The Grace of Being Held Without Explanation

There are seasons of a life that do not resolve into meaning on any timeline that the person living through them can access. There are stretches of experience that resist the narrative arc we have been formed to expect, that do not move from the problem to the insight to the growth to the testimony that makes the difficult thing retroactively sensible and therefore tolerable in memory even when it was intolerable in the living. There are things that happen to people that do not eventually make sense, that do not arrive at the clarifying moment where the purpose becomes visible and the suffering is reframed into something that the sufferer can receive as having been, in some cosmic accounting, worth it. And the person who has been told, explicitly or implicitly, that faith produces the explanation, that trust in God means eventually understanding why, that the suffering will be redeemed into meaning if only the faith is held long enough and the waiting is sustained with sufficient patience and theological correctness, that person is carrying a promise that the actual experience of a human life in a broken world does not always keep.