What If Your Disappointment Is Actually the Beginning of Your Story?

There's a moment in Pastor Saz's Mother's Day message at Courageous Church where she holds up a photo of her stairs — covered in shoes, school bags, toys, and abandoned pajamas — and calls it an act of faith. Faith that one day, her kids will clear them. The room laughs. But then, almost without warning, the laughter turns into something deeper. Because most of us know what it's like to believe in something that hasn't happened yet. And not just cluttered stairs.

That's the heartbeat of this message.

Drawing from Hebrews 11 and the ancient story of Sarah, Pastor Saz builds a case for a kind of faith that doesn't require you to pretend life is going perfectly. In fact, she argues the opposite — that faith does its most important work right in the middle of the disappointing seasons. The ones where the dream should have arrived by now. The ones where you've stopped telling people what you're hoping for because you're tired of explaining why it hasn't happened yet.

Sarah's story is one most people know in outline: a woman who waited a lifetime for a child, laughed when told it was finally coming, and then held that child in her arms anyway. But Pastor Saz slows it down and pulls out something often missed — that Sarah didn't just passively wait. She considered. She thought back through everything she knew about God's track record. She weighed the evidence. And on the basis of that, she chose to believe.

Pastor Saz calls this "Google reviewing God." Before you step out in faith toward something new, you look back at the history. You read what others have experienced. You consider whether the one making the promise has ever come through before. It's not blind faith — it's informed faith. Grounded faith. The kind that holds up when life gets complicated.

But the message doesn't stop at belief. It pushes further into something more uncomfortable: speech. Because Pastor Saz makes a sharp distinction between what we believe internally and what we're actually willing to say out loud. Belief, she says, is a thought. Faith is spoken. And there's a version of hope we carry silently for years that never quite grows because it's never been given air.

This is where the message lands hardest. Not in a guilt-inducing way, but in the way a good conversation with a trusted friend does — the kind where someone gently points out what you already know but haven't admitted. You have a dream. You haven't told anyone. And somewhere in the telling, something shifts.

Whether you're new to Charleston and still finding your community, someone who grew up around church and drifted, or someone who's never really engaged with faith at all — this message doesn't ask you to have everything figured out. It just asks one question: what would you say if you actually believed things could change?

Sarah laughed first. Then she spoke her miracle into the world.

There might be room for both in your story too.