Is God good?
Before I was ever even a believer, before I even wanted to know who God was, I wrestled deeply with questions that I think many hurting people are afraid to say out loud. How could a supposedly loving God allow horrible things to happen to innocent people? If God is truly in control and knows everything before it happens, why does He not simply stop evil before it destroys people? If He hates evil, why not just let evil destroy itself? Why does it so often seem to wound the vulnerable, the innocent, and the people already carrying the most pain?
As a child, my earliest understanding of God was not one of safety, tenderness, or love. I saw Him as a controlling Father standing over me with expectations I could never possibly meet. In my mind, He already knew I would fail before I even began. I believed I was not good enough, not worthy enough, and certainly not lovable enough.
I still remember being around eight or nine years old when a little neighborhood girl came over and sang Jesus Loves Me. I can still picture the moment so clearly. And while she sang, I remember thinking with complete certainty that the person she was singing about could not possibly be real. Because Jesus does not save children. I believed I was living proof of that. And if He was real, but had simply chosen not to save me, then that hurt was almost too much to bear.
The version of God I had been taught about felt harsh and domineering to me. I believed He handed out “discipline” because that was supposedly His job, and somehow all of that pain and fear was meant to make me obedient enough, good enough, acceptable enough to Him. Instead of seeing God as a protector of wounded children, I saw Him as someone I was supposed to fear disappointing.
And somehow, at the same time, I was told I was expected to obey Him completely and trust Him fully—or risk spending eternity in hell.
But how was I supposed to trust someone I feared?
How was I supposed to feel safe with a God who, from my perspective, had allowed me to be hurt? A God who did not seem to protect me? A God who could have stopped things and yet did not?
So as a teenager and into my early adult years, I didn’t just drift from God—I intentionally kept Him at a distance. It felt safer that way. I told myself He didn’t really have authority over my life, that He wasn’t actively involved, that He certainly wasn’t someone I had to answer to. I took the Bible and quietly lowered it in my mind from truth to suggestion—just another book with some good ideas I could take or leave depending on what felt right to me.
I began trusting my own judgment more than anything else. I believed I was capable of deciding what was good and what was bad, what mattered and what didn’t. And I settled into this quiet agreement with myself: as long as I did more good than bad, I would be okay. Safe enough. Acceptable enough.
In reality, I had taken God and reduced Him down to something I could manage—something small enough not to threaten me, not to challenge me, not to ask more of me than I was willing to give. I fit Him into a box I could live with.
Because I could not reconcile the pain I had lived through—and the pain I had seen—with the idea of a truly loving God. In my mind, those two things could not exist together. So instead of wrestling with Him, I stepped away and began creating a God that was more palatable.
In my early twenties, I began to build a life around the version of truth I could live with. I “accepted Jesus”—or at least the version of Him I had made manageable—and I said all the right things. I told myself I was willing to follow Him, or at least follow the direction I believed I was supposed to go. I reassured myself that I was safe now, that I was “saved,” that hell was no longer something I had to fear, and that one day I would go to heaven.
And for a while, that felt like enough.
I also knew, even then, that my heart was drawn toward hurting children. The ones who had been overlooked, abandoned, or broken in ways they could not fix on their own. Something in me recognized something in them. I understood their questions, their fears, the way pain shapes how you see yourself and the world. It felt meaningful—important, even—to step toward that kind of work. So I did. I stepped into foster care, believing it was something good and right and worthy of my life.
And that is where everything began to shift.
It is one thing to carry your own pain. As a child, I had learned how to quietly minimize it, explain it away, or tuck it into places where it didn’t have to be fully faced. I could survive that way. I could function that way.
But it is an entirely different thing to become a mother and hold a broken child in your arms—one you cannot fix.
When a child looks at you with eyes that have seen things no child should ever see…
When they ask you why those things happened to them…
And you realize you do not have an answer that is good enough…
That kind of helplessness is devastating in a way that is hard to put into words.
What hurt me as a child suddenly felt small compared to the pain of not being able to protect or rescue my own children. And in those moments, the version of God I had carefully contained—the one I had shaped into something I could tolerate—was no longer enough.
No amount of trying harder could fix it.
I could not look into the faces of children who trusted me and tell them, “God loves you” and “God is in control,” without something inside of me trembling. Because I wasn’t sure anymore that I believed it in a way that could hold the weight of what they had lived through.
And that forced a decision I could no longer avoid.
I had to look at the box I had put God in… and decide if I was willing to let Him out.
That was the beginning of a very real, very honest wrestling.
Not surface-level questions. Not comfortable answers. But deep, searching, sometimes painful wrestling with who God actually is.
I began to truly study the Bible—not just read it, not just pull comforting verses from it, but study it. My first question became foundational:
Do I actually believe this is the Word of God?
Is it true?
Is it accurate?
Can it be trusted?
And if it is… can I believe all of it?
Or is it something I get to pick and choose from?
Is it an all-or-nothing kind of truth? And if I only believe parts of it, am I really believing it at all?
So I began to take it apart—slowly, carefully—book by book, verse by verse.
And if I am being completely honest, I did not start that process expecting to come out believing it more.
If anything, I was fairly certain I would eventually confirm what I had already begun to suspect—that it was, at best, a collection of meaningful ideas… and at worst, a beautifully written but ultimately untrue story.
And somewhere in the middle of all that questioning, something began to unravel in me. The more honestly I wrestled, the more I realized that the Bible itself was not avoiding the very questions I had spent most of my life trying to silence. Scripture was filled with hurting people crying out to God in confusion, grief, fear, anger, and desperation.
The question of how a good and sovereign God could permit evil of this magnitude is not a new question. It is an ancient wound carried through the pages of Scripture by people who loved God deeply and still found themselves staring into suffering they could not make sense of.
It was the question Job asked as he sat in ashes after losing his children, his health, and the life he once knew. In the middle of his grief, he cried out:
“Though he slay me, yet will I hope in him.” — Job 13:15 (NLT)
Job did not understand why God had allowed such devastation. He wrestled. He questioned. He mourned. There are entire chapters where Job pours out confusion, anguish, and frustration before God. And yet, even in his pain, he continued turning toward God instead of away from Him.
It was the question Habakkuk asked when he looked out at violence, injustice, and cruelty and could not reconcile what he saw with the God he believed in:
“How long, O Lord, must I call for help?
But you do not listen!
‘Violence is everywhere!’ I cry,
but you do not come to save.”
— Habakkuk 1:2 (NLT)
That verse feels painfully familiar to anyone who has ever prayed desperately for protection, healing, rescue, or intervention and felt like heaven remained silent.
It was the question David asked over and over again in the book of Psalms. David was called “a man after God’s own heart,” and yet some of his prayers sound almost shocking in their honesty:
“O Lord, how long will you forget me? Forever?
How long will you look the other way?”
— Psalms 13:1 (NLT)
Those are not the words of a man untouched by suffering. Those are the words of someone who loved God and still could not understand why the pain would not stop.
It is the question every honest believer must face when suffering stops being theoretical and becomes painfully personal.
Because there comes a moment when faith is no longer about repeating verses that sound comforting in safe places. It becomes about whether what you believe about God can actually survive contact with real grief. Whether it can hold when children are hurting, when prayers seem unanswered, when evil feels unbearably personal, and when the God you are trying to trust seems silent.
I think sometimes people imagine faith means never struggling, never questioning, never wrestling with sorrow, confusion, disappointment, or fear. But Scripture tells a very different story. The Bible is filled with broken people crying out to God from places of deep pain—betrayal, abuse, loss, suffering, fear, and grief so heavy they could barely stand beneath it. And instead of removing those cries from Scripture, God preserved them there for us, almost as if He knew that one day we too would sit in the middle of our own pain searching for words big enough to carry our grief back to Him.
Because eventually suffering becomes real.
It is no longer just a distant conversation about why terrible things happen to people. Instead, it becomes a child sitting in front of you asking why the terrible things happened to them. It becomes holding someone you love while knowing you cannot undo what has already been done. It becomes praying through tears while wondering why God is allowing something you would stop in a heartbeat if you had the power to do so yourself. It’s in those moments, faith stops being about easy answers and becomes about whether you can still cling to God when He feels painfully absent in the middle of your grief.
And that is where many believers quietly find themselves wrestling with the same question:
If God is truly good and truly sovereign, why does He allow evil at all?
That was the place I found myself standing.
Not looking for easy answers.
Not looking for religious clichés.
But trying to decide whether God was truly who He claimed to be, and whether He was still good even in a world filled with suffering.
So when I speak about suffering, evil, pain, and the goodness of God, I am not speaking as someone repeating ideas from a theology book or someone who simply decided to “have enough faith” to believe harder. What I speak about was wrestled through in tears, confusion, anger, fear, grief, and long nights on the floor crying out to God while trying to understand how evil could touch the people I love most and God still somehow remain good in the middle of it.
I know what it is to ask where God was.
I know what it is to feel physically sick after learning what another human being was capable of doing to a child.
And I know what it is to discover that some of the children God entrusted to me carried wounds that should never have existed in the first place.
Some of those wounds were inflicted long before they came into my arms. Some came through systems that should have protected them and did not. And some came through the hands of someone I once trusted enough to build a life with. There are few griefs deeper than realizing your own children were harmed while under the authority and protection of someone who was supposed to love them.
There are no words strong enough for that kind of betrayal.
As a mother, there is something inside you that wants to go backward in time and stand in the doorway. You want to become a wall between your child and every evil thing that ever touched them. You want to carry it instead of them. You want to undo what cannot be undone. And when you cannot, there is a helplessness so deep it almost feels suffocating.
I have sat with the question:
“How could God allow this?”
Not as a theoretical debate.
Not as an online argument.
But as a real cry from a breaking heart.
Scripture never gives a shallow answer to that question. In fact, the Bible openly acknowledges that we live in a world profoundly fractured by sin and human rebellion. Creation itself is described as groaning under the weight of it:
“For we know that all creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.” — Romans 8:22 (NLT)
There is something broken here. We feel it instinctively because we were made for something better than this.
And yet, even in that brokenness, Scripture also insists that God is not distant from human suffering. He is not cold toward it. He is not indifferent to it.
Christianity does not present a God who merely watches suffering from afar. It presents a God who stepped into suffering Himself.
Jesus was betrayed. Mocked. Rejected. Abandoned. Tortured. Crucified.
And from the cross, Jesus Himself cried out the words of David:
“My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”
— Matthew 27:46 (NLT)
That matters deeply to me because it means God is not asking us to walk through suffering in a way He Himself has not entered.
I do not believe we are given full answers for every tragedy this side of eternity. Job was never given a detailed explanation for his suffering. Many of David’s questions were never fully answered in the moment either. Sometimes the silence itself becomes part of the trial.
But Scripture continually calls us back to the character of God even when we cannot fully understand His ways:
“My thoughts are nothing like your thoughts,” says the Lord.
“And my ways are far beyond anything you could imagine.”
— Isaiah 55:8 (NLT)
Faith, then, is not pretending evil does not devastate us. It is not denying grief. It is not silencing hard questions. Sometimes faith simply looks like continuing to bring our shattered hearts honestly before God while holding onto the belief that His goodness still exists even when we cannot presently see what He is doing.
And Scripture promises that evil and suffering will not have the final word forever.
One day:
“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.”
— Revelation 21:4
And I think one of the greatest mistakes Christians sometimes make is trying to answer that question too quickly.
Scripture never treats suffering casually. Jesus did not stand at Lazarus’ tomb and rebuke everyone for grieving. He wept.
“Jesus wept.” — John 11:35
That matters deeply to me.
Because sometimes the holiest thing you can do is not explain suffering away, but sit in it honestly while holding onto the character of God with trembling hands.
The Bible never denies the reality of evil. It never minimizes abuse. It never pretends wickedness is less wicked because God is sovereign. In fact, Scripture speaks about evil with far more seriousness than our culture does.
God calls it what it is:
violence,
corruption,
oppression,
wickedness,
sin.
And He hates it.
“But you are pure and cannot stand the sight of evil.” — Habakkuk 1:13
“The Lord examines both the righteous and the wicked. He hates those who love violence.” — Psalm 11:5
When I look at what happened to some of my children, I do not believe God looked down casually or indifferently. I do not believe He shrugged at their pain.
Scripture says:
“The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit.” — Psalm 34:18
I have clung to that verse in seasons where I could barely breathe through grief.
But I also cannot escape what Scripture clearly teaches: God is still sovereign even in a world where terrible evil happens.
That truth becomes difficult when suffering becomes personal.
It is much easier to say “God is sovereign” in comfortable seasons than it is when you are holding a shattered child who wakes up screaming from nightmares. It is much easier to talk about Romans 8:28 before you have watched trauma alter the way your child sees themselves and the world around them.
And yet somehow, through all these years, I have found that removing God’s sovereignty does not actually comfort me.
Because if God is not sovereign, then suffering is random.
Abuse is random.
Evil wins randomly.
Children suffer meaninglessly.
And I cannot live there.
The Bible gives me something harder, but ultimately far more solid:
a God who is still ruling even when I cannot understand what He has permitted.
“Who can command things to happen without the Lord’s permission? Does not the Most High send both calamity and good?” — Lamentations 3:37–38
Joseph said to his brothers:
“You intended to harm me, but God intended it all for good. He brought me to this position so I could save the lives of many people.” — Genesis 50:20
Notice Joseph did not deny the evil.
He called it evil.
The betrayal was real.
The suffering was real.
The abandonment was real.
And yet somehow God was still working inside a story filled with human sin.
The cross itself is the clearest picture of this mystery.
The murder of Christ was the most evil act in human history. Men lied, hated, mocked, beat, and crucified the innocent Son of God. And yet Scripture says:
“In fact, this has happened here in this very city! For Herod Antipas, Pontius Pilate the governor, the Gentiles, and the people of Israel were all united against Jesus, your holy servant, whom you anointed. But everything they did was determined beforehand according to your will.” — Acts 4:27–28
Both things are true at once:
Human beings are genuinely responsible for evil.
And God remains sovereign over history.
I do not fully understand how those truths fit together. I do not think any human being fully does.
But I know the cross tells me something essential:
God is not distant from suffering.
He entered it Himself.
He knows what it is to watch His beloved Son suffer at the hands of wicked men.
And because of that, when I am sitting with my own children in their pain, I do not picture a cold or detached God. I picture Christ weeping with us.
There were seasons after learning the extent of some of the abuse my children endured where I genuinely struggled to reconcile my grief with God’s goodness. I would look at them and think:
“Lord, if You could have stopped this, why didn’t You?”
And sometimes there was no immediate answer.
Only silence.
Only prayer through tears.
Only choosing to trust what I knew about God even when I could not understand what He had allowed.
That is where faith becomes real.
Not when everything makes sense.
But when you continue clinging to Christ when nothing makes sense at all.
Over time, I began to see something else too.
Not that the evil was good.
It never was.
Abuse is never good.
Rape is never good.
Violence against children is never good.
But God has a way of bringing life out of graves.
I have watched wounded children slowly learn safety.
I have watched traumatized children begin to laugh again.
I have watched children who expected rejection slowly begin to trust love.
I have watched God grow compassion, discernment, protectiveness, and deep dependence on Him through suffering I would never have chosen.
Some of the greatest tenderness in our family was born out of shared pain.
That does not make the evil acceptable.
It makes God miraculous.
Only God can take what Satan intended to destroy and begin weaving redemption through it.
And still, there are things I do not understand.
There are prayers I prayed that were not answered the way I wanted.
There are memories I wish my children did not carry.
There are scars that remain.
But Scripture never promises that believers escape suffering in this life. What it promises is that suffering will not have the final word.
Revelation 21:4 says there is coming a day when He will wipe away every tear, death will be no more, mourning will be no more, and pain will be no more.
I hold onto that fiercely.
Because some wrongs are so deep, they require eternity itself to fully heal them.
To my children, if you ever wrestle with how God could allow evil after what you have lived through, I want you to know something clearly:
Your pain never meant God abandoned you.
Not once.
There were moments human beings failed you horribly.
Moments adults sinned against you.
Moments protection should have come and did not.
But even there, Christ was not absent.
Psalm 56 says God keeps our tears in His bottle.
That means not one tear fell unseen.
And someday every hidden thing will be brought fully into the light. Every act of evil will face perfect justice before a perfectly holy God. Nothing will remain buried forever.
The world says suffering proves God does not exist or does not care.
But the cross says something different.
The cross says God stepped directly into human suffering Himself so that evil would not ultimately win.
And because Christ rose again, I believe with my whole heart that resurrection is stronger than destruction.
Light is stronger than darkness.
And redemption is stronger than the worst thing that ever happened to us.
I cannot answer every question about suffering.
I cannot explain every mystery.
But I know this:
The God who carried us through the darkest seasons of our lives has never once stopped being faithful.
Even in grief.
Even in confusion.
Even in the wreckage.
Especially there.
“Since He did not spare even his own Son but gave him up for us all, won’t he also give us everything else?” -Romans 8:23
So no, I do not believe faith means having every answer neatly tied together. I think sometimes faith simply means continuing to reach for the hand of God while your own hands are still shaking. It means choosing to believe that His heart is still good even when your own heart is breaking. And after everything I have wrestled through, everything I have seen, everything I have grieved, this is the truth I keep coming back to again and again:
The safest place I ever found for my pain was not away from God… but finally honest before Him.
Because God…is good.
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