A Table Full of Questions

A few years ago, I sat at a round table with a group of junior high kids. The event was organized by the local public school district, adults from the community coming in to share real-life stories for the students’ educational enrichment. The theme that day was resilience. We were each given a t-shirt with a definition printed on the front, and then we brought the word to life through our own stories. After I told my most gripping story, the kids would ask me questions. Thirty minutes later, the group would rotate and a new group would sit down, and I would tell the story again.

If you have ever spent time with junior high students, you can imagine the questions that came up. The definition on that shirt read: Resilience, the ability to recover from setbacks, adapt well to change, and keep going in the face of adversity. That word resonated with me because it describes something essential, a quality I have come to believe is not just useful but necessary for surviving a crisis and coming back from it.

​

That definition has certainly described my own life over the last forty-two years. Over time, I came to see that perseverance and resilience were two distinct but deeply connected qualities that worked together in my character. Perseverance, is the tenacity to keep moving, the refusal to stop even when every step is gruelling, the grit. Resilience is what brings you back: the ability to recover, bounce back, to adapt, re-emerge into your life, your family, your dreams, and keep going as before, or stronger than before.

​

Both qualities became indispensable to me as I encountered an unusual pattern of life-threatening situations that very nearly took me out. I knew, early in my walk with God, that following Jesus was going to ask something of me. What I did not fully anticipate was how much it would ask. The road turned out to be significantly narrower than I had imagined. Jesus described it this way:

​

“Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.”

— Matthew 7:13–14 (NIV)

​

The narrow gate speaks of Jesus as the only way in. But the road after the gate is also narrow, depicting a journey that is harder, not easier, than the alternative. That road is where this story takes place. And it is on that road that resilience stopped being a concept on a t-shirt and became a matter of survival.

​

A Word to the Broken

This book is my testimony. It is written as an act of solidarity with the millions of broken and hurting people who are struggling to make sense of a world filled with pain and confusion. Paradise is lost, genuinely, historically, consequentially lost, and because of that, people suffer. Deeply. Often without warning. Often without explanation. Many people direct their suffering toward God, blaming Him for their circumstances, questioning His goodness, or abandoning faith in Him altogether. That response is understandable.

​

You have heard the questions, and may have asked them yourself: "If God is so good, why is there so much evil in the world? Where was God when I lost my loved one? Why doesn't He stop the suffering? Why doesn't He answer my prayers? Why didn't He help me when I needed Him most?" I believe people may ask these questions out of genuine anguish, not malice. And beneath the anger, there is often something deeper, a longing, a half-buried hope, that maybe there really is a God who sees everything, who is good enough and powerful enough to fix it, and who actually cares.

The questions are a cry disguised as an accusation. I understand that cry. I have made it myself.

​

What This Book Offers

This book will not give you a complete, airtight answer to the problem of human suffering. No honest person can write that book, because no human being in a mortal body has access to all the answers. Some questions will remain locked until we stand face to face with our Creator. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. What this book does offer is something I believe is more immediately useful: sincere hope. Not the thin, cheerful kind that dissolves under pressure. The kind that has been tested in fire and is still standing.

​

My own story was forged in an intense crucible that began in my youth and continued for forty-two years of serious hardship. Several life-threatening health crises. A lot of hospitals, surgeries, and long recoveries. Financial devastation. Relational losses. Seasons of grinding, anguish-producing circumstances that filled the years in between. No exaggeration, it has often felt simply like trying to stay alive long enough to accomplish my purpose.

​

This book would be far too long if I recounted every loss. In truth, all of us could fill volumes with our stories. Every human life contains depths of suffering that deserve to be told. For me, it was a road I never planned to travel. I have stood at the crossroads of bitter and better more times than I can count. That is a difficult place to stand. Sometimes life is genuinely not fair, and we find ourselves on paths we never chose and never wanted.

​

But it is precisely on those unplanned paths, the ones we would never have taken voluntarily, that the deepest truths tend to surface. About ourselves. About God. About what faith actually is when it is stripped of every comfort.

​

I write from a biblical Christian worldview, and I want to be upfront about that. It matters, because the conclusions I have reached about suffering are inseparable from the faith that carried me through. I am not writing as someone who observed suffering from a safe theological distance. I have lived inside it. I have doubted. I have questioned. I have had seasons of genuine darkness where the only thing I had left was a stubborn, sometimes barely articulate refusal to let go of God. What I found in that struggle, and what I want to pass on in these pages, is not a set of easy answers.

​

Easy answers do not survive contact with real suffering. What I found is something more durable than that: real hope, grounded in a God who is actually good, and a story bigger than the one we can see from inside our pain. If you are looking for an easy read, this is not the book for you. There are ideas here that will confront you, comfort you, and perhaps disturb you. But if you are drawn to real-life testimony, to the account of an ordinary man who encountered an extraordinary God in the lowest places of his life, then I believe you will find something of value here.

​

My Hope for You

My hope is that by the time you finish this book, you will understand something you did not fully understand before: that hardship and suffering, as devastating as they are, carry within them the seeds of something eternal. I know how that sounds if you are in the middle of your own crisis. It may feel dismissive, or even offensive. I understand. I have been in that place where someone else’s perspective on the meaning of suffering felt like a slap rather than a comfort.

​

I am writing from inside 42 years of carrying weight I did not choose and could not always make sense of. And from that place, I can tell you with everything in me: you are not alone. You are not abandoned. What you are walking through is not the end of the story. There is Someone with you in it, and there is purpose in it, even when that purpose is completely invisible from where you are standing. The road ahead may be longer and harder than you ever imagined. Mine was. But there is hope on that road, real, tested, lasting hope.

​

And resilience, I have learned, is not simply a psychological quality. At its deepest level, it is a spiritual one. It is what happens when the life of God inside a person refuses to be extinguished by the weight of the world outside. That is what this book is about. Let’s begin.