

Grief tried to stop me. Doubt tried to shake me. Fear tried to silence me. None of them won.

Because if God is for us, I will always keep going.