When God Shows Up in the Forgotten Hearing Aids

Three wise men brought gold, frankincense, and myrrh to honor a king. I brought my 97-year-old mother to the audiologist without her hearing aids.

Three of us had one job—the aide, me, and Mama herself—and we all failed. Sitting in that car, halfway to the appointment, I felt the weight of trying to be omniscient, omnipresent, and never-failing in someone else’s life. The exhaustion hit deeper than bone.

Here’s what nobody talks about when you’re rebuilding after a devastating loss: You don’t just lose the person or the life you had. You lose the illusion that you were ever in control. And in that terrifying space between who you were and who you’re becoming, God does something unexpected. He doesn’t fix your mistakes. He inhabits them.

The God We Didn’t Expect

The Jews waited centuries for a warrior king to overthrow oppression and establish dominion. Instead, God sent a baby who couldn’t hold His own head up. Mary needed Joseph’s protection. Joseph needed divine dreams to know when to flee. The infant King of Kings needed a feeding trough because nobody had room for what God was doing. This is Emmanuel—God with us—and He arrived through insufficiency, not despite it.

We’ve been taught that strength means managing everything independently, that asking for help signals weakness. “God helps those who help themselves,” we recite, as if Benjamin Franklin’s quote were Scripture. But real Scripture—Isaiah 7:14 to be exact—promised something radically different: “The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.” Not God above us orchestrating, or God ahead of us leading, but God with us in the mess.

The forgotten hearing aids weren’t about poor planning. They exposed my delusion that perfect caregiving could somehow prove my worth or prevent more loss. But here’s the prophetic truth that will set you free: God isn’t waiting for you to get it right. He’s already present in your getting it wrong.

When Self-Sufficiency Becomes Sin

Let me tell you something the church rarely says: Sometimes our self-sufficiency isn’t strength—it’s idolatry. We’ve made ourselves God in other people’s lives, and we’re collapsing under the weight of divinity we were never meant to carry.

For Black women especially, this cuts to the bone. Generational trauma taught us vulnerability equals danger, we must be everything to everyone to survive systems designed to break us, and people couldn’t be trusted. Our ancestors survived through supernatural self-sufficiency. But what served them in oppression is slowly killing us in freedom. We’re exhausted not from our responsibilities but from refusing to let God carry them with us.

God’s Creative Process™ doesn’t start with our competence—it starts with chaos and emptiness. Genesis shows the Spirit hovering over the void before speaking creation into existence. But notice: God didn’t eliminate the chaos first. He entered it, inhabited it, then transformed it through His presence. Your insufficiency isn’t God’s obstacle; it’s His opportunity.

The Partnership Hidden in Your Failure

Think of rebuilding this way: God is the Master Architect with the original design for your life. You’re the project architect, implementing His plans in your specific circumstances. Sometimes those plans include forgotten hearing aids, failed systems, and the forced admission that you cannot be God for anyone—not even yourself.

What does “God with us” actually look like in the grinding reality of rebuilding? It’s God in the pharmacy line when insurance denies coverage. God in your sister’s judgment about your caregiving choices. God, in the moment you realize you’ve become so focused on managing outcomes that you’ve forgotten how to be human simply.

Not God fixing these moments or removing them, but God inhabiting them with you. Jesus promised, “Surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age” (Matthew 28:20). Not when you succeed. Not when your faith is strong. Not when you’ve figured it out. Always. Especially in the forgotten hearing aids.

Your Rebuilding Assignment

This week, when you hit your next failure—and you will—try something revolutionary. Instead of immediately scrambling to fix it, pause and say out loud: “God, You’re here in this mess with me.” Don’t rush to solve it. Don’t spiritualize it into a testimony before you’ve lived through it. Just acknowledge His presence in your insufficiency.

Notice where you’re still trying to be God—knowing everyone’s needs before they ask, being everywhere at once, never disappointing anyone. Then remember: Emmanuel arrived as an infant who needed everything, proving that neediness is holy ground where God meets us most intimately.

Here’s the bottom line that changes everything: Your exhaustion isn’t evidence of failure; it’s evidence that you’re finally releasing the illusion of control. Your mistakes aren’t proving you’re inadequate; they’re proving you’re human—and that’s exactly who God came to be with.

The Promise That Rebuilds Everything

Three wise men brought gold, frankincense, and myrrh to honor divinity. I brought my mother to an appointment without the one thing she needed. And in that moment, God showed up—not to fix it, but to sit with me in it. In the car. In the failure. In the insufficiency that forced me to stop being God and start needing Him.

Your rebuilding doesn’t begin when you get it together. It begins when you let God into the place where you’re falling apart. God with us means God with our mistakes, our exhaustion, our very ordinary inability to be everything for everyone.

So, stop trying to be God. Start letting God be with you—even in the forgotten hearing aids.

Because that—not our self-sufficiency—is where real rebuilding begins.