Wrestling in the Margins: When You Can’t Pray Politely Anymore

A word for mothers who are holding on by their fingernails.

God in the Unremarkable Hours

I used to think God met me in the mountaintop moments—the celebrations, the milestones, the days everything went right. Then grief taught me otherwise. The day I held my baby for the first time. The celebration of first words, first steps, first days of school. The milestones marked on calendars and captured in photo albums.

Then came the days that didn’t make it into any album. I found God there too — more quietly, more strangely, more completely than I ever expected.

But grief has taught me something unexpected: God often meets us most powerfully not on the mountaintops, but in the margins.

The margins are the in-between spaces. The waiting rooms and sleepless nights. The moments between waking and remembering. The quiet Tuesday afternoons when the world has moved on but you’re still frozen in place. The unremarkable minutes that stretch into hours while you’re simply trying to survive.

These overlooked, undervalued spaces become holy ground when we are grieving. It is here, stripped of pretense and performance, that we encounter God in ways we never could when life felt full and under control.

It is in the margins that we learn what it means to truly wrestle with God.

When Grief Makes You a Wrestler

Maybe you have felt it — the way grief doesn’t let you pray politely anymore. The way it grabs hold of God and won’t let go.

In the sport of wrestling, there is no distance. You are locked together, body to body, eye to eye, breath to breath. You can’t win by running away. You have to stay in it when it hurts, when you’re exhausted, even when you feel you are losing.

Before loss, many of us had a more distant relationship with God. We prayed from a safe distance. We maintained proper reverence. We kept our questions polite and our faith presentable.

Then grief crashed into our lives, and everything changed.

Maybe it was infertility that shattered your dreams of motherhood. Maybe it was a miscarriage, or multiple miscarriages, that left you wondering if you would ever hold your baby. Maybe it was a stillbirth, or SIDS, or an accident, or an illness that took your child. Maybe it was an adoption that fell through, a child you loved before you ever held them, a future that dissolved in a phone call.

Whatever form your grief took, it transformed you into a wrestler.

Suddenly, you weren’t just praying, you were pleading, demanding, questioning, and sometimes even raging. 

This wrestling is not a departure from faith. It is faith. The rawest, most honest kind.

What Jacob Knew About Desperation

Jacob knew what it meant to grab hold and refuse to let go. Alone in the night, he encountered a man, the text says, though Jacob later declares, “I have seen God face to face” (Genesis 32:30). What does Jacob do?

He wrestles with Him. All night long.

Jacob doesn’t bow politely and walk away. He doesn’t maintain proper religious distance. He grabs hold and refuses to let go. He fights. He strains. He perseveres through the darkness, the pain, and the exhaustion. Even when his hip is wrenched from its socket, Jacob keeps wrestling.

Then he makes this audacious demand: “I will not let you go unless you bless me” (Genesis 32:26).

Can you hear the desperation in that? 

Jacob is essentially saying, “I don’t care how much this hurts. I don’t care how long it takes. I’m not releasing You until You give me what I need.”

This is the wrestling of grief. This is what happens in the margins of life when we’re brought low and all our practiced prayers feel useless and we find ourselves grabbing hold of God with everything we have, refusing to let go until we find something—peace, purpose, presence, blessing, something to carry us through.

But the margins are also where we’re most vulnerable.

When Grief Makes You Vulnerable

Wrestling is dangerous and grief makes us vulnerable to an enemy who wants to use our pain against us.

After Cain’s offering was rejected and he became angry, God warned him with these words: “If you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must rule over it” (Genesis 4:7).

Sin as a predator, crouched and ready to pounce, waiting for the moment of weakness to spring.

When we are grieving, that door is often wide open. Grief exhausts us. It breaks down our defenses. It makes us desperate for relief, for escape, for anything that might dull the pain. Sin is there, ready.

For some of us, the crouching sin is bitterness. It whispers that God doesn’t care, that He could have prevented this but didn’t, and that we have every right to turn away from Him.

For others, it’s despair. It tells us there’s no point in going on, that the pain will never end, that we might as well give up.

It might be addiction—to substances, to busyness, to anything that helps us avoid feeling. It might be isolation. 

I have stood at every one of these doors. Some of them I walked through before I knew what I was doing.

The margins are where we are most susceptible. This is where the wrestling matters most.

How to Keep Going When You Can’t See the Path

Proverbs 4:25-27 meets us here:

“Let your eyes look straight ahead; fix your gaze directly before you. Give careful thought to the paths for your feet and be steadfast in all your ways. Do not turn to the right or to the left; keep your foot from evil.

It’s not about seeing clearly into the distance or having a ten-year plan. It’s about the next step. The next breath. The next moment. Some days I have to say it aloud just to remember it is true: the next step. Just the next one.

In wrestling, where your head goes, your body follows. Look down and you get taken down. Grief wants you to look down at everything you’ve lost, at everything that’s wrong. Keeping your eyes forward isn’t denial. It’s survival. It’s how you stay in the match.

Don’t turn to the right or left. You know what’s crouching there.

I don’t have tidy answers for the margins. But I know this: we don’t have to carry all of this alone. There’s a place to take it. There’s a God who can hold it.

A Prayer for Wrestlers in the Margins

God, I’m in the margins right now. This space feels empty and hard and holy all at once. I’m wrestling with You, and I don’t even know if that’s allowed, but I can’t seem to stop.

I have questions You haven’t answered. I have pain You haven’t taken away. I have a story I didn’t write and a loss I can’t undo.

But like Jacob, I’m not letting go. I’m holding on, even when it hurts, even when I’m exhausted, even when I can’t see clearly. I need You to bless me in this place. I need You to meet me in this margin.

Help me keep my eyes straight ahead. Help me take the next step, just the next one, without being overwhelmed by everything beyond that. Help me give careful thought to my path and be steadfast in my ways.

I know sin is crouching at my door. I feel its presence—the temptation to bitterness, to despair, to escape in ways that would destroy me. Give me strength to rule over it. Don’t let my grief become the thing that defeats me.

Meet me here, in this wrestling match, in this margin, in this sacred space I never wanted but can’t escape. Transform this empty-feeling place into holy ground. Let me encounter You here the way Jacob did, face to face, holding on, refusing to let go until You bless me.

And if I walk away limping, let that limp be a reminder: I was in the match. I didn’t give up. I held on. I wrestled with You and survived.

I’m still here. Still wrestling. Still hoping. Still holding on.

Amen.