There is a peculiar fantasy that most of us carry somewhere in the back of the mind, even if we are too sophisticated to admit it openly. We imagine that life is difficult now because we have not yet arranged it properly.
We just screw up too much. Right ?
We are still paying off the debt, still working toward the promotion, still trying to get the children settled, still attempting to repair the marriage, lose the weight, build the business, fix the house, stabilize the finances, or finally become the disciplined person we promised ourselves we would become every January. But somewhere beyond the present inconvenience, we imagine a calmer country. Once we get there, life will cease its habit of ambushing us.
It never does.
The longer I live, and perhaps especially the longer I walk with Christ, the more difficult it becomes to maintain the illusion that trials and tribulations are temporary interruptions in an otherwise manageable existence.
They are not interruptions. They are woven into the fabric of life itself.
It’s His masterpiece that sometimes looks like a mess to us !
Just when one problem recedes, another appears from behind the curtain with the cheerful efficiency of a waiter bringing the next course. You survive the career crisis only to discover the family crisis. You endure the family crisis and find yourself worrying about your health. You finally get your health under control and then someone you love becomes ill. If life were a machine, we would return it to the manufacturer and complain that it never seems to operate according to the brochure.
For Christians, this can create a particular kind of confusion. We may never say it aloud, because it sounds embarrassingly transactional, but somewhere inside we expect faithfulness to produce a degree of immunity. Surely after enough prayer, enough maturity, enough repentance, enough church attendance, enough forgiveness, enough sermons, and enough spiritual discipline, God might permit us a quiet decade.
Yet Scripture and wisdom never promises such a thing, and human experience certainly does not. The great saints were not distinguished by their ability to avoid suffering. Quite often they were distinguished by what suffering revealed in them.
C. S. Lewis understood this with unusual honesty. In his masterpiece, The Problem of Pain, he does not discuss suffering as though he were standing safely outside it with a clipboard and a philosophical theory. He turns the analysis inward and describes what happens to him when ordinary life is suddenly interrupted by fear:
“My own experience is something like this. I am progressing along the path of life in my ordinary contentedly fallen and godless condition, absorbed in a merry meeting with my friends for the morrow or a bit of work that tickles my vanity today, a holiday or a new book, when suddenly a stab of abdominal pain that threatens serious disease, or a headline in the newspapers that threatens us all with destruction, sends this whole pack of cards tumbling down. At first I am overwhelmed, and all my little happinesses look like broken toys. Then, slowly and reluctantly, bit by bit, I try to bring myself into the frame of mind that I should be in at all times. I remind myself that all these toys were never intended to possess my heart, that my true good is in another world and my only real treasure is Christ. And perhaps, by God’s grace, I succeed, and for a day or two become a creature consciously dependent on God and drawing its strength from the right sources. But the moment the threat is withdrawn, my whole nature leaps back to the toys: I am even anxious, God forgive me, to banish from my mind the only thing that supported me under the threat because it is now associated with the misery of those few days. Thus the terrible necessity of tribulation is only too clear. God has had me for but forty-eight hours and then only by dint of taking everything else away from me. Let Him but sheathe that sword for a moment and I behave like a puppy when the hated bath is over—I shake myself as dry as I can and race off to reacquire my comfortable dirtiness, if not in the nearest manure heap, at least in the nearest flower bed. And that is why tribulations cannot cease until God either sees us remade or sees that our remaking is now hopeless.”
There is more theology in that ridiculous puppy than in many shelves of solemn religious writing. Lewis understands something about human beings that most of us would rather conceal: we are excellent students during emergencies and astonishingly poor students once the emergency is over. Give us three frightening days in a hospital and suddenly we understand everything. Family matters. Time matters. Love matters. Pride is absurd. Grudges are ridiculous. Money is useful but not sacred. We promise ourselves that if we get out of this situation we will never again waste our lives on trivialities. Then the doctor says the scan is clear, we walk out into the parking lot praising God or thanking the universe, and forty-eight hours later we are furious because someone has not answered an email.
That is Lewis’s point, and it is painfully difficult to refute because most of us have lived it.
Suffering possesses a strange capacity to clarify. It does not always make us wiser, and it certainly does not automatically make us better, but it does have the rude habit of rearranging our priorities without asking permission. A frightening diagnosis can accomplish in thirty seconds what a hundred motivational books cannot accomplish in ten years. A funeral can suddenly make the argument you had last Tuesday look spectacularly stupid. A marriage crisis can make the promotion you desperately wanted seem strangely unimpressive. When the foundations shake, many of the things we considered essential reveal themselves as decorations.
The secular reader does not need to accept Christian theology to recognize this phenomenon. Human beings routinely mistake what is urgent for what is important and what is pleasurable for what is meaningful. We organize our lives around schedules, possessions, reputations, ambitions, and social approval, then act surprised when these things fail to support the full weight of the human soul. We treat temporary goods as though they were permanent guarantees. They are not bad things; the mistake is asking them to do a job for which they were never designed.
Lewis calls them “toys,” and the word is deliberately provocative. A career can be a very good thing. A house can be a very good thing. Recognition can be pleasant. Money can solve real problems. A new book, a holiday, dinner with friends, professional achievement, status, health, romance, and success are not evils that must be despised. Christianity is not a religion of pretending that good things are bad. The problem begins when a good thing becomes the thing. The moment a temporary good becomes the foundation of our identity, we have given it a burden it cannot bear.
This is why suffering is often so revealing. It shows us not merely what we possess, but what possesses us.
Ask a man what matters most to him and he will usually produce an admirable list: family, integrity, faith, friendship, purpose. Watch what destroys his peace, however, and you may discover a different hierarchy. Perhaps what actually governs him is approval. Perhaps it is control. Perhaps it is money, reputation, success, or the need to be seen as competent. We are rarely as self-aware as we imagine. Human beings are capable of lying to everyone, but the person we most easily deceive is the one looking back from the mirror.
Trials have a way of interrupting that deception.
The central human problem is not merely that we misunderstand our priorities, but that we are remarkably determined to live as self-sufficient creatures in a universe where self-sufficiency is impossible.
Read that again.
We depend upon breath we did not create, bodies we cannot permanently preserve, people we cannot control, circumstances we cannot predict, and time we cannot stop. Yet we behave as though our continued existence were the result of excellent planning.
There is something almost comic about this.
We build our little kingdoms, insure them, diversify them, password-protect them, back them up to the cloud, and then congratulate ourselves on achieving control. Meanwhile a microscopic organism, a drunk driver, a market collapse, a blood vessel, a betrayal, or one phone call can rearrange the entire kingdom before lunch.
Thus your response should not therefore be that planning is foolish or that ambition is sinful. Prudence is a virtue. Work matters. Responsibility matters. But control is not the same thing as stewardship, and maturity begins partly in learning the difference.
This is where Paul’s words to the Corinthians become so startling:
“Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.”
—II Corinthians 12:9b–10, NIV
Modern ears almost rebel against that sentence. Our culture teaches us to eliminate weakness, conceal weakness, optimize weakness, outsource weakness, medicate weakness, brand weakness, or turn weakness into an inspirational LinkedIn post by Tuesday morning. Paul does something stranger: he discovers that weakness can reveal a kind of strength unavailable to the person who believes he needs nothing.
That does not mean Christians are required to enjoy suffering. Jesus himself wept at the tomb of Lazarus. Christianity calls death an enemy, injustice evil, cruelty sinful, and compassion a duty. A theology that looks at a grieving parent and cheerfully announces that tragedy is “good for character” has misunderstood both suffering and Christianity. Some things are genuinely terrible. Some wounds remain wounds. Some questions are never neatly answered in this life.
The Christian claim is subtler and, in some ways, far more audacious: evil may be evil and suffering may be suffering, yet neither is sovereign. God can make use of what he does not call good. He can bring humility from failure, compassion from grief, courage from fear, wisdom from disappointment, patience from waiting, and dependence from the collapse of self-sufficiency. The pain is not necessarily the gift. What can emerge through it may be.
Of course, trials do not automatically transform anyone. Pain can make a person wiser, but it can also make him bitter. Loss can soften the heart or harden it. Humiliation can produce humility or resentment. Two people can undergo nearly identical experiences and emerge as very different human beings. Suffering is not a spiritual vending machine into which we insert misery and receive character.
What suffering does reliably is expose.
Pressure reveals what comfort permits us to conceal. Failure reveals how much identity was tied to success. Loneliness reveals how much we depended upon applause. Waiting exposes our addiction to control. Betrayal exposes both the depth of our love and the depth of our pride. Even success can become a trial of another kind, because it reveals whether we wanted the achievement itself or the admiration that came with it.
This is why one of the most useful questions in suffering is not merely, “Why is this happening to me?” That question is natural, and sometimes it deserves an answer. But another question may eventually become more fruitful:
“What is God showing me about myself?”
What am I afraid to lose?
What do I believe I must possess in order to be secure?
Who am I when I am no longer impressive?
Who am I when the thing I prayed for does not happen?
These are Christian questions, but they are also simply human questions. The atheist, the agnostic, the believer, the philosopher, and the exhausted executive all eventually encounter them because life has a way of stripping away abstractions.
Perhaps the deeper mistake is our assumption that the purpose of life is to construct circumstances so favorable that nothing can seriously disturb us. We spend enormous energy trying to reach that imaginary state. Enough savings. Enough health. Enough professional security. Enough social approval. Enough insurance. Enough influence. Enough certainty. Then, finally, peace.
But peace built on perfect circumstances is not peace. It is merely favorable weather.
The Christian vision proposes something far more demanding. The goal is not to build a life from which nothing can be taken. Such a life does not exist. The goal is to become the sort of person whose deepest foundation cannot be taken away.
That is what Lewis means by being “remade.”
To be remade is not simply to become more religious, more respectable, or more pleasant at dinner parties. It is to become less dominated by fear, less enslaved to approval, less intoxicated by success, less controlled by resentment, less terrified by uncertainty, and less convinced that your life can be secured through your own cleverness. It is to become more capable of courage, gratitude, love, sacrifice, and trust.
The process is rarely comfortable because the old self has excellent lawyers.
It can defend every attachment. It can rationalize every resentment. It can explain why this ambition is necessary, this grudge is justified, this fear is reasonable, and this little flower bed absolutely must be rolled around in immediately after the bath.
Lewis’s genius is that he understands how ridiculous and tragic this is at the same time.
Perhaps, then, the mature question is not simply, “When will the trials end?” They may not end, at least not in the way we imagine. The nature of the trials changes. The youthful struggle for identity becomes the middle-aged struggle for significance. The struggle for achievement becomes the struggle to let go. The fear of beginning becomes the fear of ending. We graduate from one classroom only to discover that the building is much larger than we thought.
The Christian hope is not that God will eventually remove every difficult thing from our lives. It is that no difficult thing need be wasted.
For the person who does not share that faith, Lewis’s insight still carries weight. Difficulty can force us to ask questions that comfort permits us to postpone indefinitely. What matters? What is enough? What deserves my loyalty? What have I mistaken for happiness? What am I becoming?
For the Christian, however, there is another question beneath all of these: what if the purpose of some of these trials is not merely to change my circumstances, but to change me?
That possibility does not make suffering painless. It does make suffering meaningful in a way comfort alone never could.
We spend much of our lives asking God to change the situation. Perhaps sometimes God is using the situation to change us.
And perhaps that is why the question worth carrying through a difficult season is not merely, “How do I get out of this?”
It is this:
Who am I becoming while I am going through it?
The hardest seasons often reveal the clearest questions. If you are navigating pressure, transition, or a consequential decision, I work with leaders who want to think more clearly about what comes next.
