I See You

When God's Love Doesn't Look Like We Expected

I see you.

I see you showing up when you would rather stay in bed. I see you smiling in the church lobby while carrying something no one in that lobby knows about. I see you praying the same prayer for the hundredth time, wondering if heaven is still listening. I see you sitting with a diagnosis you didn't ask for, a marriage that feels harder than it should, a child who is struggling, a dream that quietly died, or a hundred small griefs that piled up until they became one very heavy thing.

You are doing the hardest kind of faithful. The kind no one applauds. The kind that just keeps going.

And somewhere in the middle of it, you have probably whispered a version of this prayer: "Lord, I know You are good. I just don't understand what You are doing."

Friend, I want to sit with you here for a while. Not to explain your pain away. Not to hand you a verse and walk off. I want to open Scripture with you and let it hold us both, because this is a question every faithful person eventually asks, and God is not afraid of it.

Suffering Reveals What We Actually Believe

Here is something I have learned, both in my own walk with the Lord and in years of sitting across from people in their hardest seasons: suffering doesn't create our theology. It reveals it.

Not the theology we can recite. Not the verses we have memorized. The theology that is actually rooted in our hearts. Suffering has a way of asking us, very directly, what we believe about God when He doesn't give us what we asked for.

Do we believe He is still good when His answer is "wait" instead of "yes"? Do we believe He is still loving when the outcome we begged for never comes? Do we believe He is still sovereign when everything around us looks like it's falling apart?

These aren't just personal questions. They are the exact battleground the enemy has always fought on.

In the garden, Satan didn't tell Eve that God didn't exist. He didn't need to. Instead, he went after her view of God's character. He planted a question: what if God is withholding something good from you? What if His commands aren't really loving? What if you can trust yourself more than you can trust Him?

That strategy hasn't changed in thousands of years. In our suffering, the same whispers still come. If God loved you, this wouldn't be happening. If He were truly good, He would have stopped this. If He really cared, He would have answered you the way you wanted.

One of the enemy's oldest goals in our pain is not simply to make us hurt. It's to make us doubt who God is. And once that doubt takes root, everything else starts to wobble.

But Scripture offers us something far sturdier to stand on than our circumstances or our emotions in the moment. It offers us a way to interpret our lives through God's promises rather than only through our pain.

I want to be careful here, because this is not a call to pretend. God never asks us to fake our way through suffering. David wrote entire psalms from the floor of despair. Jeremiah wept until his book became known for it. Job argued honestly with God and was never rebuked for his honesty. Even Jesus, in Gethsemane, did not hide the depth of His sorrow.

Your tears are not a lack of faith. Your questions are not a lack of trust. God can hold every honest thing you bring Him.

But He also calls us to anchor how we interpret our suffering in who He is, not only in what we currently feel.

Rejoicing Doesn't Mean Pretending

Romans 5:3-5 has become one of the passages I return to again and again, both personally and in counseling. Paul writes that we rejoice in our sufferings, because suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, and character produces hope that will not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.

The first time you really sit with that verse, it can feel almost impossible. Rejoice in suffering? How does anyone do that while they are still in it?

But notice what Paul is not saying. He is not saying suffering itself feels good. He is not telling us to minimize our grief or plaster on a smile. The joy is never in the suffering. The joy is in knowing that our suffering is not wasted in the hands of a sovereign, loving God.

Suffering produces something. It produces endurance. Endurance produces character. Character produces hope. There is a chain here, and every link matters.

This tells us something important about how God works. He is not only concerned with changing our circumstances. He is deeply committed to changing us.

And this is often where we get stuck, isn't it? We pray, "Lord, change this situation," and sometimes, in His kindness, He does. But there are other times when He does something even deeper. Instead of immediately rearranging what's around us, He starts rearranging what's within us.

He strengthens a faith that was thinner than we realized. He exposes the places where we had quietly been depending on ourselves instead of Him. He teaches us to pray with more honesty. He grows compassion in us we didn't have before. He loosens our grip on temporary things and tightens it on eternal ones.

The longer I walk with the Lord, and the longer I sit with hurting people, the more convinced I become that our deepest need in suffering is not a full explanation. Our deepest need is a bigger view of God. Because when we truly know who He is, we can trust Him even in the places we cannot understand Him.

The Summer Class None of Us Signed Up For

I once heard someone teaching say that people generally learn in one of two ways: through steady repetition, or through an experience so intense it becomes impossible to forget. Everyone in the room laughed, because we all knew exactly what he meant.

I have thought about that statement often since then.

Most of the time, God teaches us through repetition. Through the quiet, faithful rhythms of walking with Him day after day. Opening His Word. Praying. Gathering with His people. Confessing sin. Obeying in the small things. Trusting Him in the ordinary moments that make up most of our lives.

But there are also seasons that feel like spiritual summer school. You know how that works. An entire semester gets compressed into a few intense weeks. There is no room to coast. You learn quickly because the lessons are right in front of you and there is nowhere to hide from them.

Some seasons of suffering feel exactly like that.

You didn't sign up for this class. You wouldn't have chosen this curriculum. You may still be wondering why God allowed you to be enrolled in it at all. But somewhere in those difficult lessons, you are learning things about His faithfulness, His comfort, and His nearness that you may never have learned any other way.

Peter understood this. He wrote to believers who were grieved by various trials, and he said the testing of their faith, more precious than gold, would result in praise and glory and honor when Christ is revealed (1 Peter 1:6-7).

I love that Peter doesn't skip past the grief. He names it plainly. Scripture never asks us to pretend our trials are easy. But he also reminds us that our trials have a purpose. They refine our faith, not because God is cruel, but because He loves us far too much to leave us unchanged.

Gold doesn't become more valuable by staying untouched. The fire doesn't destroy the gold. It burns away what never belonged there in the first place.

God does the same thing in us. The very trial you wish you could escape may be the tool He is using to shape you into someone who reflects Christ more clearly than you did before.

The People Whose Faith You Actually Want

Think for a moment about the people who have shaped your faith the most. The ones you would want to sit across from at a coffee shop and ask, "How did you get through that?"

I would guess that almost every name on your list has walked through deep water. Not a few inconvenient seasons, but real battles. Loss. Disappointment. Sickness. Betrayal. Prayers that went unanswered for far longer than they wanted. Seasons where God was genuinely all they had left to hold onto.

Their faith wasn't formed in comfort. It was formed in the fight. They fell down more than once, and by grace, they got back up. They learned to trust God not only when He gives, but when He takes away. They discovered that He is faithful on the mountain and just as faithful in the valley.

And there is something different about their faith. A depth. A tenderness. A humility that simply cannot be manufactured by reading about it. It has to be lived.

They are like jewelry that has been refined, not because their lives were easy, but because God faithfully worked through the pressure. What we admire in them is not the absence of hardship. It is the evidence of a faithful God who did not waste it.

And here is what suffering does that nothing else quite can: it changes the way we see other people.

When we haven't walked through real pain, it's easy to offer quick answers. We mean well, but we often speak before we understand. We try to fix what only God can heal. We hand someone an explanation when what they actually need is our presence. We offer a solution when they simply need someone to sit with them in the sorrow.

But suffering softens us.

When you have sat in that waiting room, you recognize the fear in someone else's eyes. When you have walked through loss, you understand the particular silence of grief. When you have prayed for something for years and are still waiting, you know exactly how to encourage someone who is tired of waiting.

Paul says it plainly in 2 Corinthians 1:3-4. God comforts us in all our affliction so that we can comfort others with the same comfort we ourselves received from Him.

God never wastes what we surrender to Him. The comfort you received in your darkest season is meant to become the comfort you offer someone else in theirs.

Take Up Your Cross, Not Your Comfort

I think one of the most dangerous ideas quietly shaping our generation, inside the church and out, is the belief that comfort is the goal. We are told, in a hundred subtle ways, to eliminate anything difficult, inconvenient, or painful as quickly as possible.

There's nothing wrong with wisdom or relief or seeking help. But there is real danger when comfort becomes more important to us than Christ.

Paul warned Timothy that in the last days people would be lovers of self and lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God (2 Timothy 3:2,4). That warning wasn't written to people outside the church. It was written to believers.

When comfort becomes our highest goal, we slowly start expecting life to revolve around us. We become more focused on what we can get than on what we can give. We want the blessings of following Jesus without the surrender He actually asked for.

But Jesus never called us to a comfortable life. He called us to a faithful one.

He did not say, "Take up your comfort and follow Me." He said, "Take up your cross and follow Me."

The cross is where we see, more clearly than anywhere else, that suffering and love are not opposites. They can exist in the very same place.

We tend to assume that if someone truly loves us, they will always shield us from pain. But the greatest demonstration of love in all of history was not God removing suffering from His Son. It was God sending His Son through suffering, for us.

The Father did not abandon the Son at the cross. The cross was the plan. And because of the cross, we can trust that whatever trial God allows in our lives is also part of a larger story we cannot yet fully see.

Don't Waste This

So don't waste the season you're in. Don't waste the chance to know Him more deeply than you did before this started. Don't waste the compassion He is quietly growing in you right now.

Don't waste the opportunity to become someone who can one day sit with another person's pain, because you know exactly what it feels like to need someone to sit with yours.

Paul wrote that he wanted to know Christ, the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings (Philippians 3:10). Notice how he ties those together. We love the resurrection part. We celebrate healing and victory and restoration, and we should.

But there is also a fellowship with Christ that only suffering can teach us. There is a nearness to God in the valley that some of us will never discover on the mountaintop.

So if you are walking through something hard today, hear this clearly.

Your suffering does not mean God has forgotten you. Your unanswered prayers do not mean He is absent. Your tears do not mean you lack faith. Your weakness does not disqualify you from His love.

The same God who allowed the trial is the God who is walking with you through it. The same Father who permits the fire is the Father who holds you in it. The same Savior who suffered for you is the Savior who has promised He will never leave you.

One day we will stand before Him and see the whole picture. We will finally understand how every moment was woven together by His wisdom and His love. We will see that the very seasons we thought were breaking us were actually the ones making us more like Christ.

Until that day, we walk by faith. We trust His character even when we cannot trace His hand. We hold on to His promises when our emotions are telling us something else entirely.

And we remember that God's love does not always look like what we expected.

Sometimes His love looks like rescue. Sometimes it looks like provision. Sometimes it looks like an answered prayer that arrives right on time. But sometimes His love looks like refinement. Sometimes it looks like endurance.

Sometimes it looks like walking beside us through a valley, because He already knows who we will become on the other side of it, and He is not willing to leave that person unformed.

The reason we can trust Him with all of this is because we never actually have to question whether He loves us. The cross already answered that question, once and for all.

"But God shows His love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us." (Romans 5:8)

Before we endured a single trial, He loved us. Before we understood a single one of His ways, He loved us. Before we could offer Him anything at all, He loved us.

The hands holding you through this are the same hands that were pierced for you.

That is the love of God. Not a love that always removes difficulty, but a love so deep, so wise, and so sovereign that He can take even our hardest seasons and use them for His glory and our good.

When God's love doesn't look like we expected, friend, you can still trust that it is exactly what you need.

I see you. And so does He.

Love,

Andrea Anderegg