Back when I wasn’t a Christian, in the late 1990s, I made the following kind of argument to Christians who said that God had healed them of condition x and illness y:
“It’s all very well saying God healed you from x or y - but through, at best, the universe’s laws or, at worst, God’s unwillingness to intervene pre-emptively, He still enabled these things to happen in the first place. If Jill has painful cancer for 2 years, then gets miraculously healed, it’s strange how God gets thanked for the healing, but not dismissed or condemned for the 2 years of painful cancer in the first place. If Jack breaks my leg by kicking me, I should not praise him for handing me a crutch."
Even then, I could accept the proposition that God doesn’t directly cause the suffering, and that there may be good reasons why He allows suffering for character-building, perseverance and growth.
But when I became a Christian, He showed me through Christ that He’s the one who comes into the wreckage, binds the wounds, and then teaches me to walk again. I also learned as a Christian that even when it seems He’s not noticeably coming into the wreckage, binding the wounds, and then teaching me to walk again, He’s still present - sustaining me, shaping me, holding me up when I can’t feel it, quietly, patiently, weaving grace into the cracks, and writing a story deeper than my immediate relief.
Understanding this helps make sense of Paul’s instruction for us to “Give thanks in all circumstances” (1 Thessalonians 5:18) and “Give thanks always and for everything” (Ephesians 5:20), even the really hard times. But it was only when I spent several years watching my dad suffer and slowly die with dementia that I began to understand more intimately what it means to give thanks in all things – even the very hardest things - because God is always good and always present and working in and through them.
This wisdom also applies to when we give thanks to God for everything that others might see as trivial. Before becoming a Christian, I used to find it strange that Christians would give thanks to God for food they’d just cooked, the weather, a car running well, and so forth. But after becoming a Christian, I began to understand why. It’s beneficial for us to be grateful for all things that we know are, in the long run, for our own good – and the kind of God who loves us enough to suffer and die for us as Christ did is bound to be doing immeasurable good in all kinds of ways that we can’t yet see or understand.
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