The Impasse Series (2/4): The School of Love

Christy Crites
Jun 9
8 min read

This is the second post in a four-part series called The Impasse. These are the questions people bring to the edge of faith and can't get past. I'm not going to give you a soft answer or a Sunday school deflection. What I'm going to do is be honest and anchor every answer in the same lens: God is sovereign, and He is our Father.

Nobody signs up for suffering. Nobody wakes up and says, I'd like some betrayal, some loss, some illness, some silence from God. That sounds like a good year. And yet here we all are, moving through a world where pain is not the exception. It's woven into the fabric of being human.

This is the second post in The Impasse Series four posts on the questions that stop people cold at the edge of faith. This one is the hardest category, and probably the most important.I could have easily titled this post “Why does God allow [insert negative circumstance]?”

The questions below are all asking the same thing underneath: why does a good God allow this? The answer, uncomfortable as it is, is that the process of learning to love is the reason for all of it. Betrayal can you love after? A murdered family member can you learn to love after? That's the curriculum. That's what we're here for. God is the author and finisher of our faith, and He does not waste a single hard thing.

The lens I'm bringing to every question here is this: love is the currency of heaven. There is this idea that life should be nothing but good things, and then we go to heaven and eat grapes all day. That's not it at all. Jesus Himself said plainly that we would share in His suffering. There's a price to leading in God's kingdom. It is not a punishment, but a preparation. Everything we face here on earth is here to mature us in our faith.

However, while we are here on earth, working that very concept out, many hard questions arise. In the midst of the chaos, we have to understand that God is sovereign and He loves us more than we can ever think or imagine. Root yourself in that concept. By the way, learning the width and depth of that love will most likely take us all of eternity. It sounds like I am serving you a platter of dark humor with a side of hyposcrisy when I say, "God will work all things out for the good of those who love him" while you've been abused, diagnosed with cancer, or even trafficked. I want to take a moment to explain before we get into the questions. We are here on earth, and because of the rebellion and consequent removal from heaven of satan, we are subject to his evil schemes. There are three ways that "bad" circumstances come into our life. God allows it as a test, we do it to ourselves, or satan's temptations. satan's temptations can be broken down into two categories: We listen to him and do it to ourselves or other people listen to satan and use their free will to hurt us.**

1. Why does God allow evil and suffering?

This is the oldest and hardest question. The honest answer is that evil and suffering exist because genuine freedom exists. You can't have a world where love is possible without a world where cruelty is also possible. A world where nothing bad can happen is also a world where nothing real can happen. The more interesting question isn't why evil exists, but why we feel so certain it shouldn't. That instinct toward justice points somewhere.

Most people think love is all positive. But whenever someone hurts us, we must learn to love as Jesus loved Judas. That's not a soft, poetic idea. It's the hardest assignment in existence, and it's exactly what we're being prepared for.

2. Why does God seem violent in parts of the Old Testament?

Context matters enormously here. Ancient Near Eastern literature, including early Hebrew texts, records events from the perspective of a people learning who God is over centuries. Some of what looks like divine violence is God working through the morality of a brutal era, not endorsing it. The trajectory of the whole story moves toward mercy, culminating in a God who absorbs violence rather than inflicting it.

God allows suffering to teach us different types of lessons. We have this idea here on earth that our life should be nothing but good things. That's not it at all. Jesus plainly stated that we will share in His suffering because God requires a price to lead in His kingdom beyond the time of the earth, and that is learning to love. Love is the currency of heaven. It is the greatest commandment, and in the process of learning to love is all other lessons we must learn here on earth. Everything we face here is to mature us in our faith. God is the author and finisher of our faith.

3. Why does God allow children to suffer?

This is the question that breaks most theodicies. There's no clean answer that makes child suffering tidy. What can be said is this: if there's a God who entered human existence and suffered within it including as a vulnerable child in a brutal empire then suffering is not evidence that God is indifferent to it. The cross doesn't explain child suffering, but it does say something about whether God stands outside of it, unmoved.

I have personally asked Jesus this very question, given my own circumstances. I wanted to know why He didn't physically prevent everything that happened to me. I did not like His answer, but I understand it now. He trusted me with the pain. He knew that someday I would use that pain to not only learn to love others well, but to minister to crowds out of that love to see them also set free. The people who wrong children choose to do it. God, in His sovereignty, takes what was meant for destruction and turns it into a weapon for healing. Think about the story of Job and what high compliments God gave of him, as well as how Job responded to his testing.

4. Why do natural disasters kill innocent people?

Natural processes operate according to consistent laws tectonic plates move, weather systems form, biology follows its rules. A world where physical laws were constantly suspended to prevent harm to individuals wouldn't be a natural world at all; it would be chaos. The suffering caused by natural events is real and terrible, but it flows from living in a physical world, not from divine malice.

In terms of "why doesn't God intervene"? He is sovereign, and we are not. We have to trust His judgment. There are millions of stories of people being spared during natural disasters by supernatural means. Look at the fruit in the aftermath. People are given the opportunity to be the hands and feet of Jesus. Look at communities after a tornado, and how people show up with chainsaws, trucks and construction equipment, without asking for a thing in return. That's serving the least of these. Most definitely.

5. Why does God allow mental illness, addiction, and despair?

These are real, physiological, and crushing. Mental illness especially is not a spiritual failure it's a brain in distress, the same way a broken leg is a leg in distress. The Christian tradition at its best has always said that the physical world matters. Bodies matter, brains matter, and suffering matters. Allowing these things to exist is part of the larger question of why God allows biological and physical suffering at all. What's promised is not their absence but companionship within them.

6. Why are some people born into circumstances that make faith difficult?

This is an honest problem. A child born into poverty, trauma, or a culture hostile to religion faces a much steeper path than someone raised in a stable, faith-nurturing home. If there's a just God, this disparity has to be accounted for and any serious theology grapples with it. The working assumption in most traditions is that God's judgment is not blind to the circumstances one is born into. What you do with what you have is a different question than what you had.

7. Why doesn't God heal everyone?

Healing happens more than the secular West tends to admit. But not always, and not on demand. If physical healing were guaranteed, faith would become a health insurance policy rather than a relationship. There are people who pray sincerely and die of the thing they prayed about, and who maintained to the end that they were not abandoned. The tradition holds that healing is real but not owed, and that death is not the worst outcome God could allow. Everyone is healed and whole in Heaven. The blood of Jesus is never wasted.

8. If God is good, why does He permit temptation?

Because goodness that has never been tested isn't virtue, it's just the absence of opportunity. A person who is kind because they've never been provoked is different from a person who is kind when it costs them. Temptation is the friction against which character is either built or eroded. A world without it would produce people with no moral texture at all.

9. Can faith survive overwhelming tragedy?

It can. It often does. The interesting thing is that the people whose faith survives great tragedy rarely say it survived unchanged it went through the fire and came out different. Simpler faith tends to shatter; more honest, more complex faith seems to be more durable. The faith that doesn't grapple with the dark tends to be the faith that breaks when the darkness arrives.

10. Why does God allow spiritual dryness and doubt?

Because a faith that feels warm and alive every day, without variation, wouldn't develop much. Dry seasons are where discipline is built. Continuing to act in faithfulness when there's no emotional reward is what separates sincere commitment from mood-dependent religiosity. Almost everyone in the history of serious faith describes periods of profound spiritual emptiness. They're considered part of the journey, not evidence that the journey was wrong.

11. What is the purpose of suffering?

There are several purposes it can serve: formation, empathy, solidarity, and reorientation. It's important not to make this too tidy. The most honest answer is that suffering can be purposeful, and that a God who works within it can bring meaning out of it.

If this concept is new to you, you're most likely feeling some kinda way. My educated guess is anger, confusion, or sadness. Any of these responses to the answer is the right response. The instinct that says this shouldn't be is not a sign that God doesn't exist; it's a sign that something in you already knows what the world is supposed to look like.

The question isn't whether suffering is real. It is. The question is whether you're willing to let it do what it's designed to do which is strip away everything that isn't love, until what's left is a love that lasts.

That's the school. That's the lesson. And nobody gets out without taking it. If you want to go deeper on any of these questions, there is a Honeyed Candor Podcast episode that pairs with this blog post. It, along with the other 3 Impasse Series episodes, are linked below. As they go live each week I will update the list.

→ Follow on Instagram @purelycece for real-time insight and unfiltered conversations

→ If you're ready to do the work, my book Escape Artist: The Fight for Freedom From Trauma will guide you through the process of breaking patterns and stepping into freedom. On Sale now everywhere books are sold.

→ If you need to go even deeper, I have written Escape Artist: The Workbook that will guide you through deeper reflections and healing. Available now on Amazon.

You don't have to figure this out alone.

The Impasse Series (2/4): The School of Love

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