Some days, I feel like a crash test dummy.
Hit the wall.
Reset.
Another impact. Another lesson. Another person telling me that someday I’ll understand why I had to go through it.
There is an idea I have heard throughout most of my life in the church. To be fair, I have heard versions of it outside the church too: sometimes we go through hard things so that someday we can help someone else who is going through the same thing.
And I don’t entirely disagree.
Divorce can give you compassion for someone whose marriage is collapsing. Financial devastation can change the way you see poverty. Rejection can make you notice the person standing alone at the edge of the room. Heartbreak can teach you how precious reciprocity really is. Fear can make you incredibly gentle with someone who is terrified.
There are things I understand now that I simply could not have understood without walking through some difficult country myself. There are trails I recognize because I have walked them. I know where the footing gets loose. I know which turns look like they should lead somewhere but don’t. I know what it feels like to crest a ridge expecting relief only to discover another climb waiting on the other side.
And because I know those places, maybe I can walk beside someone else when they get there.
But lately, I’ve been wondering whether we sometimes confuse the purpose of suffering with the redemption of suffering.
They may overlap.
But they are not necessarily the same thing.
Purpose Is More Mysterious Than We Admit
The church often says some version of, God let you go through this so someday you can help someone else.
There is biblical truth beneath that idea. Paul writes that God comforts us in our troubles so that we can comfort others with the comfort we ourselves have received (2 Corinthians 1:3–4). James says the testing of faith can produce perseverance and maturity, and Paul writes that suffering can produce perseverance, character, and hope (James 1:2–4; Romans 5:3–5).
So I don’t think the answer is to say suffering can never have purpose. Scripture clearly teaches that God can form something in us through what we endure. What troubles me is our confidence that we know exactly what that purpose is.
There is an enormous difference between saying, God can use this, and telling someone, God did this to you because someday somebody else is going to need your story.
The first leaves room for faith and mystery. The second can become speculation dressed up as certainty. Paul never says God traumatized you so you could become useful. That distinction matters. Because otherwise the crash-test-dummy metaphor becomes disturbingly accurate.
The Crash Laboratory
Think about what a crash test dummy actually exists to do.
Its purpose is to absorb trauma for the benefit of somebody else. We strap it into a vehicle, accelerate it toward a wall, and study what happens when everything stops violently. Engineers examine what broke, what held, and what happened to the body during impact. Then they use the data to make the next vehicle safer. The dummy suffers so somebody else doesn’t have to. That is literally what it was made for.
And there are days when some of our explanations of suffering make me feel exactly like that; like God keeps strapping some of us into different vehicles and sending us toward walls because somebody somewhere is going to need the data. Another betrayal. Another financial crisis. Another rejection. Another relationship that doesn’t become what you hoped. Another season where you are exhausted from being strong.
Then someone walks into the wreckage and says, *Just think how many people you’ll be able to help because of this.*I know what they mean. Usually they are trying to offer hope. But there are moments when I want to scream: What if I don’t want another lesson?
What if I don’t want another testimony or another opportunity to turn suffering into somebody else’s inspirational anecdote?
What if I just want someone to acknowledge that hitting the wall hurts?
Job and Our Need for an Explanation
That question sends me back to Job.
His life collapses around him, and almost immediately everyone starts trying to explain why. His friends desperately want suffering to have a tidy equation. There must be a reason. There must be something Job did. There must be some spiritual formula that makes all of this add up.
But Job keeps resisting their explanations. And the book tells us something his friends cannot accept: Job’s suffering is not evidence that he secretly deserved what happened. What fascinates me is that Job himself never receives the behind-the-scenes explanation the reader gets. Instead, Job encounters God.
Apparently, encountering God is different from receiving an explanation. Psychologist Crystal Park’s work on meaning-making helps illuminate that tension. Painful experiences often collide with our deepest assumptions about fairness, safety, identity, purpose, faith, and the way we thought life was supposed to work. I have written before about that difficult work of looking inward in The Shadow and the Summit.
We naturally want to make those pieces fit again. But meaning and explanation are not the same thing. Sometimes our frantic search for an answer becomes another way of refusing to sit with the ache of the question.
Job’s friends offered explanations.
Job needed presence.
Joseph and the Mystery of Providence
Joseph complicates the picture further. His brothers betray him, sell him, and separate him from his family. He is falsely accused. He goes to prison. Years disappear.
Eventually, Joseph stands before the same brothers who caused so much of his pain and says, “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good” (Genesis 50:20). That verse deserves more care than we sometimes give it. Joseph does not merely say God cleaned up the mess afterward. He says two intentions somehow existed within the same story. His brothers intended evil. God intended good. Scripture refuses to resolve that tension by making either side disappear. The brothers remain responsible for what they did, and God remains sovereign over what ultimately comes from it.
The cross holds the same mystery. Peter describes Jesus’ death as unfolding according to God’s deliberate plan while simultaneously holding those who crucified Him responsible for their actions (Acts 2:23). C. S. Lewis wrestled with this same paradox in The Problem of Pain. He insisted that suffering itself is not intrinsically good. Evil remains evil. Yet God can take what human rebellion produces and work within it toward redemption.
Maybe that is the distinction I have been reaching for. I do not have to call the betrayal good in order to call God good.
The Furnace God Did Not Prevent
Then there are Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.
In their story, there is no mystery about why the furnace is waiting for them. Nebuchadnezzar orders them to worship the image he has built, and they refuse. They know exactly what their refusal may cost. What strikes me is what they say before they are thrown in. They tell the king that God is able to deliver them from the furnace. Then they add something remarkable: even if He does not, they still will not bow (Daniel 3:17–18).
Their faith is not built on certainty that obedience will keep them from suffering. They believe God can prevent the fire. They simply do not assume that He will. And He doesn’t.
Nebuchadnezzar has them thrown directly into the furnace. That is the part I keep coming back to. Faithfulness does not keep them from the fire. God does not prevent the furnace from becoming part of their story. But when the king looks inside, he sees a fourth figure walking among them. Later he describes that figure as a messenger God sent to rescue His servants.
Maybe that is what I am trying to understand about suffering. Sometimes I want faith to mean the wall never comes, the storm turns, the relationship survives, the diagnosis changes, or the furnace never gets lit. Sometimes God does prevent the fire. And sometimes He doesn’t.
The promise Scripture gives us is not that faithful people will never walk through fire. Isaiah says almost the opposite: when you walk through the fire, God will be with you (Isaiah 43:2).
That does not make the fire good. It does not mean they needed the furnace in order to become better people. It means the furnace was not the only reality inside the furnace. God’s presence was there too. Maybe sometimes deliverance means being kept from the fire. And sometimes it means discovering that the fire cannot separate us from God once we are inside it.
Even Jesus Asked for Another Way
And then I get to Gethsemane.
This may be the part that matters most to me. Jesus knows what is coming. He understands the cross more fully than anyone around Him. And He does not stand in the garden pretending He wants it. He asks His Father, “If you are willing, take this cup from me,” before surrendering with, “yet not my will, but yours be done” (Luke 22:42).
That stops me.
C. S. Lewis saw something important in Gethsemane too. In The Problem of Pain, he argues that Christian surrender is not stoic apathy. Jesus possessed a real and powerful desire to escape suffering if another path existed, while remaining fully willing to obey the Father.
In other words, faithful surrender does not require wanting the cup. Jesus did not romanticize His suffering. He faced it honestly.
Maybe that means our desire for pain to end is not evidence of weak faith.
Maybe surrender and anguish can occupy the same garden.
Maybe faith sometimes sounds like:
*Please let there be another way.*And then, somehow: I trust You even here.
A God With Scars
Christianity does not ultimately give us a God who watches suffering through reinforced laboratory glass. It gives us Emmanuel. God with us. A God who knows betrayal, rejection, grief, and pain. A God who stands outside Lazarus’s tomb knowing resurrection is moments away and still weeps. That matters to me.
Knowing redemption is coming does not make grief unnecessary. And even after His own resurrection, Jesus still carries the wounds of crucifixion. Resurrection does not rewrite history and pretend the cross never happened. The scars remain. Something terrible actually occurred. But the wounds no longer get the final word. Maybe that is what redemption looks like: not pretending the wound was good, not pretending the collision didn’t hurt, and not manufacturing gratitude for every awful thing we survived.
Lewis makes a similar distinction. The Christian claim is not that pain becomes pleasant once we understand its usefulness. Pain still hurts. Rather, suffering can become a place where surrender, compassion, formation, and redemption emerge.
The wound is real. But it does not possess unlimited authority over the rest of the story.
Growth Is Not a Debt You Owe Your Pain
Psychological research offers an important correction here too. We love stories where suffering automatically makes people deeper, wiser, kinder, and stronger. But life does not work that neatly. Tedeschi and Calhoun’s work on posttraumatic growth describes positive change that may emerge through the struggle with difficult circumstances; not a guaranteed benefit mechanically produced by trauma itself.
That distinction matters because otherwise we create another burden for hurting people. First, survive the thing that nearly broke you. Then make sure you become a better person because of it. I don’t think we need another assignment. **You do not owe your pain a return on investment.**You are allowed to grieve something simply because it hurt. Jesus Himself asked whether the cup could pass. Sometimes the most honest thing we can say is: I did not want this. But maybe honesty about pain does not have to be the end of the conversation. That kind of honesty is part of what I explored in The Hard Heart and the Antidote, where healing begins by naming rather than bypassing what hurts.
Curiosity in the Wreckage
Maybe this is where meaning begins. Not necessarily with an explanation. With a question. There is a difference between standing in the wreckage demanding to know why this happened and returning later with enough distance to ask, What did this show me?
Because resilience cannot only mean surviving the impact. Sometimes survival is all we have capacity for at first. We brace. We breathe. We get through the next hour, the next conversation, the next night. Nobody should stand beside the wreckage and demand that we immediately turn it into wisdom. Pain is allowed to just hurt. But eventually, if we are willing, curiosity can lead us back to places survival hurried us through; not to relive them, but to understand them.
Lewis argues that pain has a way of disrupting our illusions of control and self-sufficiency. I think there is something worth holding onto there, as long as we do not turn it into a slogan and hand it to someone standing in fresh grief.
Pain can interrupt.
It can expose.
It can reveal.
The collision does not just damage the vehicle. Sometimes it changes the map.
Reading the Map Again
Curiosity helps us unfold that map.
We can begin asking what the experience revealed about us. Where were we stronger than we realized? What mattered enough that losing it hurt this badly? What patterns can we see now that survival kept us from noticing then?
Maybe we notice the places where we abandoned ourselves trying to hold onto somebody else. Maybe we recognize boundaries that should have existed. Maybe we understand something about love, fear, trust, grief, courage, God, or ourselves that we simply could not see before.
Some answers will affirm us.
Others will humble us.
Pain can reveal resilience, but it can also expose places where we still need to grow. In Between the Ridges, I explored resilience as something more flexible than simply becoming harder under pressure. Sometimes suffering shows us how tired we are. Sometimes it reveals that what we called strength was actually survival, what we called loyalty was self-abandonment, or what we called peace was avoidance.
And sometimes it reveals something extraordinary: I survived something I once thought would destroy me.
Not untouched.
Not unchanged.
But still here.
That does not mean the suffering was worth it.It means there is more to the story than the impact.
What Suffering Can Form
Scripture will not let me dismiss suffering as meaningless either. James says testing can produce perseverance and maturity. Paul describes suffering producing perseverance, character, and ultimately hope. Lewis describes human beings as something God is forming; not finished products, but lives still being shaped.
That idea resonates with me, but I think we have to handle it carefully. The question is not necessarily, *Why did God make this happen?*Sometimes I do not know.A better question may be, What can be formed here now that it has happened?
What perseverance can grow?
What needs healing?
What boundary needs building?
What false belief needs challenging?
Where can compassion deepen?
Where do I need to become softer?
Where do I need to become stronger?
That does not require us to call suffering good. It simply refuses to let suffering be meaningless by default. Maybe resilience is not how many times we can hit the wall without breaking. Maybe it is remaining open enough afterward to notice what held; and honest enough to examine what didn’t.
Becoming Students of Our Own Experience
Maybe that is the deeper difference between being a crash test dummy and being human. A crash test dummy gets studied by someone standing outside the vehicle. We can eventually become students of our own experience. Not asking only, Why did this happen to me?
But, when we are ready: What is this revealing about who I am becoming?
That question gives us agency inside the aftermath. We can notice strength we didn’t know we possessed and wounds that still need attention. We can recognize patterns, change direction, build boundaries, ask better questions, and love differently. We can become softer in places where bitterness would have been easier and firmer in places where softness once cost us too much. That tension between openness and protection is something I explored more deeply in Exposed.
Maybe meaning is not always a secret explanation hidden inside suffering. Sometimes meaning is something we discover (and something we build) from what remains. And maybe that is why curiosity matters so much. I have written before about the connection between curiosity and courageous self-examination in The Courage to Ask. Resilience gets us through the collision. Curiosity helps us understand what happened inside us when we hit the wall.
Not Everything Is Good
This is why I have become increasingly uncomfortable with the phrase everything happens for a reason.
Sometimes people make terrible choices. Bodies fail. Relationships fracture. People leave. Dreams die. We live in the same creation Paul describes earlier in Romans 8 as groaning, waiting for redemption. There is brokenness in the world, and I do not think faith requires us to assign God direct responsibility for every painful thing that enters our lives.
Romans 8:28 gives me language I trust more. Paul does not say everything that happens is good, and the verse does not attempt to explain the immediate cause of every event. Instead, Paul says that God works in all things for the good of those who love Him and are called according to His purpose.
That distinction matters to me.
There is a difference between saying God caused every collision and saying no collision lies beyond His redemptive reach.
If another person betrays me, I can name that betrayal honestly without having to claim that God made them betray me. If my own choices carry consequences, I can take responsibility for them without turning those consequences into a divinely scripted lesson. If suffering comes through loss, illness, human failure, or the brokenness of the world around me, I do not have to know exactly why it happened before I can believe God is still present and active within what follows.
And then Paul keeps writing.
We often stop at Romans 8:28 because it sounds reassuring on its own, but verse 29 gives the promise important context. Paul says that those God foreknew He also predestined “to be conformed to the image of his Son.”
That changes the way I understand the word good.
The good Paul describes is not necessarily that every painful circumstance eventually becomes pleasant. He does not promise that every relationship will be restored, every diagnosis reversed, every loss replaced, or every unanswered question eventually tied into a neat theological bow.
The good is formation. God is shaping us into the likeness of Christ.
That makes even more sense when I read the verse inside the rest of Romans 8. This is a chapter filled with suffering, groaning, weakness, waiting, and hope. Paul talks about creation groaning. He talks about us groaning as we wait for redemption. He even describes moments when we are so weak that we do not know what to pray and the Spirit meets us there.
Romans 8:28 does not suddenly interrupt all of that with, *Don’t worry—everything painful is secretly good.*It tells me that suffering cannot derail God’s redemptive work.
And verse 29 tells me where that work is headed. Toward Christ.
When I look at Jesus, conformity to His image does not look like becoming untouched by suffering. Jesus grieved. He wept. He experienced betrayal. In Gethsemane, He asked for the cup to pass. He loved without becoming numb, endured suffering without becoming cruel, and trusted the Father without pretending the pain did not hurt.
Maybe that is part of the good Paul is describing. Not that every collision becomes something I eventually celebrate, and not that I must assume God personally drove every car into the wall, but that even the roads I never would have chosen cannot place me beyond His ability to form something in me.
Compassion can deepen. Character can develop. Fear can be confronted. Wounds can be healed. False beliefs can be exposed. Faith can become less dependent on easy answers.
None of that requires me to call the suffering itself good. It means something more careful and, to me, more hopeful: Romans 8:28 does not tell me that God directly caused every painful thing that enters my life. It tells me that no painful thing lies beyond His redemptive work.
And Romans 8:29 reminds me that redemption is not only about changing what happened around me. Sometimes it is about who I am becoming within it.
What We Find Along the Way
Maybe someday someone will find themselves standing somewhere I once stood, convinced there is no trail forward. Perhaps I will be able to sit beside them and say, *I know this road. The footing gets loose here. Let me walk with you awhile. *
Not: Here is why God did this to you.
Not: Someday you’ll be thankful this happened.
Just presence.
That person was not necessarily the reason I suffered. They may simply become the beneficiary of something God formed in me along the way. And I think that is a much more beautiful theology. Your suffering does not have to be your assignment in order for it to become part of what you offer the world.
Pain does not have to be good for wisdom to grow around it. A road does not have to be one we would choose for God to meet us while we walk it. And the meaning we eventually find does not have to explain why the collision happened. Sometimes it simply tells us something about who climbed out afterward.
I Think We Have Enough Data
There are still days when I feel like a crash test dummy. Days when I look at the dents and scars and wonder how many more tests I am supposed to survive. Days when I want to climb out of the vehicle, hand somebody the clipboard, and say:I think we have enough data.
Maybe you have days like that too. If you do, I am not going to tell you that someday you will be thankful for every collision. I am not going to tell you everything happened exactly the way it needed to happen. I don’t know that.
Jesus Himself stood in a garden and asked whether there might be another way. So maybe we are allowed to say that too.
I wish this had been different.
I wish I had not lost that.
I wish they had stayed.
I wish this cup had passed me by.
Faith does not require us to lie about pain. It invites us to trust God inside it.
The Meaning We Find
I have started believing something quieter. Something that leaves room for grief, mystery, curiosity, surrender, faith, and hope.
Not everything that happens is good. Not everything painful comes with a tidy explanation. But nothing lies beyond God’s ability to redeem.
Maybe meaning is not discovering the secret reason the collision happened. Maybe it begins when, eventually, we become curious enough to look at what remains. We notice strength we did not know we had and wounds we can no longer ignore. We see boundaries we should have built, patterns we want to change, people who stayed, beliefs that shifted, and places where our faith became deeper rather than easier.
We discover where we have grown and where we still need to grow. None of that makes the collision good. None of it means we would choose the road again. Maybe that is the meaning we find in what we never would have chosen. Not an explanation that makes pain acceptable. Not a tidy reason that turns tragedy into necessity. But wisdom, self-knowledge, compassion, boundaries, perseverance, character, and hope. And perhaps, eventually, the ability to walk beside another person without needing to explain their suffering either.
You are not a crash test dummy. You are not valuable because somebody else can learn from your collisions. You are a human being who has walked roads you never would have chosen and survived impacts you never asked to endure. You are allowed to acknowledge that they hurt. You are allowed to ask for the cup to pass. You are allowed to grieve what it cost when it didn’t. And when you are ready, you are allowed to become curious about what is being formed in you along the way.
Because resilience may help us survive the wilderness. But curiosity helps us understand who walked out of it.