Either way, I have to overcome my anxiety at being placed outside the camp here for asking these questions—belonging is a serious bedfellow of mine. But then I remember what Bob Goff said on Twitter about camps: “God didn’t give us anything to join, except Him.” If we’re doing this thing right, the family can stay intact through hard questions, disagreements, and a severe wrestle with divine mysteries.
Questions like: Why do really heinous things happen to really innocent people? Why does God intervene in some circumstances but not in others? Why does praying in faith not heal everyone? What do faith and prayer even mean? If God is going to do what He wants, then why doesn’t He fix more stuff? And why do we even need to pray? Do our prayers move God? If they do, it doesn’t feel like He is that sovereign if human people can change His mind. If God is in control of absolutely everything, does sin have any real effect? Does Satan have any real effect? Is there any factor that can operate outside of God’s sovereignty? What does it mean, “He allowed suffering”? How do we understand God when He stays His hand in the face of injustice or abuse?
Sometimes it seems like God can either be sovereign or benevolent but not both.
Isn’t this such a light little conversation?
If those questions made you feel faint, I’ll say this: I am no longer afraid of spiritual investigation. I’m confident in the end game, which is that God is good and He loves us and He could not possibly be unfair, arbitrary, cold, or abusive. He couldn’t be. It is outside the possibility of His character. It isn’t just that God is loving but that He is love itself. I am so certain of that. I possess full confidence in God but a healthy skepticism of the human understanding of God. (I used to be the opposite, and I miss the days when I knew everything.) So in this case, I can see the clear answer at the end of the problem and realize I simply don’t understand the equation. I know the final answer is right, but I haven’t worked out the spiritual math.
Back to the questions.
With anything as viscerally devastating as suffering and all its messy appendages, it is difficult to explore thoroughly without unintentionally becoming dismissive. But, still, the Christian community has long tried to explain it. We want to understand God’s role because it goes to the heart of His character, which goes to the heart of our perceived belovedness. At its core, the question boils down to: Am I just a bit part in the greater story of God’s glory? Or am I truly a loved daughter?
What we typically want to know when tragedy strikes is why. It is hard to reconcile arbitrary suffering with a loving God, isn’t it? We want an unambiguous explanation instead of the mysterious cocktail of sovereignty, the common human experience, God’s glory, and redemption.
To this end, the church has a history of formulizing suffering, giving it tidier origins and endings, and whitewashing the debilitating middle. We assess the complicated nuances of sorrow and assign it categories, roots, principles. Or, uncertain, we default to sovereignty in a way that feels so lonely and cold, it makes God out to be a heartless pursuer of His own fame at any human cost. That just feels gross.
Here is what we know about suffering from Scripture:
? Sometimes people suffer because of self-inflicted misery and sin. Humans have long been their own worst enemies. We are a self-destructive people who prefer to blame. Adam, Eve, Jonah, David, Saul, Judas.
? Sometimes people suffer because of the sins of others, which God would never cause, endorse, or initiate. It is contrary to his perfect nature. Bathsheba, Daniel, Tamar, Hosea, the beaten man in the Good Samaritan story, Paul.
? Sometimes people suffer through no human fault at all. The best of God’s saints had their dark nights. This is no indicator of divine disfavor. Life is simply hard.
? Sometimes people suffer specifically for the gospel, which the Bible said we would.
? Sometimes people suffer because loved ones get sick and die. This happens to every person, family, and community on earth. Even Jesus wept salty, human tears at death and the grief of his friends.
? Sometimes people suffer because we live on a physical earth involving tornadoes, earthquakes, wildfires, tsunamis. Natural disasters are a part of any living, shifting, fluctuating planet. (And the longer we irresponsibly plunder and harm it, the greater it will groan and creak and protest, but that is a different essay.)
? Sometimes people suffer because we have a vicious enemy who hates us and is out to steal, kill, and destroy everything redemptive and beautiful. That is real.
The point is, there is no formula for suffering. There is no one answer. There is no pat explanation. Scripture clearly identifies numerous root causes of suffering, some entirely incompatible with God’s character. Because He is so good at being God, He uses everything, He can heal anything, He wrestles glory from all things. Paradoxically, adversity can be so good for us, and He knows that. So regardless of why or how life delivers pain, God makes the absolute most of it.
Back to Sydney’s shredded baby blanket.
In Genesis 50, Joseph told his brothers after they sold him into slavery in a fit of jealous rage (WTH, brothers?): “You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good . . .” This is important: Meant is the Hebrew word for wove. In other words, you wove evil but God rewove it together for good. After his brothers went Tasmanian devil on him and essentially tried to bury him in the backyard, Joseph deposited all the tattered shreds of his life into the careful hands of God, who just picked up the threads of hate and deceit and abandonment and injustice and refashioned them into a truly beautiful story.
God used all the same threads. He didn’t create a replica. He didn’t start from scratch. He didn’t throw the destroyed original in the trash and begin again with all new material. God rewove what was torn into a stronger version than the first.
This is a perfect depiction of sovereignty to me. He is Lord over all, no matter how it began, how it was meant, how it harmed. He reigns over intent, over agenda, over loss. Nothing escapes His reach, nothing is beyond reclamation in His hands. If someone or something sewed threads of suffering in your life, even if that someone was you, God’s sovereignty says: I’m bigger than that, stronger than that, more powerful than that. I can make this beautiful again and use it to heal you and make you sturdier and, while we’re at it, other people too. At its most altruistic, loving center, God is indeed glorified through our suffering, not because He is an egomaniac who profits from our losses, but because, truly, nothing bears a better witness than watching God resurrect someone’s life. That is a God who folks want to know, a God worth His glory.
So in the face of brokenheartedness, there’s no need to counsel people in the way of spiritual explanation, for we are guessing at best, misrepresenting God at worst. Nor should we push them into tidy grief. God will reweave the threads in time—the approximate gap between Joseph’s brothers selling him into slavery and him standing before them as the second-highest leader in the country: twenty-two years. We don’t need to hustle others through their stories. Or ourselves.