Angry Expectations vs. The Joy of Jesus

Liza Carder sharing at chapel

Judah senior Liza Carder was once, in her words, “a slave to social media.” To have an identity outside of God, she filled herself with worldly ideas and expectations. But God had other plans for her. 

Jesus, in John 15:10-11, said, “If you keep my commands, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands and abide in his love. These things I have spoken to you so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be full.” At chapel on November 6, Liza shared how she found joy by abiding in Jesus and following His commands instead of the world’s or her own. Here is what she said:

Getting to know Jesus has felt like watching a sunrise after years of living under the clouds. 

For the majority of my life, I saw the world through shades of gray. I expected disappointment and feared for the worst. I was content in my negative perspective of the world, and I believed that an honest pessimism was the only way to face life.

I was raised in a Christian household. I’ve been a Judah student since preschool, I attended church weekly, and I went to Bible camps. As I grew older, I began to feel as though I was just going through the motions. Ask me the story of David? I could recite it by heart. But ask who Jesus really was to me, and I was tongue-tied. 

I played the part I was meant to and believed that’s what Christianity was: sing some songs once a week, pray a quick prayer before my meals, and you’re set. 

But still, I’d see people brought to tears by sermons and songs, and I desperately wanted to understand what they felt. I wanted to feel their joy. 

I became angry at God when people seemed to find so much joy in the words written in a book and I felt nothing. My curiosity quickly turned to frustration, and I became bitter about the joy that I felt I would never experience. I carried that anger throughout my teenage years, as I fought to uphold the image that I believed was expected of me. Every memory verse was a begrudging grade I had to put in the gradebook. 

I didn’t love God; I loved the identity He gave me. I was the Christian daughter my parents wanted me to be, and I resembled the person I thought my school wanted me to be too. Although, in my heart, I knew I was neither of these. 

It became a daily struggle to maintain the facade I had created. It wore on me, until the daily struggle from my constant performance fed the fire of anger and bitterness — and the anger and bitterness became part of my identity as well.

I know now that I carried anger and bitterness as my identity to somehow prove to God that I didn’t need Him. I believed that resenting everything to do with Him would somehow give me a “leg up” in this angry struggle with Him I had created. In truth, this resentment only fed the growing sense of emptiness I had. 

I believed that the more anger I stuffed in my heart, the more fullness I would feel, but all the anger did was deepen the chasm and make me feel more separated. 

This internal battle began to seep out from behind my perfect Christian facade. I removed myself from those around me and developed anxiety in simply being around others. This only worsened when COVID hit, as I withdrew myself from all of my friends. Merely hanging out with others for an hour left me feeling anxious and burnt out. 

This continued for nearly three years. I removed myself from relationships and carried a crippling sense of loneliness. All of my decisions grew out of a place of fear that I didn’t know how to escape.

I knew I was missing something. Life couldn’t only be continuing to fill myself with nonsense to feel “full.” If that’s all life was, it was pointless. 

Now the obvious answer to my question of “why am I not satisfied?” would be that maybe the things I had been settling for were never meant to fill me. But I was far too prideful to admit that. All the time I could have spent seeking out God, I spent searching through every worldly thing just to get a taste of the fulfillment I desired. 

There is a saying: “Your eyes are the gateway to the soul; whatever you behold, you become.” I never really understood the truth of this statement until I lived it. In my loneliness, I immersed myself in a world where I seemed to receive the connection and validation I craved. I immersed myself in social media. 

For a long time, I was a slave to social media. Whatever society said was “cool,” that was who I was going to become. As a young girl, I was constantly being told who I was meant to be and what I was meant to look like. I was constantly rewriting my personality to match what others wanted from me. I did this rewiring so much that I forgot who I was. My identity became dependent on what everyone else thought of me.

Having ruthless and impossible standards thrust upon me on YouTube and TikTok caused me to not only hate the world around me, but also to hate myself. An inflow of self-judgment combined with overwhelming anxiety caused me to cope in harmful ways. The ways I perceived myself began to bleed into how I treated my body. 

Back then, I engaged in restrictive eating and turned my anger upon myself by occasionally leaving cuts on my body in an effort to feel a form of control over my feelings. I did this in a desperate attempt to live up to the expectations set for me by social media. 

This constant inflow of opinions filled me with bitterness against anything telling me what to do or who to be. As a result, I saw the commandments of the Bible as more impossible expectations I was forced to uphold. Every principle the Bible stated felt like another burdensome standard “society” told me I had to maintain rather than it being a way to live life to the fullest. I resented the idea of believing in a God that enforced a new set of “rules” to follow. 

I was angry at the world, I was angry at myself, and I was angry at God.

This reached a climax in my sophomore year of high school. I remember being in my second-hour Bible class with Mr. Neethling as we were discussing a passage in 2 Timothy. I had a feeling of discontent about the verse we were talking about, but I was adamant on not engaging in the conversation. 

As I listened begrudgingly, I felt an inner prompting to voice my opinion on the verse. I was fully expecting Mr. Neethling to shut me down, but instead he spent the rest of class talking with me about the verse. I admitted parts of the Bible I disagreed with that I had never told anyone; I began to wrestle with my doubts. I left the class with an inexplicable weight lifted off my shoulders.

Throughout the rest of the year, I would occasionally come to Mr. Neethling with passages I believed to be flawed or incorrect, and he would kindly prove me wrong each and every time. I began to notice that the more I inquired about the word of God, the more I would feel the anger I carried toward God and myself diminish. 

I acknowledge I have a very competitive nature. I enjoy discussing differences in beliefs and opinions. I can say that I’ve never felt such peace and relief in being proven wrong.

In my junior year, I decided to make a deal with myself. This year I was going to try, seriously try, to find God, and if I didn’t find Him, then I knew He wasn’t real. I started reading the Bible daily and making efforts to pray. Instead of spending my Bible classes checking the clock, waiting to be dismissed, I stayed after the bell, fleshing out questions that may have seemed obvious to someone else. 

Turning against the opinions I had clung to for years was challenging and humbling. To turn around and realize that I had been opposing the truth for years tore at the foundations I had built so much of my life on. I had to destroy my system of belief and work from the bottom up. I had to turn around, change my mind, do what I know now as “repentance.”

My repentance wasn’t a single moment where I became a completely different person. Instead, it happened in private moments with God where I, piece by piece, began unloading the burdens I carried. Like a caterpillar shedding its cocoon, I let go of my anger, and in return God gave me the freedom to fly.

Reading the Bible no longer carried the constant challenge of finding faults in it in order to make me feel better about myself. Rather it had become a space where I found peace in being challenged by God about my perspectives on life. Verses I had once believed “constricted” me began to set me free. 

The once debilitating fear and pressure to uphold the standard I felt from social media diminished the more I immersed myself in scripture. My identity was no longer found in maintaining the facade I felt people expected of me. My identity was in Christ alone.

The standards of social media change overnight, but God never does. God sees me for who I truly am, not the person I had convinced the rest of the world I was. He knew how many times I had rejected and ignored Him, yet He loved me regardless. 

God saw past my anger and bitterness and replaced my guilt with His grace. His love for me is patient, and His plans for me are good, even when I don’t understand them. He turned my intense feeling of anger into appreciation for all that He has done for me.

In the light of God’s love, voices from social media are insignificant. Following Christ meant I no longer needed to listen to the thousands of people on social media telling me who to be. I only needed to listen to one voice, my Creator — the one who knew me before I was in my mother’s womb, the one who has a purpose and a plan for me.

To this day, I can’t help but feel overwhelmed with an undeniable joy that I am no longer burdened by anger and bitterness. I finally feel at rest in God’s forgiveness. 

By letting go of my anger, I discovered the simple yet powerful truth: that God’s love is dependable and that His presence brings a peace that surpasses all understanding. God replaced my once all-consuming bitterness with hope and joy.

Joy is more than temporary happiness. It’s an eternal state of being and a faith built on the assurance of having a deeper purpose. Joy isn’t dependent on your circumstances. Repenting from my anger and resentment taught me that the joy of the Lord is offered free to all who are willing to set aside their pride and former convictions and trust Him.

Fear has no place at the feet of God. Jesus gives us the opportunity to trade our suffering for joy. Instead of walking in lonely darkness, we walk in joyful freedom.

True joy is not found by holding on to your anger, but by surrendering to God’s love. In choosing God’s love over my anger, I found the joy I had been searching for all along.

Liza’s testimony reminds us that we can’t truly follow Jesus unless we lay down our anger and resentment. When we do this, we can actually start to grow in His word and be full of the joy of Jesus all of the time, even when life gets tough. Liza has shown us that this is possible, not just for her but for every single one of us.

—Suzana Coulter, class of ’27