I'm Struggling — VacantTomb

Suffering and Loss

No intellectual argument about the problem of evil lands in the same place as an actual death. When the person who died is someone you loved, when the grief is not theoretical but physical — the body knows grief before the mind has words for it — the question "why did God allow this?" is not a philosophical puzzle. It is a cry.

This section does not primarily offer arguments, though arguments appear in the Why Christianity Foundation's Section 09 and in the Why Not Atheism Foundation's Section 09. What it offers is honesty about what grief and suffering feel like in the Christian life, what the biblical record says about them, and what has actually helped people who have walked through devastating loss.

Grief is not a failure of faith

The shortest verse in the New Testament is John 11:35: "Jesus wept." The context is the death of Lazarus — a man Jesus loved, whose death Jesus had actually allowed to happen by deliberately delaying his arrival (John 11:6). Jesus knew he was about to raise Lazarus from the dead. He wept anyway.

Why? John records that when Jesus "saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in his spirit and greatly troubled" (John 11:33). The presence of grief in the people he loved moved him to grief himself. He did not explain to Mary that her grief was misplaced because the resurrection was coming. He wept with her first.

This is a theological statement about God's relationship to human grief. It is not efficient or detached. When the people God loves suffer, something in God's own experience corresponds to that. The incarnation means this is not a metaphor — God has occupied human grief from the inside.

Grief is not a failure of faith. It is the appropriate response to real loss. Paul does not tell the Thessalonians not to grieve — he tells them to "not grieve as others do who have no hope" (1 Thessalonians 4:13). The grief is acknowledged. What changes is the horizon against which it is felt.

1 Thessalonians 4:13–14

ESV

But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep.

Note what Paul does not say. He does not say "do not grieve." He says "not as others who have no hope." The grief is real and permitted. The difference is hope — not optimism, not the cheerful conviction that things will be fine, but hope in the specific, historically grounded claim that death is not the final word, because the one who conquered death has promised to bring with him those who have trusted him.

C.S. Lewis and the experience of grief

C.S. Lewis was perhaps the most widely read Christian apologist of the 20th century. His intellectual case for Christianity is developed across many books. But what happened when he actually lost someone he loved reveals something that the intellectual case alone cannot.

Lewis married Joy Davidman late in life, against considerable resistance from his friends and colleagues. Their marriage was brief — Joy died of cancer in 1960, four years after they married. Lewis had spent his career writing about suffering and the problem of evil, including an entire book (The Problem of Pain, 1940) offering a theodicy — an explanation of why God allows suffering. When his own loss came, he found that his theodicy did not absorb the weight of the grief.

He wrote what he called a journal — not intended for publication — in the days and weeks after Joy's death. He published it later as A Grief Observed. Its opening pages are among the most honest accounts of grief in any literature:

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing. At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says.
C.S. LewisChristian scholar— A Grief Observed, 1961

Meanwhile, where is God? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be — or so it feels — welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside.
C.S. LewisChristian scholar— A Grief Observed, 1961

Lewis does not resolve this quickly. He describes the experience of feeling that God had slammed the door. He describes what he calls "the agonized and rebellious feelings of Job." He describes his anger, his confusion, and the sense that his theodicy was a piece of paper held up against a gale.

And then, slowly — not through argument but through perseverance in the relationship — something shifted. Not resolution. Not answers. But a return of the sense of God's presence, changed and deeper:

You can't see anything properly while your eyes are blurred with tears. You can't, in most things, get what you want if you want it too desperately: anyway, you can't get the best out of it. 'Knock and it shall be opened.' But does knocking mean hammering and kicking the door like a maniac?... When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of 'No answer.' It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze. As if He shook His head not in refusal but in waiving the question. Like, 'Peace, child; you don't understand.'
C.S. LewisChristian scholar— A Grief Observed, 1961

Lewis's journey through grief is important for several reasons. First, because it is honest — he does not pretend that his theology protected him from the full weight of loss. Second, because it demonstrates that the experience of God's apparent absence in grief is not unique or unusual — it was experienced by one of the most intellectually sophisticated Christians of the 20th century. Third, because it models what faithfulness in grief looks like: not the performance of peace, but the stubborn continuation of the relationship through every stage of the pain.

What suffering is for — and the honest limits of what we can say

The Christian tradition has multiple accounts of why God permits suffering. The soul-making theodicy (John Hick) argues that a world without suffering cannot produce courage, compassion, perseverance, or depth of character — that the goods God aims at require the process, not just the outcome. The free will theodicy (Plantinga) addresses suffering caused by human choices. The mystery theodicy (Job, Paul) argues that we are not in a position to see the full account that God sees — that our judgment of "pointless suffering" is made from a position of radical epistemic limitation.

Each of these accounts has genuine force. None of them, in the moment of acute grief, says everything that needs to be said. The person who has just buried their child does not need a theodicy first. They need what Job's friends got wrong and what Job needed: presence. Sitting with someone in their grief without demanding that they perform gratitude or premature resolution is one of the most demanding and most important things one human being can do for another.

What can be said, honestly and without pretense:

God does not waste suffering. This is not the same as saying God causes every suffering or that every suffering has an obvious redemptive purpose visible from within it. It is the claim that in the hands of a God who entered suffering himself, and who rose from the worst suffering imaginable, nothing is permanently wasted. Romans 8:28 is not a promise that everything will feel fine — it is a promise that God is working even in the most devastating material.

Romans 8:18

ESV

For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.

This is not minimizing the suffering. "The sufferings of this present time" — Paul knew what those were, having been beaten, imprisoned, shipwrecked, and exhausted in the service of the gospel. The comparison is not "your suffering is small." The comparison is "the glory is so large that even the most real and substantial suffering will not be the dominant note in the final account."

Death is not the end. This is the central Christian claim about grief — not that death does not matter, but that it does not have the final word. The resurrection of Jesus is not just a nice theological category. It is the historical event that changed the meaning of every death that follows it. Because Jesus rose from the dead, physical death is not annihilation — it is passage. The person who has died in Christ has not ceased. They have gone ahead.

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Suffering and Loss

John 11:35 — "Jesus wept." Before he raised Lazarus, knowing he was about to raise him, Jesus wept with Mary. Grief is not a failure of faith. "Do not grieve as those who have no hope" (1 Thess. 4:13) — the grief is permitted. What changes is the horizon.

Key claims

—"Jesus wept" (John 11:35) — before raising Lazarus, knowing he would raise him, he wept with Mary
—C.S. Lewis: the theodicy he wrote didn't protect him from the weight of grief when his wife died
—Paul: "Do not grieve as others who have no hope" — the grief is permitted; what changes is the horizon
—Romans 8:28: God works in all things — not that everything feels fine but that nothing is permanently wasted
—Death is not the end — the resurrection changes the meaning of every death that follows it
—Romans 8:18: the sufferings are real; the coming glory is so large the comparison is not worth making

Scholars cited

C.S. LewisChristian (writing through grief)

Other foundations

Why Christianity

Why Not Islam

Why Not Atheism

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