It is 2026, and the captivating headline (outside of the imminent threat of war) seems to be that “God is SO back.” He has returned to us finally. God once left, and now He has returned. Churches are packed to the brim, catholic masses are running out of wine, and Pentecostal churches are running out of space to jump during worship. The talk around town is that everyone is excited to see a once-lost generation captivated by “God’s big return.”

Let me break it down for you. What is really going on? As a Gen-Z myself, I would like to take the time to explain why “God is SO back” is not the big and amazing statement that everyone thinks it is.

I would like to preface my rambling by saying that the same could be true for many other generations before me, but I can only speak for mine. Gen-Z, those of us born between 1997 and 2012. That seems like a very large age gap, but that would put us all around 14–28 years old. I am almost 26, so I will speak to us older Gen-Z. We are the generation that grew up with iPhones in our faces while we were still children. Unsupervised internet access and too much social media as teenagers led us to the endless game of comparison—comparing ourselves to strangers, television stars, and the popular girls in school who somehow always looked prettier than us.

Many of us grew up in broken homes, torn apart by divorce or single parenthood. Unstable living situations because our parents were on their own healing journeys from their messed-up childhoods. We didn’t all get to experience examples of “healthy” love. We only saw glimpses of happy parents and siblings that played together when we turned on Disney Channel. It seemed like a fantasy world, not real life.

We got to the end of high school. We were approaching adulthood, and so many things were sold to us as “truth”: “Write your own story,” “Be the author of your destiny,” “Find yourself,” “Work hard and force your dreams to become a reality.” At eighteen, I am fairly confident that the motivational quotes floating around were almost as aggressive as the “live, laugh, love” 2010 home decor obsession. The lies that we, 18-year-olds with no wisdom or direction, could take control of our lives and do it all on our own were glaring. These lies were silly Pinterest quotes that led us to believe that we could do it all on our own—that we needed no other strength but our own, that our power came from within us.

After a few years of doing it on our own, something slowly started waking us up. As a whole generation, we looked around at the mess we had made for ourselves and realized that we couldn’t do it alone—and that we were fighting against something that was impossible to fight against. We were fighting against an Almighty power that we could never beat. We realized that we were not the writer of our own destiny, and that by trying to be we were royally messing up and straying further and further away from who we were meant to be. Somewhere in the chaos of the endless social media quotes we decided that we were better authors than the Creator of all things. The all powerful Alpha and Omega who has control over all of eternity. We had a serious God complex thinking that we controlled the pen better than God.

The silver lining, the glorious truth, is that God is not “finally back.” He never left. Every bathroom floor breakdown, every empty bottle, every morning waking up feeling lost, alone, and scared—He was always there. He walked with us and stood behind us as we went on journeys searching for our identity. We got on airplanes, crossed oceans, and changed our whole wardrobes in search of feeling comfortable in our skin. God was beside us the whole time, holding our hand. He stood with outstretched arms, waiting for us to jump into them as we ran past them. He put mattresses at the bottom of cliffs we jumped off of to cushion our fall. I will say it again: God is not BACK.

God never left our side.

And that truth is why a whole generation has been forced on their knees.