There are seasons in almost every life that make absolutely no sense at the time.
We look at our disrupted circumstances and wonder why God would allow such pain, especially when we feel we have been faithful. Sometimes, years later, the fog begins to lift and we see things we could not possibly have seen before.
Sometimes it doesn’t.
God allowed me to walk through several shocking experiences in my teens and early twenties. For years, I couldn’t make sense of them. Eventually, however, I began to see that what looked pointless at the time was shaping something in me that God would use much later.
To make sense of those years, I want to lean especially on the Apostle Paul, along with an eighteenth-century poet named William Cowper, who found remarkable language for describing the hidden work of God.
Paul understood something that took me decades to learn: the details of our affliction matter less than what God is doing through it. He never explained his famous “thorn in the flesh,” because the thorn itself was not the point.
What God was doing through it was.
The Shock That Shaped a Life
Growing up, by all appearances, God removed blessings from my family.
My parents lost land—twenty acres in Mississippi and twenty more in Texas. I still don’t know why. What I do know is that the loss plunged us into years of scarcity.
My mother bought our clothes at garage sales. They didn’t fit. They weren’t in style. And at an age when friendships matter most, I became the kid people avoided.
Some shouted insults. Some simply turned away. Though God gave me a few faithful friends, the overall experience was one of deep rejection.
Anger took root.
Confusion toward God followed.
I remember the moment I crossed a line—when I stopped asking God to change things and began demanding that He do so. I shook my fist in anger. I felt abandoned.
Then adulthood came—marriage, children, career. Those memories faded into the background.
But they never resolved.
I had survived the experience.
I still didn’t understand it.
Paul Asked for the Pain to Go Away
Years later, Paul’s experience in 2 Corinthians 12 began to give me a way of thinking about my own.
Paul had done nothing wrong. He had been faithful to God’s calling. Yet he was given a persistent “thorn in the flesh.” Whatever its precise nature, it was painful enough that Paul pleaded with God three times to remove it.
That is worth noticing.
Paul’s first response to pain was not to celebrate it. He asked God to take it away.
Sometimes Christians can make suffering harder for one another by assuming that mature faith should immediately welcome whatever God sends.
Paul didn’t.
He asked for relief.
And God said no.
But God did not merely leave Paul with a thorn. He gave him something else:
an explanation.
The thorn had been given “to keep me from exalting myself.” And then came God’s word:
“My grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness.”
Suddenly Paul could see something he had not seen before.
He had been looking at the pain.
God had been looking at Paul’s future.
That distinction is enormous.
While we are looking around for understanding, God is looking ahead.
Paul saw a thorn that needed to be removed. God saw a danger that needed to be prevented and a servant whose weakness would become the stage on which divine power could be displayed.
The thorn wasn’t meaningless.
It was doing something.
When God Is Looking Ahead
As a boy, I was doing what Paul initially did—looking at my circumstances and feeling completely confused.
But unlike Paul, I became angry.
My family’s period of scarcity began immediately after I had committed my life fully to Christ. It felt almost timed. I couldn’t comprehend why obedience was being met with suffering and rejection.
What I could not see from my limited vantage point was that God was looking at my future.
Looking back, I now realize that had my family remained financially secure, I easily might have grown into a proud, smug, self-sufficient man—someone entirely unable to sympathize with those who are hurting.
While I was bitterly complaining about my circumstances, God was quietly shaping a courthouse chaplain.
Every day now, working in the Family Law Center, I meet people whose lives are blowing apart. They are walking through adult versions of some of what I experienced as a child. Often they tell me they have done nothing to deserve what has happened, and because of my own past, I understand that feeling to my core.
I can now see purposes in some of what happened to me that I could not see then.
But we need to be careful here.
My experience does not mean that every suffering person will eventually be able to look backward and say, “Now I know exactly why God did that.”
Sometimes God gives us an explanation, as He did Paul.
Sometimes years of distance allow us to recognize at least part of what He was accomplishing.
And sometimes the reason remains buried.
What then?
The Unfathomable Mine
William Cowper understood that question.
Cowper—pronounced “Cooper”—wrote the familiar hymn “There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood.” His life also included profound suffering, and he found memorable language for God’s hidden activity in another hymn, “God Moves in a Mysterious Way.”
He begins:
God moves in a mysterious way
His wonders to perform.
He plants His footsteps in the sea
And rides upon the storm.
Cowper doesn’t picture God standing safely outside the storm.
God is in it.
But His presence doesn’t mean we understand what He is doing there.
That is what makes the storm mysterious.
Cowper develops the idea further:
Deep in unfathomable mines
Of never-failing skill
He treasures up His bright designs
And works His sovereign will.
The imagery resonates strongly with Job 28, where human beings descend into the earth, cut shafts through rock, expose hidden things, and retrieve treasures buried in darkness.
Human beings are remarkably good at mining the earth.
But Job asks a far more difficult question:
“But where can wisdom be found?”
We can dig into the earth and find treasure.
We cannot dig into God and extract an explanation.
There are depths we cannot reach.
That changes the question.
When pain refuses to explain itself, the question can no longer merely be:
“Why is this happening?”
Eventually we have to ask:
“How do I live faithfully when I don’t know why this is happening?”
Job 28 gives us an answer.
After an entire chapter about wisdom that human beings cannot discover for themselves, the chapter ends:
“Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom;
And to depart from evil is understanding.”
That is profound.
When we cannot find the reason, we can still find the posture.
We may not know what God is doing.
We can still know what faithfulness looks like while He is doing it.
What Do We Do While We Wait?
Paul gives us one answer.
Ask.
Paul asked three times for the thorn to be removed. There is nothing unspiritual about asking God to end our pain. We don’t have to pretend we enjoy suffering in order to trust Him.
But Paul’s experience also teaches us something else:
Leave room for God to answer a different question from the one we are asking.
Paul asked:
Will You remove this?
God answered, in effect:
Let Me tell you what I am doing through it.
And that revelation changed Paul’s interpretation of his pain.
Removal gave way to revelation.
Revelation produced reinterpretation.
And reinterpretation eventually enabled Paul to say something astonishing:
“Most gladly, therefore, I will rather boast about my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me.”
But Job protects us from turning Paul’s experience into a formula.
God may not tell us why.
If He does, receive the explanation.
If He doesn’t, live faithfully on what He has revealed while entrusting to Him what He has concealed.
That may be one of the hardest disciplines of faith.
We naturally want enough information to make God’s actions reasonable to us.
Sometimes He gives it.
Sometimes He asks us to trust His wisdom before we can trace His reasoning.
The Cloud of Mercy
Cowper captures this beautifully later in the hymn:
Ye fearful saints, fresh courage take;
The clouds ye so much dread
Are big with mercy and shall break
In blessings on your head.
That doesn’t mean pain isn’t painful.
A cloud can be dark precisely because it is carrying something.
And that may be one of the hardest truths to accept when suffering makes no sense: what looks empty of meaning to us may be carrying purposes we cannot yet see.
Paul’s thorn looked like weakness.
God was preparing power.
My childhood looked like rejection and scarcity.
Years later, I could see that at least part of what was being formed was compassion.
The cloud had been carrying something.
But we should resist the temptation to tell every suffering person exactly what their cloud is carrying. We don’t know.
Sometimes even the person suffering doesn’t know.
That is why Cowper’s word mysterious matters.
When the Explanation Never Comes
There is a temptation at this point to make a promise Scripture doesn’t make:
Hang on long enough, and someday God will explain everything that happened to you.
Perhaps He will.
Perhaps, like Paul, you will eventually understand something you couldn’t see before.
Perhaps, like me, decades will pass before pieces begin fitting together.
But some questions may remain unanswered in this life.
And faith must be able to live there too.
Job never receives the kind of explanation we might expect. Instead, he encounters God.
That is an important distinction.
Sometimes God gives us an answer. Sometimes He gives us Himself.
And when the explanation remains buried in the unfathomable mine, God Himself must be enough.
We ask for removal.
We remain open to revelation.
We reinterpret our pain when God gives us light.
And when He doesn’t, we continue to walk in what we already know about Him.
We don’t call evil good.
We don’t pretend pain doesn’t hurt.
We don’t manufacture explanations God hasn’t given us.
And we don’t assume that because we cannot see what God is doing, God isn’t doing anything.
What the Thorn Taught Paul
Paul eventually reached a place he could never have reached when he was simply asking for removal.
He learned that God’s grace was sufficient.
He learned that divine power could operate through human weakness.
And he learned that the thing he most desperately wanted removed could become the very place where Christ’s power rested upon him.
That is why Paul’s story doesn’t end merely with tolerating the thorn.
It ends with a radically different interpretation of it.
The thorn remained.
But its meaning had changed.
That may be one of the deepest works God ever accomplishes in suffering.
Sometimes He changes the circumstance.
Sometimes He explains the circumstance.
Sometimes He changes us while the circumstance remains.
Living With Mystery
So what do we do when pain comes and makes absolutely no sense?
Ask for relief. Paul did.
Listen for what God may be teaching you through it. Paul did that too.
Receive whatever understanding God gives you without pretending to possess understanding He hasn’t given.
And when the reason remains buried, do what Job 28 teaches us:
Fear God. Turn from evil. Keep walking.
Because the fact that God’s purposes are hidden does not mean they are absent.
The mine may be unfathomable.
But it is not empty.
Cowper’s “bright designs” may lie beyond our ability to excavate. Paul’s thorn may remain. The storm may continue longer than we ever imagined.
But we know something Paul did not know when he first begged God for relief:
Pain we cannot explain can still be pain God can use.
And sometimes, many years later, we may look backward and discover that while we were desperately trying to understand what God was doing around us,
God had been quietly doing something within us all along.
Take One Truth With You
If you could choose one truth in this article to carry with you the next time you find yourself under a “frowning providence,” which one would you most want to take, and why?
This was very helpful for some personal things I am going through Randall. Excellent read.🙏🏻