Adapted from Even If He Doesn’t: What We Believe about God When Life Doesn’t Make Sense by Kristen LaValley.

If I had been asked fifteen years ago to write a book about hardship in the life of a believer, I would have been thrilled. With all the confidence of a recent Bible college graduate, I would have written that book emphatically. I would have huffed and puffed and passionately typed out all I knew about hardship, because my perspective hadn’t yet been humbled from experiencing it. The main points of this hypothetical (Thank you, Jesus) book would probably be something like this: 

Most hardship is caused by sin. 

Some hardship isn’t caused by sin, but we don’t know why it happens—so just suck it up and trust God. 

I come from a rich heritage of faith, and for most of my childhood and early adulthood, nothing really bad happened to any of us. I was convinced that my lack of childhood trauma and my family’s protection from major heartache was because we were prayer warriors, faithful to the Lord, and free from sinful strongholds. So for me, faith was pretty formulaic: accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior + don’t sin that much + tithe 10 percent = a happy life of minimal suffering. 

If only it had stayed that simple. 

In the last decade and a half, my simplistic view of suffering (and God’s role in it) has crumbled and been rebuilt. But even with the pain I’ve experienced and now carry with me, I wouldn’t want to go back to the naivete I had before I discovered how difficult life could be. I was relatively pain-free, but my faith was simple. If something went wrong, I blamed myself. I believed my actions, my immaturity, my selfishness, or my sins were the cause of my problems—even things that were out of my control. In my mind, everything could be explained, and most pain was avoidable. 

When your life experiences follow the formula you believe in, you have no reason to question it. The equation feels simple, and your life serves as the proof. What a brutal grace it is to experience something that proves the formula problematic. Whether it’s our own pain or the pain of someone we love, the experience will bring us to believe one of two outcomes. 

The first is that when we encounter some kind of pain that doesn’t fit our faith equation, our thoughts about God and our faith in him are shaken, sometimes to the point of abandoning our faith. The math of a pain-free life doesn’t add up, which leads to the logical (albeit incorrect) conclusion that everything else we believe is also false. 

The second outcome of a formulaic understanding of suffering is that it blocks us from truly caring for those around us who are hurting. When we believe that even the most brutal crisis can be easily explained or that sin is always the catalyst for pain, we place the fault and responsibility solely on the person in crisis. How can we bear the burden of a brother and sister in Christ if we believe their pain is their own fault? Can we truly follow the command to love each other if the side effect of our theology is conditional compassion? Can we really bootstrap people into complete healing? 

Spoiler alert: the answer is no. 

I have walked through trials with shaky faith, and I’ve walked through them with unwavering faith. I’ve been the recipient of compassion and gentleness, and I’ve been blamed and accused of causing my own heartache. Sometimes my pain was too complicated for others to touch. So people stayed out of it, afraid to misplace their compassion in case what had happened was my fault. Sometimes my pain was received with warmth—but from a distance. At times my grief felt like too much for people to cross the threshold. Other times the body of Christ stepped into the thick of it without questions, loving me in a way enabled by Christ. In those moments when I could barely put one foot in front of the other, they were my breath, my voice, and my strength. 

Through the painful moments, the paradigm shifts, the shaking of my faith, and the rebuilding of it, I have found the goodness of the Father at every turn. Sometimes all I had to hold on to were the pieces of my faith that hadn’t been shaken by my pain. When my brain was foggy and I could barely open my Bible or utter a word of prayer, I’d repeat to myself things I knew to be true: he is good, he is kind, he is faithful, he is for me. Those truths were tied to the character of God—aspects of who I believed him to be that didn’t need theological clarification. His faithfulness in my life had confirmed those unchangeable attributes over and over again. 

When I didn’t have the time or bandwidth to think, to process, to decide what I believed about something, the roots of my faith were planted so deeply that my decisions were instinctive. I knew what my belief system could compel me to decide without having to retrace the steps of how I got to that belief. 

It wasn’t always that way, of course. We don’t suddenly become assured of what we believe when crisis hits. And often, that assurance is just certainty that hasn’t been tested. When we allow suffering to teach us, and when we interact with others’ suffering with openness and empathy, our theological best guesses get tested and tried and then they either take root or are ripped out. The ones that take root become spiritual instincts that guide us when we need it most. 

Crisis tends to hit us out of nowhere, and we don’t often have the time or emotional fortitude to rethink what we believe about God. It’s in those moments that our faith becomes active. We move in step with what we already believe to be true about our Father, for better or for worse. We’ll react differently to a situation if we believe God is good, kind, active, and faithful or if we believe he is distant, uncaring, and vengeful. 

The way we were taught to pray, what we were taught to believe about suffering and the sovereignty of God, and how our community displays care for the hurting will shape the way we respond to trials. If we believe that suffering is always a consequence of sin, the blame we heap on ourselves will become self-hatred, which dishonors the image of God in us. If we’ve learned to pray only as a way to receive something from God, we’ll feel like he has abandoned us when he doesn’t answer. If the faith communities we’re part of respond to pain with judgment and reservation, we’ll never learn how to respond to others’ suffering with compassion, grace, and generosity. But when we view suffering as something that we will all have to endure at some point, regardless of how good of a Christian we might be, and when we believe that God is present with us in it, we’ll be able to get a clearer picture of who God is and who we are. 

Even If He Doesn’t by Kristen LaValley

How can I approach God if I’m struggling to believe in His goodness?
So much of our belief can be formulaic. We often think that if we do A, B, and C, then God will do X, Y, and Z. We check things off the “Good Christian Checklist,” trusting we’ll be okay, and our trials will be minimal. But when our experiences inevitably deviate from that belief, our trust in God often crumbles. After a series of life-altering trials--including a devastating diagnosis--uncovering faith in the cracks of pain is something Kristen LaValley knows well.

In Even If He Doesn’t, Kristen will:

-share her vulnerable and honest story

-unpack the nuances of suffering and faith, holding space for the tension between the two

-reveal how engaging the gentleness and grace of Christ in our suffering offers a surprising path to healing

-remind us that when our belief is reduced to a formula, we rob ourselves of a faith that’s enriched by suffering, not crippled by it

Those in the midst of heartache will find strength and renewal as Kristen approaches the complexity of suffering with compassion, guiding us to endure while not forsaking the joy, hope, and peace of those marked by Jesus.