Last updated on March 16th, 2026 at 11:12 pm
I’ve sat in enough women’s Bible studies to know exactly how this goes. Someone in the group is struggling financially, or her marriage is unraveling, or she got the diagnosis she was dreading. And without fail, someone else in the circle will say something like, “Just trust God. He wants to bless you. Just claim it.”
And listen, I know the heart behind it is good. But I also know what happens to the woman who claims it, waits for it, and then watches the blessing not come. She doesn’t just feel disappointed. She feels like she did it wrong. Like her faith wasn’t big enough. Like God looked down at her little mustard seed and found it lacking.
That’s not a theology. That’s a trap.
The Prosperity Gospel Didn’t Die. It Just Got an Instagram Aesthetic.
We tend to think prosperity theology belongs to the televangelists with the private jets and the matching suits. We comfort ourselves that we’re too doctrinally sophisticated for that. And then we go home and repost a quote over a picture of a woman twirling in a field of flowers.
Honey, I grew up in Arkansas. I hate to break it to you, but real fields grow dandelions, mud, and whatever the cows left behind. That woman is one step away from chiggers and a rash… but sure… twirl away, girlie.
The watered-down version of prosperity gospel is alive and thriving in Christian women’s content, and it sounds a lot more like this:
When you walk in faith, God opens doors. Trust His plan and watch Him move. Release it to God and He’ll handle it.
Mary Kaye Chambers
These aren’t wrong exactly. The problem is how we use them. We use them as transaction promises. We use them to tell struggling women that if the door isn’t opening, if He doesn’t seem to be handling it, it must be because she hasn’t trusted enough or released enough or believed correctly enough.
We turned a relational God into a vending machine. You put your faith in, you get your blessing out.
"For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts." Isaiah 55:8-9 (KJV)
What the Bible Actually Promises (And What It Doesn’t)
Here’s something nobody says at the women’s retreat: God doesn’t promise you the life you want. He promises you His presence in the life you have.
That’s a significant difference.
He promised Abraham land, and Abraham spent most of his life living in a tent on it. He promised Joseph a position of influence, and Joseph got there by way of a pit and a prison. He promised Paul that His grace was sufficient, and Paul’s idea of sufficient grace included shipwrecks, beatings, and a thorn in the flesh that never did go away.
I don’t know about you, but none of that would make my vision board.
The people God loved most in Scripture weren’t the ones with the smoothest paths. They were the ones who kept walking with Him on the rocky ones.
Friend, I want to say something here that I hope lands gently but lands firmly: if your faith is primarily built on what you believe God will do for you, it won’t hold when He doesn’t do the thing you expected. And there will be a season when He doesn’t. There’ll be a diagnosis. A prodigal. A financial crisis. A door that stays shut no matter how many times you claim the blessing over it.
Your faith has to be built on who God is, not what God does for you. Because what He does will sometimes confuse you. Who He is will not.
Mary Kaye Chambers
The God Who Showed Up in the Wilderness
The Israelites left Egypt with a dramatic, impossible miracle behind them. The Red Sea parted. They walked through on dry ground. And then they spent forty years in the desert wondering if God had abandoned them.
He hadn’t. He was there in the cloud by day and the fire by night. He was there in the manna that showed up every morning. He was there even when they couldn’t see where they were going.
But He didn’t give them the comfortable, settled life they wanted. He gave them the presence of Himself and the provision of enough for today. Just today. Not the whole supply at once, not the promised land on the schedule they would have chosen, not the menu they would have ordered.
Manna isn’t exciting. Manna isn’t a breakthrough testimony. Manna is just enough. And sometimes the most faithful thing we can say about our lives is that God gave us exactly that: enough, and Himself, and the next step. Not the whole map. Not the prosperous ending. Just enough to keep walking.
Why This Actually Matters for Midlife Women
Here’s why I’m talking about this here, in this space, for women in this particular season of life.
When you’re in the middle of an identity reconstruction, when the roles you carried for decades have shifted and you’re standing there asking God what comes next, the prosperity gospel version of faith is genuinely dangerous. Because it’ll tell you that your confusion is a faith problem. That if you were trusting correctly, the next chapter would be clear and exciting and obviously blessed.
But what if the next chapter is a year of not knowing? What if it’s a season of learning who you are when nobody needs anything from you? What if the blessing God is giving you right now looks like rest, and quiet, and the slow reconstruction of a self that got lost somewhere in the middle of decades of serving everyone else?
That doesn’t look like a breakthrough. It doesn’t make a good conference testimony. But it might be exactly what faithfulness looks like in this season.
God is not withholding from you. He might be working in you. Those are very different things.
Mary Kaye Chambers
What to Do With This on a Wednesday Morning
So what does this mean practically? It means a few things worth thinking through.
It means you can stop performing your faith in hopes of triggering the blessing. God isn’t a slot machine. More surrender language in your prayer journal won’t accelerate His timeline. I’ve tried. I have the journals to prove it.
It means you can be honest with Him about your disappointment. Every single Psalm of lament is a person telling God that things aren’t going the way they were supposed to. That’s not faithlessness. That’s relationship. You’re allowed to say “I thought you were going to come through differently” without it meaning your faith is broken.
It means you can look for the manna instead of waiting for the miracle. What’s the enough that’s showing up today? The friend who called. The moment of clarity. The small provision you almost missed because you were watching for something bigger.
And it means you can start to separate your trust in God from your expectations of what that trust will produce. Because those two things can come apart, and when they do, you get to choose which one you’ll hold onto.
Hold onto Him. Not the version of Him that promises you the outcome you want. The actual One, who is better and stranger and more trustworthy than the sugar daddy version we sometimes construct when life gets hard.
He’s not impressed by your faith claims. He’s not withholding until you get your theology right. He is present, He is working, and He is good, even when the evidence on a Wednesday morning looks absolutely nothing like what you expected.
That is a harder faith. But it’s the only one that’ll actually hold.
With Love,
Mary Kaye
⛪️ Prayer
God, you are faithful when we're faithless, present when we feel abandoned, and good when life looks nothing like what we prayed for.
Forgive us for the ways we've tried to reduce You to a transaction, for confusing blessing with ease and Your presence with smooth circumstances.
Teach us to want You more than we want the outcome we've decided You should provide. Give us the grace to find You in the manna when we were waiting for the miracle, and the courage to trust who You are even when we can't make sense of what You're doing.
Help us build our faith on the solid ground of Your character rather than the shifting sand of our expectations.
We pray this trusting and believing in You. Amen.
🖋️ Reflect & Review
Take a few minutes with these questions. Journal through them, think them over on a walk, or talk them through with a trusted friend.
• Where in your life right now are you waiting for God to come through in a specific way? What would it mean to trust His character even if that specific thing doesn’t happen?
• Have you ever felt like your faith wasn’t working? Looking back now, what was actually happening in that season?
• What does the manna in your current season look like? What provision for today are you maybe overlooking while you wait for the larger breakthrough?
🕊️ Relevant Scriptures
Isaiah 55:8-9
"For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts."
Matthew 11:28
"Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest."
2 Corinthians 12:7-9
"And lest I should be exalted above measure through the abundance of the revelations, there was given to me a thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan to buffet me, lest I should be exalted above measure. For this thing I besought the Lord thrice, that it might depart from me. And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me."
Exodus 16:4
"Then said the LORD unto Moses, Behold, I will rain bread from heaven for you; and the people shall go out and gather a certain rate every day, that I may prove them, whether they will walk in my law, or no."
1 Kings 19:5-8
"And as he lay and slept under a juniper tree, behold, then an angel touched him, and said unto him, Arise and eat. And he looked, and, behold, there was a cake baken on the coals, and a cruse of water at his head. And he did eat and drink, and laid him down again. And the angel of the LORD came again the second time, and touched him, and said, Arise and eat; because the journey is too great for thee. And he arose, and did eat and drink, and went in the strength of that meat forty days and forty nights unto Horeb the mount of God."
Esther 4:14
"For if thou altogether holdest thy peace at this time, then shall there enlargement and deliverance arise to the Jews from another place; but thou and thy father's house shall be destroyed: and who knoweth whether thou art come to the kingdom for such a time as this?"
💌 Before You Go
If this one hit close to home, I’d love to know. Leave a comment below or find me over on Substack where we talk about this kind of thing regularly, without the Instagram filter.
If you’re in a season where God feels absent or the promises feel empty, you’re not alone and you’re not doing faith wrong. Stick around. There’s more to talk about.
