I remember the day as a sunny, summer Brazilian one. Denalyn and I were spending the afternoon with our friends Paul and Debbie. Their house was a welcome respite. We lived close to downtown Rio de Janeiro in a high-rise apartment. Paul and Debbie lived an hour away from the city center in a nice house where the air was cooler, the streets were cleaner, and life was calmer. Besides, they had a swimming pool.

Our two-year-old daughter, Jenna, loved to play with their kids. And that is exactly what she was doing when she fell. We didn’t intend to leave the children unattended. We had stepped into the house for just a moment to fill our plates. We were chatting and chewing when Paul and Debbie’s four-year-old walked into the room and casually told her mom, “Jenna fell in the pool.” We exploded out the door. Jenna was flopping in the water, wearing neither floaties nor a life jacket. Paul reached her first. He jumped in and lifted her up to Denalyn. Jenna coughed and cried for a minute, and just like that she was fine. Tragedy averted. Daughter safe.

Imagine our gratitude. We immediately circled up the kids, offered a prayer, and sang a song of thanks. For the remainder of the day, our feet didn’t touch the ground, and Jenna didn’t leave our arms. Even driving home, I was thanking God. In the rearview mirror I could see Jenna sound asleep in her car seat, and I offered yet another prayer: God, you are so good. Then a question surfaced in my thoughts. From God? Or from the part of me that struggles to make sense out of God? I can’t say. But what the voice asked, I still remember: If Jenna hadn’t survived, would God still be good?

I had spent the better part of the afternoon broadcasting God’s goodness. Yet had we lost Jenna, would I have reached a different verdict? Is God good only when the outcome is?

When the cancer is in remission, we say “God is good.” When the pay raise comes, we announce “God is good.” When the university admits us or the final score favors our team, “God is good.” Would we and do we say the same under different circumstances? In the cemetery as well as the nursery? In the unemployment line as well as the grocery line? In days of recession as much as in days of provision? Is God always good?

For my friends Brian and Christyn Taylor, the question is more than academic. During this last year their seven-year-old daughter was hospitalized for more than six months with six surgeries for a disease of the pancreas, Brian’s job was discontinued, several family members died and another was diagnosed with brain cancer, and Christyn was pregnant with child number four. Life was tough. She blogged:

Multiple hospital stays with my daughter were exhausting, but I held faith. Losing Brian’s family members one by one until there was only one left, who was then diagnosed with stage 4 brain cancer, was incomprehensible, but I still held faith. Being hospitalized seven-and-a-half weeks with a placental abruption was terrifying, but I held faith. I held to the faith that God works for my good, and though I did not necessarily understand the trials, I trusted God’s bigger, unseen plan.

God and I had a deal—I would endure the trials that came my way as long as he acknowledged my stopping point. He knew where my line had been drawn, and I knew in my heart he would never cross it.

He did. I delivered a stillborn baby girl. With my daughter Rebecca still at home on a feeding tube and her future health completely unknown, it was a foregone conclusion that this baby we so wanted and loved would be saved. She wasn’t. My line in the sand was crossed. My one-way deal with God was shattered.

Everything changed in that moment. Fear set in, and my faith began to crumble. My “safety zone” with God was no longer safe. If this could happen in the midst of our greatest struggles, then anything was fair game. For the first time in my life, anxiety began to overwhelm me.1

We can relate. Most, if not all of us, have a contractual agreement with God. The fact that he hasn’t signed it doesn’t keep us from believing it.

I pledge to be a good, decent person, and in return God will . . .

save my child.

heal my wife.

protect my job.

(fill in the blank)                            .

Only fair, right? Yet when God fails to meet our bottom-line expectations, we are left spinning in a tornado of questions. Is he good at all? Is God angry at me? Stumped? Overworked? Is his power limited? His authority restricted? Did the devil outwit him? When life isn’t good, what are we to think about God? Where is he in all this?

Joseph’s words for Pharaoh offer some help here. We don’t typically think of Joseph as a theologian. Not like Job, the sufferer, or Paul, the apostle. For one thing we don’t have many of Joseph’s words. Yet the few we have reveal a man who wrestled with the nature of God.

To the king he announced:

But afterward there will be seven years of famine so great that all the prosperity will be forgotten and wiped out. Famine will destroy the land. This famine will be so terrible that even the memory of the good years will be erased. As for having the dream twice, it means that the matter has been decreed by God and that he will make these events happen soon. (Gen. 41:30–32 NLT)

Joseph saw both seasons, the one of plenty and the one of paucity, beneath the umbrella of God’s jurisdiction. Both were “decreed by God.”

How could this be? Was the calamity God’s idea?

Of course not. God never creates or parlays evil. “God can never do wrong! It is impossible for the Almighty to do evil” (Job 34:10 NCV; see also James 1:17). He is the essence of good. How can he who is good invent anything bad?

And he is sovereign. Scripture repeatedly attributes utter and absolute control to his hand. “The Most High God rules the kingdom of mankind and sets over it whom he will” (Dan. 5:21 ESV). God is good. God is sovereign. Then how are we to factor in the presence of calamities in God’s world?

Here is how the Bible does it: God permits it. When the demons begged Jesus to send them into a herd of pigs, he “gave them permission” (Mark 5:12–13). Regarding the rebellious, God said, “I let them become defiled . . . that I might fill them with horror so they would know that I am the LORD” (Ezek. 20:26 NIV). The Old Law speaks of the consequence of accidentally killing a person: “If [the man] does not do it intentionally, but God lets it happen, he is to flee to a place I will designate” (Ex. 21:13 NIV).

God at times permits tragedies. He permits the ground to grow dry and stalks to grow bare. He allows Satan to unleash mayhem. But he doesn’t allow Satan to triumph. Isn’t this the promise of Romans 8:28: “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose” (NIV)? God promises to render beauty out of “all things,” not “each thing.” The isolated events may be evil, but the ultimate culmination is good.

We see small examples of this in our own lives. When you sip on a cup of coffee and say, “This is good,” what are you saying? The plastic bag that contains the beans is good? The beans themselves are good? Hot water is good? A coffee filter is good? No, none of these. Good happens when the ingredients work together: the bag opened, the beans ground into powder, the water heated to the right temperature. It is the collective cooperation of the elements that creates good.

Nothing in the Bible would cause us to call a famine good or a heart attack good or a terrorist attack good. These are terrible calamities, born out of a fallen earth. Yet every message in the Bible, especially the story of Joseph, compels us to believe that God will mix them with other ingredients and bring good out of them.

But we must let God define good. Our definition includes health, comfort, and recognition. His definition? In the case of his Son, Jesus Christ, the good life consisted of struggles, storms, and death. But God worked it all together for the greatest of good: his glory and our salvation.

Joni Eareckson Tada has spent most of her life attempting to reconcile the presence of suffering with the nature of God. She was just a teenager when a diving accident left her paralyzed from the neck down. After more than forty years in a wheelchair, Joni has reached this conclusion:

[Initially] I figured that if Satan and God were involved in my accident at all, then it must be that the devil had twisted God’s arm for permission . . .

I reasoned that once God granted permission to Satan, he then nervously had to run behind him with a repair kit, patching up what Satan had ruined, mumbling to himself, “Oh great, now how am I going to work this for good?” . . .

But the truth is that God is infinitely more powerful than Satan . . .

While the devil’s motive in my disability was to shipwreck my faith by throwing a wheelchair in my way, I’m convinced that God’s motive was to thwart the devil and use the wheelchair to change me and make me more like Christ through it all . . .

[He can] bring ultimate good out of the devil’s wickedness.2

This was the message of Jesus. When his followers spotted a blind man on the side of the road, they asked Jesus for an explanation. Was God angry? Who was to blame? Who sinned? Jesus’ answer provided a higher option: the man was blind so “the works of God should be revealed in him” (John 9:3). God turned blindness, a bad thing, into a billboard for Jesus’ power to heal. Satan acted, God counteracted, and good won. It’s a divine jujitsu of sorts. God redirects the energy of evil against its source. “[God] uses evil to bring evil to nought.”³ He is the master chess player, always checkmating the devil’s moves.

Our choice comes down to this: trust God or turn away. He will cross the line. He will shatter our expectations. And we will be left to make a decision.

Christyn Taylor made hers. Remember the young mother I told you about? She concluded her blog with these words:

I have spent weeks trying to figure out why a God I so love could let this happen to my family at such a time. The only conclusion I came to was this: I have to give up my line in the sand. I have to offer my entire life, every minute portion of it, to God’s control regardless of the outcome.

My family is in God’s hands. No lines have been drawn, no deals made. I have given our lives to the Lord. Peace has entered where panic once resided, and calmness settled where anxiety once ruled.4

At some point we all stand at this intersection. Is God good when the outcome is not? During the famine as well as the feast? The definitive answer comes in the person of Jesus Christ. He is the only picture of God ever taken. Do you want to know heaven’s clearest answer to the question of suffering? Look at Jesus.

He pressed his fingers into the sore of the leper. He felt the tears of the sinful woman who wept. He inclined his ear to the cry of the hungry. He wept at the death of a friend. He stopped his work to tend to the needs of a grieving mother. He doesn’t recoil, run, or retreat at the sight of pain. Just the opposite. He didn’t walk the earth in an insulated bubble or preach from an isolated, germfree, pain-free island. He took his own medicine. He played by his own rules. Trivial irritations of family life? Jesus felt them. Cruel accusations of jealous men? Jesus knew their sting. A seemingly senseless death? Just look at the cross. He exacts nothing from us that he did not experience himself.

Why? Because he is good.

God owes us no more explanation than this. Besides, if he gave one, what makes us think we would understand it? Might the problem be less God’s plan and more our limited perspective? Suppose the wife of George Frideric Handel came upon a page of her husband’s famous oratorio Messiah. The entire work was more than two hundred pages long. Imagine that she discovered one page on the kitchen table. On it her husband had written only one measure in a minor key, one that didn’t work on its own. Suppose she, armed with this fragment of dissonance, marched into his studio and said, “This music makes no sense. You are a lousy composer.” What would he think?

Perhaps something similar to what God thinks when we do the same. We point to our minor key—our sick child, crutches, or famine—and say, “This makes no sense!” Yet out of all his creation, how much have we seen? And of all his work how much do we understand? Only a sliver. A doorway peephole. Is it possible that some explanation for suffering exists of which we know nothing at all? What if God’s answer to the question of suffering requires more megabytes than our puny minds have been given?

And is it possible that the wonder of heaven will make the most difficult life a good bargain? This was Paul’s opinion. “Our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all” (2 Cor. 4:17 NIV).

Suppose I invited you to experience the day of your dreams. Twenty-four hours on an island paradise with your favorite people, food, and activities. The only stipulation: one millisecond of discomfort. For reasons I choose not to explain, you will need to begin the day with the millisecond of distress.

Would you accept my offer? I think you would. A split second is nothing compared to twenty-four hours. On God’s clock you’re in the middle of your millisecond. Compared to eternity, what is seventy, eighty, ninety years? Just a vapor. Just a finger snap compared to heaven.

Your pain won’t last forever, but you will. “Whatever we may have to go through now is less than nothing compared with the magnificent future God has in store for us” (Rom. 8:18 PHILLIPS).

What is coming will make sense of what is happening now. Let God finish his work. Let the composer complete his symphony. The forecast is simple. Good days. Bad days. But God is in all days. He is the Lord of the famine and the feast, and he uses both to accomplish his will.