Pain Isn't a Lesson

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith. One of the most persistent myths I hear in my office—especially from those walking through deep pain—is the idea that God sends suffering to teach us lessons. I’ve sat across from people who have lost a child, whose bodies are failing, whose relationships have shattered. They ask me through tears, Why is God doing this? What is God trying to teach me? And sometimes, in that sacred and sorrowful moment, the only honest thing I can say is, I don’t know. Because the truth is, Scripture never presents God as a cosmic teacher who assigns suffering like homework to shape us into better students. That image may give us a sense of control, a reason for the pain, but it also risks turning God into an abuser—someone who wounds us for our (supposed) own good. I don’t believe that’s the God revealed in Jesus Christ. When Job’s world fell apart—his children dead, his wealth gone, his body covered in sores—his friends tried to tell him his suffering must have a reason. They insisted he must have done something wrong or that God was trying to teach him something. But Job refused that narrative. He demanded an audience with God, not a tidy theological answer. And when God finally spoke, the divine response wasn’t an explanation but an invitation—to see the vastness of creation, to recognize that human understanding will never be enough to hold the mystery of suffering. The writer of Ecclesiastes echoes that humility: “Time and chance happen to them all.” The rain falls on the righteous and the wicked alike. Life under the sun, he says, often makes no sense. But rather than despair, he urges us to eat, drink, and find joy in the simple gifts of existence—to live gratefully, even in the midst of what we cannot explain. The New Testament takes that mystery a step further. It tells us that God does not send suffering but enters into it. In Jesus, the Word made flesh, God takes on our pain, our loneliness, our grief. On the cross, Christ cries out the same question so many of us have whispered: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” And yet even there, in that abandonment, God is present. The crucifixion does not explain suffering; it redeems it. It proclaims that nothing—not even death—can separate us from the love of God. The mystics of the Church understood this well. St. John of the Cross wrote of the “dark night of the soul,” not as punishment, but as the stripping away of everything that is not God. It is not that God causes the darkness but that God meets us in it, guiding us toward a love deeper than comfort, a faith that trusts even when it cannot see. Teresa of Ávila once quipped to God, “If this is how you treat your friends, it’s no wonder you have so few!”—but she still kept walking with Christ through the shadows. So perhaps the lesson isn’t that God sends suffering, but that no suffering is wasted. The lessons, if they come, emerge not because God imposed pain, but because God refuses to abandon us in it. The wounds we bear may become, in time, the places where grace seeps through—where compassion grows, where we learn to walk with others in their darkness. I cannot tell you why you are suffering. But I can tell you that you are not alone. The God who hung on a cross walks beside you still, carrying your pain into the heart of divine love until the day when every tear is wiped away and all things are made new. Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember, protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.