God, Where Are You?

God, Where Are You?, Dominique Young. NavPress (ISBN: 9798898020217) 2026.

Summary: In the midst of pain, God may seem distant. Healing begins when we drop our masks, discovering God’s love and presence.

Let’s be honest. There are times when it just feels like God has left the building. Life isn’t working out as we’d like. Or, we are in the pit of deep depression or besieged with anxious thoughts. Dominique Young writes out of her own experience of depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation. She is a child of divorce and growing up was traumatic, at times. People in church had no clue. Faith felt like a facade she maintained, one she longed to drop. Yet, paradoxically, it was only when she dropped the facade that she discovered the nearness of God. In this book, she walks readers through her own healing process.

First, before we find God, we need to find ourselves. Sometimes, we’ve so cleverly hid behind the masks that we don’t know where we are. She helps us identify where we are mentally and emotionally. Then, she helps us identify the costumes and masks we’ve used that leave us so disoriented. As we do this, we discover our brokenness, the depth of our emotional emergency. Perhaps the most scary thing is naming it. But this is a step toward help and healing Young wants us to learn to be OK with. Finally, she helps us identify the lies we’ve been told and to replace them with truth. For her, the lie was that arguments must lead to separation, leading her to shut down when differences arose. She learned that love casts out fear.

Second, She addresses finding God. Young observes that often, our question, “God, where are you?,” is a rhetorical one. She challenges us to exchange that for an honest and earnest search, believing that God will find us as we seek Him. But sometimes, the darkness of our experiences of abandonment is so intense, we wonder where God was in the trauma. She encourages us to ask this but also to lean into what we know of God’s attributes and to look for evidence of his presence in the darkness. Then there is the issue of failure. Young uses her own experience of failing in creating an organization to explore God’s presence in our failures. Lastly, she explores the presence of God in the storms of our lives.

Third, she explores finding “us.” By this she means finding a walk, a life with God on an ongoing basis. For Young, it begins with the reality that God doesn’t just want to inform us, he wants to change us. Pain in our lives is sometimes one of the ways he does this. Also, we often want God to show up in power to change things when he wants us to learn the power of his presence with us in hard situations. Not only that, God wants us to learn its not all about us, but that being loved, we become instruments of his love with others. Finally, finding us means celebrating not what I’ve done, but what we’ve done.

Each chapter includes a Tracing God Devotional, Reflection Questions for journaling, and a prayer. In addition, Young often pauses during chapters to ask readers to reflect. This is not a book to be read quickly. Rather, one does well to have a journal at hand, and a box of tissues. It might be good to read with a trusted friend, practicing removing masks. And if it is too painful, use that as a cue to take a break, care for yourself, and return to what is painful with a trained counsellor who can accompany you through the pain.

Dominique Young invites those in pain who struggle with God’s presence to take the next step and follow a more intentional process of being honest both with oneself and God. Her own discovery of God’s presence and love in her dark places encourages the reader to persist in a seeking faith that is not a facade but one birthed both in adversity and biblical truth. And she holds forth the vision of not simply encountering God’s presence but making one’s life in that presence.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.