She Faced the Lions, What would We have Done?

She Faced the Lions; We Nurse the Snub

What Would We Have Done in Carthage?

I recently received a mailing from The Voice of the Martyrs, and inside was the story of a young woman named Perpetua. I didn't expect it to stay with me the way it did. She was only twenty-two — a new mother in Carthage, eighteen hundred years ago — and she went to her death rather than deny the name of Jesus. Wild animals. A public arena. A crowd that came to watch her die. I read it the way most of us read those stories: humbled, moved, and quietly certain that I could never be tested like that.

But the longer I sat with it, the more the story turned around and started testing me — not in the way I expected.

Because here's what struck me. Perpetua was crucified by the world. Rome, the arena, the jeering crowd — the pressure that tried to break her came from the outside. And she stood. Yet most of us will never face a lion or a sword. Our test is smaller, quieter, and, if I'm honest, we fail it far more often than we'd like to admit. We aren't broken by the world. We're wounded by the church — by our own people — and it does something to our faith that beasts and swords could never do to hers.

We don't reject God with a slammed door. We do it with a slow cooling. A prayer life that quietly thins out. A trust that grows guarded. A heart that keeps showing up to church on the outside while, on the inside, it has already begun to pull back. Someone in the family of God dismisses us, gives us the cold shoulder, makes us feel unwelcome for speaking the truth — and without ever deciding to, we begin to withdraw. Not from them. From God.

And often, if we trace that cooling back to its source, we find something we would never say out loud: we are offended. Not at strangers. Not at the world. We are offended at the people of God — and underneath that, whether we admit it or not, we are quietly offended at God Himself. Perpetua faced the arena and never let the crowd's rejection become God's rejection. And I had to ask myself: if a hard look from a brother can turn me cold toward God, what would I have done in Carthage?

The wound that starts it

Here is how it usually begins. You speak the truth. Maybe you named something that needed naming. Maybe you stood on conviction when it would have been easier to stay silent. And instead of being received, you were pushed back. Dismissed. Given the cold shoulder. Made to feel unwelcome in the very family that is supposed to be yours.

That kind of wound is real, and it goes deep — deeper than a wound from the world ever could. Solomon knew it: an offended friend is harder to win back than a fortified city (Proverbs 18:19, NLT). Offense doesn't just hurt us; it fortifies us. It builds walls. And slowly, without our permission, those walls start locking out the very God we came to worship.

Jesus called this exact thing a trap. He said, “God blesses those who do not fall away because of me” (Matthew 11:6, NLT). The phrase “fall away” comes from a word that means a stumbling block — a snare, a trip wire. Offense is not just a bad feeling. It is a trap laid across the path of your faith. And His own hometown fell straight into it. They heard His truth, and rather than receive it, they were deeply offended and refused to believe (Matthew 13:57, NLT). The rejection of the messenger became the rejection of God standing right in front of them.

When a wound grows teeth

But I have to stop here and be honest, because I don't want to be glib. Sometimes what looks like nursing a snub is heavier than a snub. Betrayal by your own spiritual family — the people who prayed with you, the ones you trusted with your soul — can leave a genuine trauma imprint. David knew this exact ache. He didn't say an enemy had wounded him. He said it was “my equal, my companion and close friend,” someone he had once walked with to the house of God (Psalm 55:13–14, NLT). Betrayal from inside the sanctuary cuts in a category all its own.

And here is where we have to be precise, because it matters. The snub may arrive small. On the day it happens it may not look like much at all. But nursing is not passive. It is not a wound sitting quietly in storage. Rehearsing an offense in the dark keeps the threat alive, keeps the body braced, keeps the nervous system from ever filing the moment as past. And a wound that is never allowed to close does not stay the size it started. It festers. That word is not a figure of speech. It is the actual process by which a slight becomes a serious injury we never consciously agreed to carry.

We rehearse the offense until the offense rehearses us.

This is the part that ought to sober us: we can do this to ourselves without ever knowing we are doing it. No one decides to deepen the cut. But every time we take the offense out and turn it over, we reopen it. We are not merely failing to heal. Quietly, unconsciously, we are re-injuring ourselves in the dark — and over time that manufactures a real and serious wound where there was once only a bruise.

Left to that process, a betrayal like this settles into the recognized patterns of a trauma response. Not as a self-diagnosis — only a trained professional can name that — but as a lens worth holding honestly up to our own hearts. Some of us re-live it — the confrontation plays on a loop, and simply walking into a church foyer or hearing a certain worship song drags the whole scene back, chest tight, pulse racing. Some of us avoid — we stop serving, quietly leave the congregation, change the subject when faith comes up, drive past the building rather than in. Some of us carry changed beliefs and a flattened mood — “I can't trust Christians,” “I don't belong in God's house” — a numbness where worship used to bring joy, a distance from believers we once felt close to. And some of us live on guard — scanning the room for the next slight, braced at every gathering for the next blow.

Notice what all four have in common: when the wound comes from the house of God, faith itself becomes the trigger. That is why the drift from God can feel less like rebellion and more like flinching from a hot stove. It is not always defiance. Sometimes it is a nervous system trying to keep you from being burned in that place again.

And here is why so many of these wounds never heal: the church has taught us to dismiss them. When a believer is cut by another believer, the reflex is almost automatic — “that was the enemy,” “the devil did that,” “there's a spirit behind it.” We rebuke it and move on. In one sense that is not wrong; there is a real enemy who delights in the wreckage. But naming the devil can become the most spiritual way imaginable to never address the wound at all. It is avoidance dressed in Scripture. We rebuke the injury instead of tending it — and an untended wound does the one thing untended wounds do.

Because the harder truth, the one we work so hard to avoid, is not “the devil did this.” It is that God allowed it. And we would rather hand the whole thing to the enemy than sit with a God who could have stopped it and did not.

But look at Calvary. The deepest wound ever inflicted on a faithful sufferer was not merely the devil's doing. Scripture will not let us off that easily: “it was the LORD's good plan to crush him” (Isaiah 53:10, NLT), and the cross was God's “prearranged plan,” carried out through the betrayal of His own (Acts 2:23, NLT). Heaven did not wave away the wounds of the cross as an enemy attack to be rebuked. They were entered. They were felt all the way to the bottom. And only because they were fully faced did they become the doorway to resurrection. A wound you assign to the devil, you dismiss. A wound you bring to God, you can finally begin to heal.

So this is not something to pray louder against or muscle past. If these patterns are persistent and disrupting your life, that is not a failure of faith to overcome by trying harder — it is a reason to sit with a licensed, trauma-informed counselor and let the wound be treated as the real injury it is. Seeking that help is not weakness; it is stewardship of something God takes seriously. He is, after all, close to the brokenhearted, and He is the one who bandages their wounds (Psalm 34:18; 147:3, NLT). Healing and help have never been rivals.

None of this cancels the challenge of these pages. It sharpens it. The goal was never to numb the pain or pretend the wound is small — nor to spiritualize it away and leave it festering in the dark. It is to face the wound honestly, call it exactly what it is, and keep it from quietly hardening into an accusation against the God who allowed it and means to heal it.

The transfer we never notice

This is the part we rarely see in ourselves, so look at it closely.

When the church wounds you for speaking truth, the hurt does not stay neatly filed under “people.” It bleeds. Because those people represent God to you. They are His body, His family, and you were being obedient when you spoke. So somewhere beneath conscious thought, a transfer happens. The offense you feel toward them gets quietly reassigned to Him.

You never decide, “I am angry at God.” You would never pray that. But the grievance is there all the same, humming underneath: I did what You asked. I told the truth. And this is what it got me.

That is the subconscious blame. And it is exactly the sin God caught in Cain before it grew into something worse. Cain's offering was rejected, and he burned with anger. God came to him gently and asked, “Why are you so angry?” (Genesis 4:6, NLT). Cain never openly cursed God. He simply took his sense of rejection and let it harden — and it came out sideways, on his brother. The root, though, was a man wounded over feeling rejected by God, nursing it in silence instead of bringing it into the light.

The hardest truth: God allowed it

Now we reach the thing our hearts most want to avoid, so we have to say it plainly.

God allows us to be crucified by our own.

He does. He did not stop the cold shoulder. He did not rebuke the ones who dismissed you. He did not send fire from heaven to defend you when you told the truth and got punished for it. He let the spear go in. And that is where the deepest whisper is born: If You let Your own people do this to me, then maybe You are against me too.

We have to drag that whisper into the light, because the answer to it is the strongest ground in the whole Christian faith.

Being handed over to suffering by the religious community is not a sign of God's absence. It is the most Christlike thing that can happen to you.

Jesus was not primarily killed by pagans. He was betrayed by an insider. He was condemned by the priests. He was handed over to Rome by His own covenant people. “He came to his own people, and even they rejected him” (John 1:11, NLT). The crowd that screamed for His crucifixion was the church of its day — and yet it was the pagan world that drove in the nails, so that the household of faith and the world outside it wounded Him in a single act. So when believers wound you for standing on truth, you are not being pushed away from Christ. You are being pressed into the exact shape of His life.

And here is the tension we must hold, because both halves are true at once: God allowing it is never God endorsing it. Joseph, sold into slavery by his own brothers, stood before them years later and said, “You intended to harm me, but God intended it all for good” (Genesis 50:20, NLT). The brothers were still guilty. The betrayal was still real and still evil. And God was still sovereign over every inch of it, bending it toward a purpose they never imagined. Jesus said the same: offenses will inevitably come — but sorrow awaits the one who causes them (Luke 17:1, NLT). God permits the wound and still holds the wounder fully accountable. You do not have to excuse the church in order to keep trusting God.

So why does He allow it? Because the wound that comes from inside the body is the very furnace that burns out our idolatry of human approval. Peter told believers not to be surprised by the fiery trial, but to be glad, because these trials make us “partners with Christ in his suffering” (1 Peter 4:12–13, NLT). Trouble produces endurance, and endurance builds character (Romans 5:3–4, NLT). God is teaching us to rest our faith on Him and not on how His people treat us. And the only way to teach that lesson is to let the people fail us — while He holds.

Perpetua and the question she leaves us

Eighteen hundred years ago, in Carthage, a twenty-two-year-old mother named Perpetua faced this same test — only in its most extreme form.

Rome had come for her. The crowd in the arena howled for her death. But the sharpest pressure did not come with a sword. It came from her own father, who loved her. He didn't threaten her. He wept. He begged her to think of her baby, to spare the family its shame, to just go quiet and stop confessing this Christ. That was the soft, tearful pressure to abandon the truth for the sake of everyone's peace.

Perpetua felt it deeply. Her diary — one of the earliest writings we have from a Christian woman — is full of grief for her father, full of struggle and fear and honest wrestling. She did not pretend the wound wasn't real. But she brought all of it to God rather than burying it. She stayed tender toward her father and immovable toward God. And she would not cool her confession to soothe anyone's offense.

She held the truth without hardening her heart. That is the whole resolution in one life.

Now hear how Scripture frames her, because she is literally part of the picture it paints. “Since we are surrounded by such a huge crowd of witnesses to the life of faith, let us strip off every weight that slows us down, especially the sin that so easily trips us up” (Hebrews 12:1, NLT). That weight, that thing that trips us up — that is the offense. Perpetua is in that crowd, watching us run. And a few verses later comes the line that ought to stop us cold: “You have not yet given your lives in your struggle against sin” (Hebrews 12:4, NLT).

Perpetua did. She reached the point of blood. We have not shed a drop — and yet we are already nursing grievances, already going quiet, already cooling toward God, over a snub from a brother or a cold word from a sister.

Sit with the weight of that. Perpetua was thrown to wild animals by the world and never once let that suffering become an accusation against God. And we let a bruised feeling from a fellow believer do to our faith what beasts and swords could not do to hers.

The word martyr means witness. Perpetua's witness cost her everything and has endured for eighteen centuries. Our offense costs us nothing — and yet it silences us completely. And a silenced believer leaves no witness at all. Every time we go cold to protect ourselves from the sting of rejection, we forfeit the very thing she died to give.

But wasn't hers different?

Somewhere in here, an honest reader pushes back, and the objection deserves a straight answer. Perpetua's suffering was different from mine. God allowed her martyrdom — Scripture almost frames it as an honor. But my wound came from a church board, a betrayal, a friend who went cold. Surely God didn't sign off on that the way He signed off on her arena.

It is a fair question, and the answer is bracing: there is no difference in the permission. The same sovereignty that let the cross happen let the arena happen — and let your wound happen too. We would love a loophole here. If God had authorized only her suffering and not ours, we would have our excuse ready: her pain was holy, mine was just people being cruel, so my resentment is justified. But the moment we admit He allowed both, equally, that excuse dissolves. The shared “God allowed it” is not the weak point in the comparison. It is the keystone. It levels the ground and asks the same faithfulness of us that it asked of her.

But permission was never the real question. The real question is what God allowed it for — and here Paul hands us the floor to stand on. God “causes everything to work together” for good in the lives of those who love Him and are called according to His purpose (Romans 8:28, NLT). Everything. The arena for Perpetua. The snub for us. Not that the suffering is good — the verse never says that — but that God bends all of it, even the God-allowed wound, toward good. Same promise, same God, whether the wound came from Rome in the year 203 or from the church you walked away from last spring.

And Paul does not leave “good” vague. The very next verse tells us exactly what the good is: God works it all together so that we would “become like his Son” (Romans 8:29, NLT). The good of verse 28 is not that life turns out comfortable. The good is Christ formed in us. And that changes everything about the question.

Because if the good God is aiming at is likeness to Christ, then the inside-wound — the betrayal by our own — is not a detour from His purpose. It may be the most direct road to it. Christ was wounded from the inside. He was betrayed at the table, handed over by His own, condemned by the faithful. So the suffering we resent most, the one that stings precisely because it came from the household of faith, is the exact instrument Romans 8:29 says God uses to shape us into the image of His Son. Perpetua was made like Christ through the arena. We are made like Christ through the wound we refuse to let fester into an accusation. Same purpose. Same Sculptor. Different chisels.

This is slow work, and often invisible from inside the wound. It never makes the wound good, and it never lets the wounder off the hook — that was true of Joseph's brothers, and it is true of yours. But it means the pain is not wasted, and it is not random, and it is not merely the devil's. It is being spent on something: the slow, deliberate shaping of you into the likeness of the One who was also wounded by His own.

So no — her suffering was not different in the way we want it to be. God allowed both. God is working both toward the same end. The only real difference left is the one this whole article has been circling: not what God permitted, but what we will do with what He permitted.

The fork in the road

So there are two paths, and every wounded believer stands at the split.

There is the way of Cain: take the rejection, bury it, let it harden, and slowly let the wall you built against people become a wall against God.

And there is the way of Perpetua — the way of Christ Himself: let the wound be real, grieve it honestly, bring every bit of it before God, and refuse to let “God allowed it” curdle into “God rejected me.”

And Christ walked that second path first, all the way to the bottom. Look closely at how He was wounded, because it gathers up everything these pages have said. The world drove the nails — He told His disciples He would be handed over to the Gentiles to be mocked and crucified (Matthew 20:19, NLT). The church handed Him over — the people who should have known Him best were the ones who cast Him out. Both wounds, the world's and the church's, Perpetua's kind and ours, met in one body on one hill.

But go back one step further, into the garden the night before, because that is where the real battle was fought and won. Kneeling in Gethsemane, Jesus looked past every human hand that would wound Him — past Judas, past the priests, past Rome — to the one hand behind them all. He knew the cup was the Father's to give or to take away. And He did not accuse that hand. He received the cup as the Father's will and prayed the hardest words ever spoken: “I want your will to be done, not mine” (Luke 22:42, NLT).

That is the bottom of it. That is the third figure our fork has been pointing to all along — not Cain, who hardened, and not merely David, who complained his way back to trust, but the Son who took the deepest God-allowed wound in history and said yes to the Father who allowed it. Perpetua found her garden in a prison cell and surrendered there long before she reached the arena. We find ours in the quiet after the offense — the moment alone with God where the wound becomes either an accusation or an altar.

We are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, and Perpetua is in it. She faced the arena without letting the crowd's rejection become God's rejection — because she was following the One who faced both the lions and the snub, both the world and His own, and never once stopped trusting the Father. And the question that cloud puts to us is simple, and uncomfortable, and worth answering honestly today:

If a hard look from a brother or a cold shoulder from a sister can quietly turn us cold toward God — what would we have done in Carthage?

The answer was never to measure up to Perpetua. It was to follow the One that Perpetua herself was following — down into our own small garden, with our own bitter cup, to pray the only words that have ever turned a wound into worship: not my will, but Yours be done.

The questions that remain

So let me leave you with the questions I had to ask myself.

Is there a name you still cannot say in prayer without your voice changing?

Have you actually knelt in your Gethsemane — or are you still standing outside it, rehearsing the offense, waiting for an apology that may never come?

Is there a resurrection you are missing in your own life because you are still fighting your Calvary — still trying to climb down off a cross God means to raise you from?

And the hardest one: if the wound never heals, if the person never makes it right, if the church never sees what they did to you — can you still say, not my will, but Yours be done?

You don't have to answer today. But don't answer never. The garden is quiet, and the cup is in your hands, and the Father who allowed the wound is the same Father waiting to raise you past it.