Hard Questions: Where is God when it's awful

I have sat at a lot of bedsides. That's part of what hospice chaplaincy does to you — it puts you in rooms where the usual religious answers arrive and then fail, one by one, in the presence of actual dying. People don't need abstractions at the end. They need something true.

The question most people bring to those rooms — where is God in this? — is one of the hardest questions in the history of human thought. Theologians have a word for it: theodicy. It comes from the Greek words for God and justice. It names the problem of reconciling a God who is supposed to be all-powerful and all-good with a world that contains genuine, sometimes unbearable, suffering.

This article won't solve that problem. Nobody has. But the question deserves more than the answers the church usually offers, and that's what I want to try here.

The standard answers arrive fast. God has a plan. Everything happens for a reason. This suffering will make you stronger. God won't give you more than you can handle. Heaven will make it worth it.

These answers share a common instinct: to make suffering mean something — to fit it into a framework where God's goodness and power remain intact and the pain serves some larger purpose. Theologically, this belongs to what scholars call the "greater good" tradition of theodicy, which argues that God permits suffering because it leads to outcomes that couldn't exist without it. No courage without danger. No compassion without need. No faith without testing.

The Bible is not silent on this. Paul writes to the Romans that suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, and character produces hope (Romans 5:3-4). The Letter to the Hebrews describes suffering as a discipline that produces the fruit of righteousness in those trained by it (Hebrews 12:11). These are serious biblical claims.

But applied too quickly, to the wrong person, in the wrong moment, they become pastoral catastrophe. When a parent buries a child and someone tells them God had a reason — the theology may be defensible and the damage is real. Some suffering is not, in any meaningful human sense, worth what it cost.

C.S. Lewis understood this better than almost anyone. In 1940 he wrote The Problem of Pain — a careful philosophical defense of God's goodness in the face of suffering. Twenty years later, after his wife Joy died of cancer, he picked up a notebook and wrote what became A Grief Observed (1961). It reads like a man discovering that his own earlier answers don't reach where he is now. He describes grief as a door slamming in his face. He asks whether God is a cosmic sadist. He writes with the fury of someone who built a theological house and is now living through a storm it wasn't designed for.

What Lewis found, at real cost, is the gap between theodicy as an intellectual exercise and theodicy as something you have to survive. The philosophical problem of evil is worth engaging seriously. But it does not reach the person sitting with a diagnosis, or standing at a graveside, or lying awake at three in the morning with a grief that won't lift.

So what does the Christian tradition actually offer people in that place?

N.T. Wright, in Evil and the Justice of God (IVP, 2006), argues that the Bible is less interested in explaining why suffering exists than in narrating what God is doing about it. The Old Testament, he observes, does not offer a philosophical treatise on the origin of evil. It offers instead what he calls "a narrative of God's projects of justice within a world of injustice." The primary biblical move is not explanation but engagement — God entering into the mess of human history, working to put things right from the inside rather than explaining them from a distance.

That engagement reaches its fullest expression in the crucifixion. The Christian claim, at its most scandalous, is that God did not watch suffering from a safe distance and issue explanations. God entered it. The cross is not primarily an answer to why suffering exists. It is the assertion that God has been where suffering is — has been abandoned, has cried out, has died — and that this changes what suffering means, even when it cannot explain it.

This is where Anglican theological honesty tends to land. There has never been an official Anglican teaching on theodicy. The tradition makes room for the honest answer, which is sometimes simply: I don't know. That is not a failure of faith. It is a refusal to say more than the evidence warrants.

The Psalms of lament hold the same territory from a different direction. Roughly a third of the Psalter is lament — raw, unresolved prayers of abandonment, accusation, and grief addressed directly to God. Psalm 88 is the darkest chapter in the entire Bible. It ends with no resolution, no morning after the darkness, no turn toward praise. Just night. It is in the canon. The community that assembled Scripture decided it belonged there.

What the lament tradition offers is not an answer to where God is. It offers a practice: bringing the question to God directly, without cleaning it up first. The demand to know becomes itself a form of prayer — evidence that the relationship is real enough to fight inside.

I have sat with people who were furious at God and people who felt nothing at all, and people who described something they could only call presence in the worst moments — not comfort exactly, but company. I cannot explain the variation. What I can say is that the tradition at its most honest does not promise that God will prevent the awful thing. It promises something stranger: that the awful thing is not the end of the story, and that God is somehow inside it.

Where is God when it's awful?

Closer than the silence makes it seem, and more hidden than we'd like. The cross says God does not watch from outside. The resurrection says suffering is not the final word. In between — in the middle of the loss and the diagnosis and the grief that won't move — what the church offers is not an explanation but a presence, and a community willing to sit in the dark without rushing you toward the light.

Some days that doesn't feel like enough. But it is not nothing, and it is what we have.

Where are you with this today? Maybe you're not reading this out of idle curiosity. Maybe something has happened, or is happening, and the silence has felt less like mystery and more like abandonment. If that's where you are, you're not the first person to sit in that silence and wonder if anyone is there. The tradition doesn't offer an explanation for it. What it offers is company — people across centuries who sat in the same dark and found their way through, and a God who, if the tradition is right, knows that darkness from the inside. You don't have to be okay. You just have to still be here.

Sources and further reading: Romans 5:3-4; Hebrews 12:11; Psalm 88 (NRSV). C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (Geoffrey Bles, 1940); A Grief Observed (Faber and Faber, 1961). N.T. Wright, Evil and the Justice of God (IVP Books, 2006). "Theodicy," An Episcopal Dictionary of the Church, Church Publishing Inc. Episcopal Diocese of Atlanta, "Theodicy: What Can We Say About Evil?" (2022).