Where is God in my suffering?
"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" — Psalm 22:1
Maybe this question isn't theoretical for you tonight. Maybe it has a name, a diagnosis, a date, a face you miss. If you're asking where God is in your pain, please hear this first: you are not being unfaithful by asking, and you have not surprised Him. Jesus Himself cried out the words of Psalm 22 from the cross — "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" — and the Psalms are full of exactly this kind of raw, unresolved lament (Psalm 13; Psalm 88). God is not standing back, arms crossed, offended by your grief. He is close to the brokenhearted. Let's walk through this honestly together — not for a tidy answer, but for a true one.
This is not the world God made
The suffering you're carrying was never God's original design. He made a good world (Genesis 1:31), and it was human sin that broke it — that let death, disease, and cruelty loose in what was meant to be whole (Genesis 3). Paul writes that the whole creation is now "groaning together in the pains of childbirth" (Romans 8:20-22), waiting to be set free. That single image holds so much: this present pain is real, but it is not the end of the story, and it is not what love intended. God did not build a world with cancer wards and funerals in mind. He gave real freedom to real people, and love without freedom isn't love — but that freedom was used to wound the world, and we all live inside that wound now. Your suffering is evidence something is deeply wrong, not proof that God is absent or unkind. Even creation itself is aching for the same repair you long for.
God did not stay distant from it
This is where the Christian answer stops being an argument and becomes a person. God did not watch human suffering from a safe distance — He stepped into it. Isaiah described the coming Christ as "a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief" (Isaiah 53:3). Jesus knew hunger, exhaustion, betrayal, false accusation, physical torture, and death. At the tomb of a friend, surrounded by others' grief, the shortest verse in Scripture says everything: "Jesus wept" (John 11:35) — not performing sorrow, but truly feeling it. And because He walked through real suffering Himself, Hebrews says He can "sympathize with our weaknesses" (Hebrews 4:15) — not from a distance, but from experience. Whatever room your pain lives in, He has already stood in one like it. You are not suffering alone while God watches from somewhere safe. He came all the way in.
God can bring good from it — without calling the pain good
Here we have to be careful, because this truth gets misused into a platitude, and platitudes wound. Romans 8:28 does not say all things are good — it says "we know that for those who love God all things work together for good." Your loss is not secretly good. God is not the author of your suffering, celebrating it in disguise. But He is skilled at weaving real good out of real evil, without ever needing to call the evil good. Think of Joseph, sold into slavery by his own brothers, unjustly imprisoned, years stolen from him — and years later he could say to those same brothers, "you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good" (Genesis 50:20). Notice: their evil stayed evil. It was genuinely wrong. And God still wove good through it, good Joseph could never have engineered himself. That is the promise held out to you too — not that this hurt is disguised blessing, but that God is still able to work, quietly and faithfully, even here.
Suffering will not have the last word
The Christian hope was never that this life would be free of pain. It's that pain is not forever. Revelation gives us a picture of what's coming — not a vague comfort, but a promised person and a promised place: "He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away" (Revelation 21:4). Notice who does the wiping — not time, not distraction, not forgetting. God Himself, tenderly, tear by tear. That is not a platitude meant to rush you past your grief today. It is a real hope for a coming restoration, solid enough to grieve honestly right now while still trusting it's not the end. Your tears matter enough to God that He has promised, personally, to wipe every one of them away.
Search the Scriptures
Ps. 13; 22:1; 88; Gen. 3; 50:20; Isa. 53:3; John 11:35; Rom. 8:20-22, 28; Heb. 4:15; Rev. 21:4.
Reflect
If you're in the middle of real pain right now, you don't need to perform peace you don't feel, and you don't need a tidy answer to keep believing. It's all right to say, honestly, "My God, my God, why?" — and still mean "my God." Bring Him exactly what you're carrying tonight, in your own words, without polishing it first. You are not alone in this, and you don't have to stay alone in it.
You don't have to carry this alone