For Those Who See Suffering Up Close and Try Desperately Not to Doubt...Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People? And for Those Who See Good Things Happening to Good People - Is There Any Logic?

“God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.”— 1 John 4:16

“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face.”— 1 Corinthians 13:12 (KJV)

There are questions that feel more like earthquakes than inquiries. They shake the ground under our tidy theologies and philosophies about living a good life and leave us standing in dust.

Yesterday a woman asked me one of those questions.

I saw her at church.  She had been quiet. I asked her how she was.  “I’m just thinking. About my son and about God and about prayer.”

Her son, a beautiful young man, suffered a horrible biological calamity which totally incapacitates him physically and mentally. She has been his caretaker for twenty years.

She has prayed faithfully — not casually, not occasionally — but daily. “I have asked God either to restore him,” she said, “or to take him home. How can a good and powerful God let this go on?” She had been sitting with that question for two decades.

There it is. The question a lot of people, not just religious ones, have asked for centuries.

We assume, almost instinctively, that good things should happen to good people. We breathe that logic like oxygen. People of faith have done that for thousands of years. If we are faithful, kind, generous, devout — surely we will be spared the worst.

And yet.

A particular story in the Bible itself, the story of Job, should unsettle that assumption at least for those in the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim religious worlds. Really, it’s one of those stories that seems to belong to all cultures and religions.

Job was described as righteous, blameless. For a while his life went exceedingly well.  He was “blessed by God.”

But later, things turn. His children die, he gets leprosy, his flocks of sheep and cattle suffer demise. His world collapses.

His friends rushed in with their religious explanations. God is just, they said. Therefore, you must have done something wrong. (I heard a lovely Christian woman respond to the woman who asked me this question with something that went like, “Sometimes it could be somebody else back in the family history that could cause misfortune to us now.” Oh dear.)

They were trying to protect a formula we humans seem to have.  Especially religious people.

But Job refused the formula. He cried. He argued. He demanded. And in the retelling by the wonderful Frederick Buechner, God does not give Job an explanation. But something much bigger.  An overwhelming encounter! (When God speaks, it is indeed the most beautiful passage in the Old Testament as Buechner says.)

The questions from the whirlwind are not tidy answers. They are a reminder that the universe is wilder, more complex, more mysterious than our moral arithmetic can hold. Job’s friends were rebuked not because they believed in justice, but because they would not sit quietly in mystery.

Sometimes the most faithful response is not explanation but presence.

Conservative Christian theology leans into mystery and sovereignty. It says: God sees the whole tapestry; we see only a thread. There is a redemption we cannot yet perceive.

This perspective preserves hope in ultimate justice. It whispers that nothing is wasted.

But for a mother watching twenty years of suffering, that can feel abstract, even cruel, if delivered without tenderness.

Progressive Christian theology shifts the focus. It says: God is not orchestrating this. God is not punishing. God is not “teaching a lesson” through injury and suffering.

God is with you. God is the ache in your chest. God is the grief that prays when words run out.

And then there is the lesser well-known process Christian theology, which dares to reimagine Divine power itself. It suggests that God does not control every outcome in a universe of real freedom and real biology.

God works through persuasion, invitation, luring creation toward goodness, but does not override the laws of neurons or the fragility of flesh. In this view, tragedy is not willed by God.

It is part of a risky, evolving world. God’s power is not coercive but relational — always coaxing healing, meaning, courage from within the mess.

For some, that feels like a loss of omnipotence. For others, it feels like the only way to preserve divine goodness.

And then there is Dr. Stephen Post, who approaches the question from another angle altogether. In his book, Why Good Things Happen to Good People, he does not claim that goodness guarantees protection from tragedy.

Instead, he shows that altruism, compassion, forgiveness, generosity — these tend to generate health, resilience, and deeper well-being. Kindness lowers stress. Service builds connection. Meaning strengthens the immune system of the soul.

Goodness, in other words, has built-in life-giving consequences. We should take note.

But it is not insurance against catastrophe.

The mother’s question pierces deeper than research. It asks about fairness. It asks about power. It asks whether prayer matters.

That to me seems it like a holy, deep human question.

Even Jesus cried, “My God, why?” Faith does not eliminate protest. Sometimes it sharpens it.

Perhaps we must gently release the idea that the universe distributes outcomes according to moral merit. Good people get cancer. Children suffer. Cruel people prosper. The rain falls on the just and the unjust alike.

So how do we go forward?

We choose goodness not as a bargain with God but as participation in love and healing and living a good life as best we can. We cultivate compassion because it aligns us with the deepest currents of reality.

We build communities of care because isolation is unbearable. We sit with the suffering because explanations rarely soothe, but presence sometimes does.

In the case of this lovely, faithful mother and her son, perhaps the good life does not look like restoration or release — at least not yet. Perhaps it looks like stubborn love. It looks like neighbors who show up. It looks like a church that does not offer platitudes but casseroles and listening ears. It looks like a woman who keeps praying, not because she is certain of outcomes, but because prayer keeps her connected to the One who holds even this brokenness.

If you believe, as I do, that Divine power is a woo-ing, persuasive love and mystery rather than coercive control, then every act of compassion becomes collaboration with God. Every moment of patience in the face of anger is a small miracle. Every refusal to grow bitter is holy defiance.

We cannot promise that tragedy will be reversed. But we can promise that love is never wasted.

Sometimes good things happen to good people because goodness itself builds a life of depth and connection. Sometimes bad things happen to good people because we live in a fragile, unfinished world. The mystery is that both are true at once.

The journey to the good life, then, is not a journey toward guaranteed outcomes. It is a journey toward alignment with love and connection and healing, even when outcomes break our hearts.

To the mother who asked that question: you are not faithless for asking. You are faithful because you are still asking. You are still loving. You are still faithfully present by your grown child for these many hard years. And in a world where suffering can harden us into despair, that is no small thing.

Perhaps the good life is not immunity from sorrow but intimacy with love — a love that sits in hospital rooms, that absorbs anger, that weeps, that refuses to abandon.

We journey together not because we have all the tidy answers, but because we have each other.

AND sometimes, it is in the ash heap, according to some mystics and philosophers, that we have an overwhelming encounter with God. I love Job. He's just so danged honest.

How might we journey together to the Good Life by sitting together with the big questions?

Side notes:

1) I get a kick out of hearing how kids think about God.  When one of our grandchildren was about four, she and her two-year-old sister were with me in the car.  A police siren started blaring near us.  The two-year-old was alarmed and asked, “What was that?” 

I replied that it was the police.  She thought for a moment and then asked, “What is the police?” I thought for a moment and said, “Well the police help us when we are in trouble, they protect us.” (I’ve learned from some of my friends in poverty and of different ethnicities that they don’t always see the police quite like that.)

The two-year-old shook her head up and down. “Oh. The police are like God.”

The four-year-old shook her head side to side, “No God isn’t like the police.  God is in your heart. God speaks to you from your heart and tells you things like, ‘Pick up your books.’”

I asked the four-year-old how she knew that was God speaking.  She looked at me like I was a dummy and said, “Because the Voice says, ‘Pick up your books.’”

I was telling this story to my nine-year-old grandson.  He said, “Oh, they are both right and wrong.  God is a mystery.”

I love kids, they are just so danged brilliant.

Kids pondering and people asking big questions during hard times…that’s where we have some opportunities to grow.

2) A related blog Can Prayer Make Us More Healthy?

3) Different from Christianity, in the Jewish Tradition, struggling with God - arguing and even lashing out, whining, all of that is not seen as rebellion, but relational. (Jewish scholars remind us that Jesus was a very good Jew. He often told stories, parables, not so much for people to have a tidy answer, a moral that they could walk away with and apply, but rather one that would cause them to struggle together, to provoke and unsettle listeners' typical thinking - see the work especially of Dr. Amy Jill-Levine for a full discussion.)

4) A brilliant work in my mind was written by Holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel. It's called The Trial of God. A central theme is why God doesn't do more to help those who innocently suffer at the hands of evil action... and punish the evil actors in particular. In the play, the trial is stalled for a lengthy time because no defense attorney can be found for God. One of the big moments is when people are harshly rebuked and upbraided (like Job's friends) for blaming innocent people for the suffering they experience...making clear that in no way is divine justice involved as a punishment or to teach them a lesson or improve their character and all that nonsense.