When God Stops Making Sense
Reflections on Faith, Suffering, and the Limits of Understanding
There are moments in life when God becomes difficult to understand.
For some people, it happens after a diagnosis. For others, after a death. For others, after a disaster. Sometimes it happens gradually. Sometimes all at once.
But sooner or later, many people encounter an experience that does not fit comfortably inside the God they thought they knew.
A child dies.
A community is devastated.
A faithful prayer appears unanswered.
A life built carefully over decades changes in a matter of minutes.
The questions arrive quickly.
Why?
Why this family?
Why now?
Why did this happen?
Where was God?
These are not new questions. Human beings have been asking them for thousands of years.
Yet when suffering becomes personal, the questions feel different.
Theoretical questions become urgent questions.
Abstract questions become deeply human questions.
The problem is not simply that tragedy occurs.
The problem is that tragedy often refuses to cooperate with our assumptions.
Many of us carry an understanding of God that functions reasonably well during ordinary seasons of life. God is loving. God is present. God answers prayer. God watches over us. God is working for good.
These convictions can be deeply meaningful. Many of them are rooted in Scripture.
The challenge emerges when life becomes more complicated than our explanations.
Years ago, I assumed that the greatest challenge suffering posed was emotional. Over time, I began realizing that suffering often creates theological challenges first.
People continue functioning.
Continue working.
Continue caring for others.
Yet privately they find themselves wrestling with questions they never expected to ask.
The disruption begins in theology.
The framework starts to crack.
Not because God has disappeared.
Because reality no longer fits comfortably inside existing explanations.
I have witnessed this repeatedly in disaster response. After a flood, tornado, wildfire, or hurricane, survivors often ask questions that have no easy answers.
Why this neighborhood?
Why this home?
Why was one family spared while another lost everything?
Why did this happen at all?
The questions are understandable.
Sometimes they are heartbreaking.
And often they remain unresolved.
Many people assume faith requires answers.
Scripture suggests something different.
The Bible contains remarkably few neat explanations for suffering. What it contains instead are people wrestling.
Job wrestles.
Jeremiah wrestles.
The psalmists wrestle.
Habakkuk wrestles.
Even Jesus cries out from the cross.
The biblical witness is strikingly honest.
There are moments when God does not make sense.
Moments when suffering appears larger than explanation.
Moments when silence feels louder than certainty.
Scripture does not hide these moments.
It preserves them.
Perhaps that is because confusion has always been part of faith.
Modern religious culture sometimes treats certainty as the goal.
The biblical story often treats faithfulness as the goal.
The difference matters.
Certainty seeks understanding.
Faithfulness seeks relationship.
Certainty wants answers.
Faithfulness continues the conversation even when answers remain unavailable.
One of the most important discoveries I have made through years of ministry and disaster response is that God and our explanations about God are not always the same thing.
This distinction may sound obvious.
It rarely feels obvious when suffering arrives.
When tragedy strikes, people often discover that their explanations about God are more fragile than they realized.
The explanation collapses.
The question becomes whether God collapses with it.
For many people, the answer is no.
Not immediately.
Not easily.
But eventually.
They discover that while God no longer makes sense in the way God once did, God remains present.
Different.
Less predictable.
More mysterious.
Harder to explain.
Yet somehow still present.
I have seen this happen repeatedly.
People lose certainty.
Yet continue praying.
Continue hoping.
Continue searching.
Continue believing.
Not because they have solved the mystery.
Because they have chosen to remain in relationship with God despite the mystery.
That kind of faith feels different from the faith many people begin with. It tends to be less interested in simple answers, less confident in easy explanations, and less concerned with appearing certain.
At the same time, it often becomes more compassionate, more patient, more humble, and more willing to acknowledge complexity.
People who have wrestled with God tend to be gentler with the questions of others. They know what it feels like when familiar explanations stop working. They understand the loneliness of uncertainty and recognize that suffering is rarely solved by clichés.
One of the dangers of theological injury is the temptation to believe that confusion represents failure.
It does not.
Confusion is often evidence that faith has encountered reality at close range.
The problem is not that people have stopped believing.
The problem is that life has become larger than their previous explanations.
Sometimes God stops making sense because our understanding of God is being stretched beyond its previous limits.
The process can be painful.
It can also be transformative.
Much of spiritual growth involves discovering that God is larger than we imagined, more mysterious than we assumed, less controllable than we hoped, and perhaps more present than we realized.
The older I become, the less interested I am in defending explanations and the more interested I am in remaining attentive to presence.
Presence in suffering.
Presence in grief.
Presence in uncertainty.
Presence in the ordinary acts of compassion that emerge when people care for one another during difficult times.
Disaster work has reinforced this lesson repeatedly.
People experiencing catastrophe rarely need theological lectures.
They need companionship.
They need dignity.
They need someone willing to remain.
Perhaps this is because God’s presence often becomes most visible when explanations fail.
Not because suffering is good.
Not because tragedy is meaningful.
But because compassion emerges within it.
Again and again, I have watched people encounter extraordinary kindness in the midst of profound loss. I have watched communities care for one another. I have watched volunteers remain long after the headlines disappeared. I have watched people become answers to prayers they could not explain.
These experiences have not resolved every question.
They have not eliminated mystery.
They have not made God easier to understand.
What they have done is convince me that understanding is not the same thing as faith.
God may stop making sense.
Faith may continue.
The questions may remain.
The relationship may remain as well.
And perhaps that is one of the most important discoveries theological injury has to offer.
The goal of faith is not always understanding God.
Sometimes the goal is continuing the conversation.
Continuing the relationship.
Continuing to trust.
Even when God no longer makes sense.
And perhaps especially then.