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In my work as a psychologist, I have sat with survivors of kidnapping, rape, abuse, combat, and repeated violence. Well-meaning Christians sometimes say, “God only gives us what we can endure,” hoping to offer comfort. But to many survivors, it can sound as though the trauma itself was somehow assigned by God for their good. Instead of bringing relief, it risks collapsing the distinction between God’s goodness and the evil that was done to them.
That is not what I believe. And it is not what the Gospel teaches.
But I have also watched something happen in the aftermath of suffering that I cannot ignore: people sometimes encounter depths of reality, of God, of themselves, that they could not access before. Not because suffering opened that door — but because their ordinary defenses finally stopped working.
These are different claims. And confusing them does real damage.
Most of us move through life with unexamined assumptions operating quietly beneath the surface: I’m in control. People are basically safe. If I stay strong enough, nothing can really hurt me. Those assumptions are not always wrong, but they are incomplete — and they are comfortable enough that we rarely question them. They sit in the background like the frame of a building you never think about until something starts to crack.
Trauma cracks them. Violently, often. And in the gap, certain things become visible that were always true but previously hidden: our fragility, our dependence, the limits of self-sufficiency, the thinness of the illusions we mistake for foundations.
The important word is always. Those truths were there before the trauma. They did not require trauma to exist. What suffering did — what suffering always does — is strip away the ideals of ordinary life that let us avoid them. Ecclesiastes 7:2 makes the same observation without romanticizing it: “It is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting … for death is the destiny of everyone; the living should take this to heart.” Grief clarifies. That is not an argument for grief. It is an honest account of what grief can do when it cannot be avoided.
Jesus’ parable of the two houses is useful here, and it is often misread. The storm does not create weakness in the house built on sand. It reveals a weakness that was already there. “The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew… yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock” (Matthew 7:25). The storm is not the point. The foundation is the point. A person who builds on rock does not need the storm to prove it — the rock was already sufficient.
This is the pastoral mistake that well-meaning people make with survivors: suggesting that the trauma was necessary to reveal something. It was not necessary. The truths it exposed were always accessible. A person can discover their fragility through prayer, through honest community, through reading the Psalms at 2 a.m. without having been victimized. They can encounter God’s sufficiency without first being crushed. The storm just made it unavoidable. That is not the same as making it redemptive.
The Psalms understand this. David’s laments in Psalm 42 and Psalm 88 are not celebrations of suffering — they are raw, unguarded speech before God. “Why are you cast down, O my soul?” is not the question of someone who has found suffering useful. It is the question of someone who has stopped managing their own inner experience and brought it, unfiltered, before God. That unguarded quality — not the suffering itself — is what makes those psalms feel like encounters.
There is a version of Christian thought that implies God authors suffering in order to produce holiness—that rape or abuse or violence is, in some dark but ultimately purposeful way, a tool of divine formation. I want to be precise here, because the question of suffering and sovereignty is genuinely contested theological ground. Reformed traditions rightly insist that nothing falls outside God’s sovereign knowledge and purpose — Acts 2:23 tells us even the crucifixion occurred by “God’s deliberate plan.” I do not dispute divine sovereignty. What I resist is a pastoral reading that collapses the difference between God’s capacity to work within evil and the claim that God therefore scripted the evil as necessary. Those are different claims, and the second one is not orthodox Christianity. It is a distortion of providence that does pastoral harm and theological violence to the character of God.
The orthodox claim is different: God does not waste. That is not the same as saying God requires evil. It means that evil, which is real and which God did not author and which causes genuine damage, does not have the final word. God can work despite it, within it, after it — without the evil itself being necessary or good.
The crucifixion is the paradigm — and we must read it carefully. The cross is not incidental to Christian theology. Isaiah 53:10 and the whole logic of atonement make clear that something decisive and unrepeatable happened there. I am not arguing the cross was accidental or merely tragic. What I am arguing is that the wickedness of those who crucified Jesus was real wickedness, not a stage-managed prop in a divine lesson plan. God’s response was not to endorse what was done, but to refuse to let it be final. Resurrection is not a reframing that makes the crucifixion acceptable. It is a refusal to let wickedness write the last line. The evil was real. The damage was real. Redemption came in spite of that evil, not through it as a prerequisite. The cross reveals something decisive about how God responds to suffering: not by engineering it from a safe distance, but by entering it.
This distinction matters enormously in pastoral care.
When we say to a survivor, “God used this to teach you something,” we are — however gently — assigning divine authorship to their abuse. We are making their rapist or their abuser a tool in God’s curriculum. That is not comfort. That is a theological error dressed as comfort, and it can shatter a person’s relationship with God.
What we can truthfully say is different: What happened to you was evil. God did not send it. God did not need it. But God has not abandoned you inside it, and God’s redemptive reach extends even here — not because the evil was useful, but because evil is never the final word.
Paul’s declaration in 2 Corinthians 1:4 is often quoted in this context: God “comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive.” Notice what Paul does not say. He does not say the trouble was necessary for the comfort to exist. He says that comfort received in trouble becomes transferable to others in trouble. The wound does not create the capacity for compassion — God’s comfort does. The wound is simply the context in which that comfort arrived. Romans 5:3–4 goes further: honestly, Paul says that suffering produces perseverance, perseverance produces character, and character produces hope. I take that seriously. But Paul is describing what God can bring out of unavoidable suffering — not prescribing suffering as a means of achieving holiness. There is a difference between God redeeming what is unavoidable and God requiring what is evil.
This matters psychologically as well as theologically. Research on posttraumatic growth confirms that many survivors do report increased compassion, deepened faith, and greater clarity about what matters, after suffering. I have witnessed this. But the research is careful to distinguish between growth that occurs following trauma and growth that could only have occurred because of it. In virtually every case, the growth stems not from the trauma itself but from the human and spiritual resources the person drew on in its wake — community, prayer, meaning-making, God’s presence. The trauma was the context. It was not the cause. Survivors who emerge changed are evidence that human beings, with God’s help, can survive what was meant to destroy them. That is not a theology of redemptive suffering. It is a theology of resilience and grace.
The cross may not fully explain evil, but it does reveal something decisive about how God responds to it. It does not justify evil or call evil good. The crucifixion was still betrayal, torture, and injustice. Yet the cross declares that God does not remain distant from human suffering; He enters it. It plants a flag in the darkest parts of human experience and says: even here, God is present; even this will not be the end. That is what survivors most need to hear — not that God sent the storm, but that God stands with them in the middle of it.
