Years ago, I was the Assistant National Manager of a charity project. I’d been in the role for about two and a half years and had thrown myself into it, including more than a hundred nights away from home each year. My wife and I had four children under ten.
When the National Manager resigned, I decided not to apply for his job. Someone else was appointed, and six weeks later he called me into a meeting.
I walked into that room with a job and walked out without one.
There had been no warning. My position had been made redundant. I handed over the work phone and laptop and was told not to go back and speak with the people I had been working alongside. The only other position meant moving cities within three weeks for less than 70 per cent of my existing pay.
I was furious.
But the first thing I did wasn’t work out the finances or start looking for another job.
I rang my wife.
Then I went home.
Looking back, there was something instinctive about that. When something I had relied on suddenly disappeared, I moved towards the relationship that still felt secure.
Sometimes you find out what matters when something disappears
Most of us build our lives around things we assume will still be there tomorrow: relationships, family, health, work, income and plans. We don’t usually think, These are the things holding my life together. We just live as though they will continue.
Until something changes.
It might be a previous trauma being repeated or a sudden medical crisis. You might lose a person you love, or a relationship that had felt secure might be threatened or come to a painful end. Businesses can fail, a secure job can disappear, or someone you trust can prove to be untrustworthy. Sometimes what happens is obviously life-changing. Other times it might not look especially dramatic to anybody else, but it changes the shape of your world.
Then the questions change quickly. Who is with me? What can I actually rely on? What happens now? Who am I if this part of my life is gone?
Sometimes life is a bit like carrying a full backpack. You don’t realise how much weight one strap has been carrying until it breaks.
The urgent and the important aren’t always the same thing
Ordinary life fills every available space: bills, emails, appointments, deadlines, problems to solve and people who need something from us.
Then something serious happens and the difference becomes obvious. If someone you love is rushed to hospital, the email that was bothering you ten minutes earlier is suddenly forgotten. If a relationship you thought was secure falls apart, whatever happened at work that day can become almost irrelevant.
That doesn’t make ordinary life unimportant. A lot of meaning is built slowly through small things: routines, conversations, shared meals and the people we keep showing up for. But some things carry more immediate weight, and when one is shaken, everything else can suddenly look different.
My wife could be with me, but she couldn’t fix it
When I rang my wife, her first response was to be angry with me.
And I needed that.
She could listen, stand with me and help work out what we were going to do next. But she couldn’t undo the meeting, give me the job back or guarantee what would happen next. Even though she knew me better than almost anyone, she couldn’t enter what was happening inside me.
My wife could be beside me in what had happened.
She couldn’t be inside it with me.
Eventually another question appeared: what is this going to do inside me?
Pain can become anger. Betrayal can make trust feel foolish. Fear can start deciding what we will risk next. What happens to us matters, but so does what happens in us afterwards.
That was where my relationship with God became important.
So where is God when life goes wrong?
That question gets harder when suffering stops being theoretical.
The Bible does not teach that every bad thing that happens is God directly punishing somebody. It begins with a world God made good. Human beings rebelled against God, and sin, death, hurt and disorder entered what he had made.
Sometimes we suffer because of our choices, sometimes because of someone else’s, and sometimes simply because we live in a broken world.
Broken doesn’t mean worthless. It means something good has been hurt and has not yet become all it was created to be.
God didn’t stay outside it
God entered our world in Jesus. Jesus knew rejection, betrayal, injustice, grief and physical suffering. He wasn’t watching human pain from somewhere safe.
“For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses… Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.”
That doesn’t answer every “why?” question. But it tells us this: God is not indifferent to suffering.
Jesus lived the genuinely human life we were created to live. He died, taking the consequence of our separation from God upon himself, and was raised from the dead. His resurrection means sin and death do not get the final word.
God didn’t ask me to pretend I wasn’t angry
Prayer didn’t make me suddenly okay with what had happened. God didn’t ask me to call it good or pretend I hadn’t been hurt.
God didn’t ask me to pretend I wasn’t angry. He asked me not to let my anger decide who I would become.
Eventually, that meant forgiveness. Not saying the decision was okay. It meant refusing to let somebody else’s decision keep controlling my life long after the meeting was over.
God can meet us inside our pain
Christians don’t only believe that God once entered human suffering in Jesus. Jesus promised that God would be present with his people through the Holy Spirit.
“In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans.”
There are moments when we don’t have words for what is happening.
People who love us can stand beside us. God can meet us within it.
Through the Holy Spirit, Christians believe we are never alone inside our pain.
That doesn’t mean the pain disappears or everything makes sense. But God can begin changing us inside circumstances we would never have chosen.
The job didn’t come back. The meeting wasn’t undone. But anger did not get to own what came next.
Maybe being shaken reveals what we were standing on
Looking back, I can see that my job had become more than a way of earning money. It carried identity, purpose and a sense that I knew where my life was going.
Work, relationships, health, family and plans all matter. But they are also things we can lose. Being shaken showed me that I had allowed something temporary to carry more of the weight of who I was than I realised.
The Bible gives us somewhere deeper to stand. Our value does not begin with our job, our usefulness, another person’s approval or whether life is going according to plan. It begins with the God who made us.
Christian hope is bigger than hoping things get better
Sometimes hope really means, I think this is going to work out the way I want.
Sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn’t.
Christian hope has to be able to survive both.
The Bible’s final picture is not of people escaping a ruined creation. It is of God restoring what he made.
“‘He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death’ or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”
The pain matters. The loss matters. God does not ask us to pretend otherwise.
But none of them gets the last word.
Suffering is not good, and I don’t believe every painful thing happens for some simple reason we should be able to explain.
But when life shakes the things we rely on, it leaves us with a question worth taking seriously:
For me, the Christian answer is not that God will stop everything from moving.
It is that God will still be there when it does.