“I’m worried about your soul.”
If you’ve started questioning the faith you were handed, someone has probably said this to you. Maybe your mom. Maybe a spouse or an old friend from youth group. Maybe it came in a text at 11 p.m. with a Bible verse attached. (Nothing says “I love you” like Jeremiah 17:9 with no context.)
Even people on Instagram tell me they’re praying for my soul when I tell you that it’s ok to sleep in on Sunday. Perfect strangers, worried about my faith!
Underneath their questions is usually another one, the one that keeps a lot of us up at night: Are they right? Am I backsliding? Did I wander so far that God let go of me?
This week’s story answers that question. Spoiler alert - The answer is no.
Why Jochebed?
Hebrews 11, the Faith Hall of Fame, moves from Abraham down through his family until it reaches Moses. But before it says a word about Moses, it honors his parents:
“By faith Moses was hidden by his parents for three months after his birth, because they saw that the child was beautiful, and they were not afraid of the king’s edict.”* (Hebrews 11:23)
By faith. That’s why they’re on the list. Not because everything turned out well. Because in the scariest moment of their lives, they trusted that God was holding what they couldn’t hold.
That’s the faith this week is about. And it’s the faith you need when your people are scared, your certainties are gone, and you’re not sure where God went.
The story
Pharaoh fears the Hebrews and orders every baby boy thrown into the Nile (Exodus 1:22). A mother, Jochebed, hides her son for three months. When she can’t hide him anymore, she seals a papyrus basket with tar and pitch, lays him inside, and sets it among the reeds at the river’s edge. His sister, Miriam, “stood at a distance, to see what would happen to him”* (2:4).
The Hebrew word for that basket is tevah. It appears in only one other story in the Bible: Noah’s ark. Jochebed isn’t throwing her son away. She’s building him an ark and trusting God with the river.
Where is God in this story?
From the moment the basket goes into the water until Moses is safe in Pharaoh’s house (2:1–10), God is never mentioned. Not once. No voice from heaven. No angel. No sign.
Just a terrified mother, a watching sister, and a river.
And yet Hebrews calls it faith. Because faith isn’t feeling God’s presence. Faith is trusting that God is there when you can’t see or hear a thing.
And God was there. God was working through the unlikeliest person imaginable: Pharaoh’s own daughter, who finds the basket and takes pity on the baby. God was even working through Miriam’s quick thinking, which gets Jochebed hired to nurse her own son (2:7–9). Then, a few verses later, the text says it outright: “God heard their groaning, and God remembered… God looked upon the Israelites, and God took notice of them”* (2:24–25).
God was holding the baby in the basket. God was holding the mother on the bank. God was holding the sister in the reeds. The river was never empty because God was there the whole time.
This is you, and this is them
If you’re questioning, you might feel like the baby in the basket, set adrift from everything that used to hold you. Hear this: you’re not in the river alone. You’re in an ark, and God is holding it.
And the people who are scared for you? They’re Jochebed on the bank. Many of them live under their own Pharaoh, a fear-based theology that taught them one wrong belief could cost you everything. When your mom says “I’m worried about your soul,” she may be a woman on a riverbank trying to build you an ark out of the only materials she has: prayers, verses, pleading.
(And that word, “soul”? In Hebrew it’s nefesh, your whole living self. Underneath “I’m worried about your soul” is often “I’m scared of losing you.”)
Here’s the part that sets us both free. God is holding them, too. You don’t have to carry their fear, and they don’t have to carry you. The same God holds both sides of the river.
Questioning is not backsliding
Let’s define the word that gets thrown around. In the prophets, “backsliding” (the KJV’s word, often translated “faithlessness” today) meant turning away from God toward idols and injustice (see Jeremiah 3). It never meant asking God hard questions.
Scripture is full of people who questioned God right to God’s face: the psalmists, Job, Habakkuk. Their questions were a way of turning toward God, not away.
If you’re bringing your doubts to God, you aren’t sliding away. You’re leaning in.
An honest complication
This story ends better than most. That’s a miracle, not a formula. I can’t promise that if you trust God, your family will come around. Some relationships drift and don’t return the same. What I can promise is what Hebrews holds up: God doesn’t let go of the basket, even when the ending isn’t what we hoped.
And one guardrail. If “worry” has turned into control, threats, or shunning, that isn’t Jochebed. Trusting God with your people never means staying in harm’s way. You get to decide what feels safe and what isn’t.
So what do we do with this
Translate before you react. When you hear “I’m worried about your soul,” try hearing “I’m scared of losing you.” You can receive the love without accepting the theology.
Hand their fear to God. It’s not yours to fix. Pray it, name it, and set it in God’s hands instead of your own.
Bring your questions to God, not just about God. That’s the difference between drifting away and leaning in.
You were seen as good before you ever touched the water. You’re not backsliding. You’re being carried. And so are they.
*Scripture quotations are from the NRSVue.
The Greenhouse Preview
This Friday in The Greenhouse: What to say when someone’s fear comes out sideways, and a prayer for placing your people, and yourself, in God’s hands.
The Closing Question
Tell me in the comments: Has anyone called your questions “backsliding”? What do you wish you’d said?
P.S. This Sunday on Streams of Grace: what faith looks like when God seems silent. Come breathe with me. Sign up here!
So well written, Amanda. I especially loved what you said about Jochebed building the arc and trusting God with the river. I also loved this line “By faith. That’s why they’re on the list. Not because everything turned out well. Because in the scariest moment of their lives, they trusted that God was holding what they couldn’t hold.” I think there’s such a tendency to think people are against you but so much of the tension on both sides of the relationship comes from a place of fear. I think so many times when we rage or grieve against God, it comes from a place of fear as well. What I find so fascinating though is how they never minimize that rage and grief but instead “mourn with those who mourn” and hold us through it.