If you do not stand firm in your faith, you do not stand at all. (Is. 7:9)
Years ago I would have told you I had a good marriage. We had the normal issues of every couple, but I knew I was loved, that we were committed to each other, and that God was a central part of our lives.
At least, that’s what I thought I knew. Then one day the word divorce was introduced into our (at that time) twelve-year marriage.
Everything I believed about this man began to crumple the moment he first said it. I fought to understand where it was coming from. I appealed to his common sense, and to the commitment to God’s precepts I believed he held.
When I first wrote about that week, in 2013, I wrote this:
“How could I have become so detestable in his eyes?”
I want to tell you what that sentence actually was, because I don’t think I could have explained it then.
It wasn’t a confession. I didn’t believe I was detestable. I knew I wasn’t. I knew my own heart, my own history, my own motives. And the message coming at me, from the person I trusted most, insisted with total certainty that I was.
That question was the sound of two realities colliding.
The Question Behind the Question
If you’ve lived in that collision, you know the feeling exactly.
On one side is what you know: your history, your character, what you actually did and why. On the other is what you’re told: repeatedly, confidently, often calmly, by someone you love and have every reason to believe.
Your mind can’t hold both. So it tries to resolve the conflict. And the fastest way to resolve it, for a conscientious woman, is almost always to doubt herself.
Because he’s so sure. And you’re the one who was raised to consider that you might be wrong. You examine yourself. You’re humble. You want to be fair.
So the question comes out sounding like self-blame: What did I do? How did I become this? But listen underneath it. The real question is: Why is he saying something I know isn’t true?
That’s not a character flaw talking. That’s your knowing, trying to get your attention.
And the confusion you feel in that moment? Hear this: the confusion is not evidence you are confused. It’s evidence that two stories are in the room and only one of them is true about you.
The Upside-Down Way We Were Taught to Stand
Here’s where a lot of us were set up to lose.
Somewhere along the way you absorbed a version of faith that sounds humble and is actually upside down:
“There are two sides to every story.” “If he’s saying it, there must be something to it.” “Examine your own heart first.” “The heart is deceitful above all things. Who can understand it?”
Each of those has truth in it. Put them together and aim them at the woman who already examines herself more than anyone in the house, and here’s what they teach:
Stand on what you’re told. Question what you know.
So you questioned what you knew for months, then years. And whatever he told you became the ground you stood on, even when it moved every week.
I want to turn that right side up:
Stand firm in what you know. Question what you’re told.
Not arrogantly. Not without self-examination. You’ll always be willing to look at yourself honestly; the capacity to examine yourself is the very thing that made you a target in the first place. But you examine yourself from solid ground, not by handing your ground to someone else and hoping he gives it back.
The First Piece of Armor Is Truth
I describe spiritual warfare this way, and I still love the picture:
Hearing the words spiritual warfare conjures up images of flannelgraph Roman soldiers, each piece of armor labeled truth, righteousness, peace, faith, salvation, or Word of God. We swing our swords in every direction, hoping to take down the enemy. We pray hard and hope desperately that Satan might be afraid enough of us to move on and bother someone else.
What I didn’t notice then was the order Paul puts them in:
“Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness in place…” (Ephesians 6:14)
Truth first. Before the shield. Before the sword. Before anything else, you stand in what’s true.
A soldier in that era buckled the belt before anything else, because the rest of the armor hung from it. The instruction isn’t stand firm and hope the truth sorts itself out. It’s stand firm in the truth.
Even while I was fighting this battle, I turned the whole investigation on myself: the footholds I must have allowed, the ways I must have failed. That’s what conscientious women do. It’s also how the belt comes off.
One more thing about this passage, because it gets misused: “Our struggle is not against flesh and blood.” (Ephesians 6:12) It’s true. But it’s often quoted to mean it’s not him, it’s the enemy: the man doing the harm disappears behind a spiritual explanation, and the woman absorbing it is told to pray harder. That has a name: the field calls it spiritual bypassing. Taking the spiritual battle seriously has never required pretending a person isn’t responsible for what he does.
Even Paul Got Checked
If questioning what you’re told feels unspiritual, look at the Bereans.
When the apostle Paul himself came to preach to them, they didn’t simply accept it. Scripture says they “examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true.” (Acts 17:11)
And Luke calls them noble for it.
Paul. The man who wrote nearly half the New Testament got fact-checked, and Scripture applauds the people who did it.
So when someone insists on a version of you, your marriage, or your history that doesn’t match what you know, you’re allowed to check it. That isn’t rebellion.
Truth can survive your questions. It doesn’t need you to stop asking.
Truth can survive examination. Manipulation needs your agreement.
What You Know vs. What You’re Told
Here’s something to do with this, this week. Take a page and draw a line down the middle.
Left column: what I know. Things you know from evidence, not from feelings: what actually happened, what you actually said, what your track record actually is, the fruit of your life over years.
Right column: what I’m being told. The insistent messages. You’re controlling. You’re the problem. You’ve changed. Nobody else would put up with you.
Then take each item on the right and run three questions:
1. Does it match the evidence on the left? Not your fears. The evidence.
2. Does it arrive with pressure? Urgency, repetition, certainty, anger when you hesitate. Truth rarely has to shout. It can wait for you to check.
3. Who benefits if I believe it? Not a cynical question. A clarifying one. Apply the fruit test: what grows in your life when you accept this version of yourself? Life, or shrinking?
What survives those three questions, you can consider. What doesn’t, you can set down, and stand on the left column instead.
If your ability to trust your own read has been worn thin for a long time, it can be rebuilt. I’ve written about four practices for rebuilding it.
Stand Firm Doesn’t Mean Stand Still
A word about the other way “stand firm” gets used, because many of you have heard it in a crisis: Stand for your marriage. Don’t give up. Keep praying. If you walk away, the enemy wins.
Covenant matters, and some marriages really are restored. But look at Ephesians 6:13 again: “so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground.”
Stand your ground. The picture is a soldier holding a position against something coming at her. It isn’t a woman holding a door open for it.
After you have done everything, stand firm. When nothing seems to be happening, stand firm. When you’re overwhelmed, stand firm. When the world is crumbling around you, stand firm. Even if you can’t see it, can’t plan it out, work it out, or shake it out: stand firm.
But stand on truth. Not on an outcome. Not on his return or his change of heart, or on the marriage finally looking the way you prayed it would. (If you are watching for change, here’s when a marriage must change in order to stay.)
Standing is not hinged upon a spouse, a child, a job, or a dream; it’s anchored to a Hope that does not disappoint.
If your standing is hinged on him, it isn’t faith. It’s a hostage situation with a prayer list.
How Big Is God, Really?
Either God is big enough to protect, provide for, and deliver… or He isn’t.
Here’s how big I know Him to be.
Big enough to handle your questions. He isn’t threatened when you check what you’re told against what’s true. He commended people for doing it. A God who needs you to stop asking is a small God.
Big enough that you don’t have to shrink your own knowing to make room for someone else’s version of you. He made you able to know things. He’s not asking you to hand that over to the loudest voice in the house.
Big enough that His faithfulness isn’t measured by the outcome you prayed for. Sometimes deliverance looks like restoration. Sometimes it looks like a road out. Sometimes it looks like a woman who stops asking what’s wrong with me? and starts asking why is he telling me something I know isn’t true? All of them are deliverance.
So Here’s the Deal…
Put the belt on first.
Stand firm in what you know. Question what you’re told. Examine yourself honestly, from solid ground. Check every insistent message against the evidence. And let God be as big as He actually is: big enough for your questions, and big enough to hold you while you ask them.
Then stand. After you have done everything, stand. With grace that teaches you to say no and the courage to take the next right step.
How we stand still reveals what we believe about how big He is.
I just believe He’s bigger now than I did then.
Next Steps
- Tools for Healing: my guided journal for women healing from emotional and narcissistic abuse. Nine chapters and 36 questions, rooted in faith and written to be lived with slowly. It’s a good place to keep your two columns. Instant download.
- Identity Recovery Groups: a small group of women re-learning to trust what they know, together.
- One-to-one coaching with me or Identity Recovery Coach Lauren Rose, when you want someone in your corner who can hold both columns with you: booking portal.
Find yourself. Keep yourself.
About the author. Sharmen Elaine Kimbrough is an identity strategist and the founder of LiveFound, Inc. She holds a Master’s degree in professional counseling and spent more than ten years developing and leading the women’s programs at the Marriage Recovery Center. She writes for women recovering a self after emotional abuse, coercive control, and spiritual bypassing. More about Sharmen →
