God Didn't Do This to You

A reflection on suffering, choice, and the God who is actually for you.

If you are in the middle of something hard right now, this is for you.

Not for the person who has it figured out. Not for the one who has already come through it and can speak with the confidence of distance. For the person who is in it right now — who is tired, or angry, or numb, or all three — and who has maybe looked up at the sky at some point and asked, in whatever words came, why.

I have sat with a lot of people in that place. And I want to offer something that has taken me years to understand — not as theology handed down from a pulpit, but as truth I have watched lived out in real lives, including my own.

The God I Know

I want to start here: the God I know does not do this to you.

I know that is not what everyone has been taught. Some of us grew up with a version of God who was the architect of our suffering — who allowed or even caused the hard things as punishment, as lesson, as some inscrutable plan we were supposed to accept without question. I understand why that version of God produces rage. Or distance. Or a faith that quietly collapses under the weight of too much pain.

But that is not the God I have come to know. The God I know is described by his own fruit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. That is not a description of someone who engineers suffering. That is a description of someone who is fundamentally, irreducibly, for you.

The Space He Gives You

Here is what I believe about how God works: He does not take you where you don't want to go. He does not force on you even what is good for you. He gives you space. He gives you choice. He is hoping — actively, lovingly hoping — that you will choose what is in your best interest. Because when you do, it creates blessings not just for you but for everyone around you.

This means that much of what we suffer is the result of choices — our own, or other people's. We live in a world where human beings have the capacity to choose badly, to cause harm, to act out of fear or greed or brokenness. And those choices land on other people. Sometimes they land on you. That is not God's design. That is the cost of a world where love is real — because love that is forced is not love at all.

And yes — there are things that happen that are not the result of any human choice. Natural disasters. Disease. The randomness of a broken world. I do not have a tidy answer for those. What I have is a God who enters into them with us. Who does not watch from a distance.

The Living in Between

Because we are made in God's image, we carry something remarkable: the capacity to choose good even when we want what is wrong. Even when our motives are impure. Even when we are not yet who we are trying to become.

There is a phrase I both love and resist a little: fake it till you make it. I resist it because it sounds like performance. But I have come to understand it differently. It is really about living in the space of becoming — the not yet, but one day will be. You choose the right thing before you fully feel it. You act in the direction of who you want to be before you are fully that person. And over time, something shifts. The choosing changes you. The doing becomes the being.

That is not weakness. That is wisdom. And it is some of the hardest work a human being can do.

What I Have Seen

I work with young people who have been through things that should not happen to children. Loss, trauma, betrayal, abandonment — the full weight of what human beings can do to each other when they are broken and choose badly.

What astonishes me, every time, is watching them choose. Not perfectly. Not without backsliding or grief or rage. But choosing, in the direction of life, over and over again. Working the hardness back out of their hearts when they had every right to keep it there. Daring to hope when hope had failed them before.

I have come to believe that this choosing — this turning toward life even when death would be easier — is one of the most sacred things a human being can do. It is not natural. It is supernatural. It is what we were made for.

And I have watched God honor it. Every time.

If You Are in the Middle of It

If you are in the middle of something hard right now, I want to say this directly to you:

God did not do this to you. He is not punishing you. He is not testing you to see if you will break. He is with you in it — closer than you can feel right now, holding things you cannot hold, working in the silence that feels like absence.

You do not have to have it figured out. You do not have to feel better than you feel. You just have to make the next small choice in the direction of life. And then the one after that.

That is enough. That is, in fact, everything.

There is more to say about all of this — much more. This reflection is the beginning of a longer conversation I am hoping to have. Stay tuned.

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