Turner’s story isn’t unique. The question of suffering and evil is a powerful — insurmountable for some — obstacle to faith. C.S. Lewis took the issue seriously enough to devote an entire book, The Problem of Pain, to the subject. Alister McGrath, the famous Oxford theologian, calls the issue of evil and suffering a "hole" in the fabric of a Christian worldview.

Now if the religion under scrutiny were Hinduism or Buddhism, instead of Christianity, suffering wouldn’t present a problem. In fact, the issue would literally be unintelligible. In the Hindu tradition, the gods are neither all powerful nor are they depicted as good, that is, personally committed to the well-being and happiness of their worshippers. Instead, they can be downright capricious. In Buddhism, suffering proceeds from an excessive attachment to the temporal and passing.

In contrast, Christianity — along with Judaism and Islam — believes in a God who is both all-powerful and good. Christians confess "We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty ..." We also believe that He is personal and that He desires what is good for us. And that’s the problem. How do you square what Christianity teaches about God’s nature with what we read about in the newspaper and experience in our own lives? Many people are left asking the same question the great Scottish philosopher David Hume asked: "Is [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?"

Before we can answer Hume, we need to be clear on what we mean by "suffering" and "evil." Not all evil, and the suffering it causes, is the same. We can divide evil into two broad categories: the kind caused by us, and the kind best described in the title of Jacob Kushner’s book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People. Possibly the best illustration of the first kind of evil is the new David O. Russell film Three Kings. The film takes place in the days after the liberation of Kuwait. Four Americans, led by Major Archie Gates (George Clooney), find a map — I’ll spare you where — that reveals the location of gold bullion stolen from Kuwait by the Iraqis. When they arrive at the hiding place of the gold, the Iraqi Republican Guard not only isn’t interested in stopping them from taking the gold, they’ll even help them load it on the truck. All Gates and company have to do is turn their backs on the slaughter of Iraqi Shiites.

It’s a tempting offer. Not only is there the prospect of avoiding a fight with the Iraqis and returning home rich, the soldiers are under standing orders not to intervene in the slaughter. (I won’t say anything else, except that the rest of this black comedy explores the consequences of making these kind of moral choices.) Three Kings, inadvertently or not, reminds us that a lot of the suffering and evil we see in the world has very little to do with God. God didn’t cause the slaughter of the Iraqi Shiites — Saddam Hussien did. What’s more, the nations of the world stood by and let it happen, just as they did in Germany, Cambodia, Rwanda, and Bosnia. They convinced themselves that they had good reasons for doing nothing. Whether those reasons could ever justify inaction in the face of evil is open to debate. What’s not open to debate is that before anyone shakes their first in God’s face and asks "where was God?" they should start by asking "where was man?"

Now, God could have created a world where people were not free to act on their darker impulses. It would have been a world without wars, genocide, "ethnic cleansing," or even crime. It would have been missing something else: free will. Free will means that we are free to choose between good and evil, and we are also free to choose between coming to our neighbor’s aid, or telling ourselves "it’s not your business, don’t get involved."

Okay, that still leaves the other kind of evil and suffering, the kind where bad things happen to good people. The kind without perpetrators, only victims. It’s a subject I’m personally acquainted with. My son David is the best Christmas gift I ever got. When I’m sad, he urges me to "smile, Daddy." When I look lonely, he tells me "daddy, you’re my best friend." This keen sensitivity to my emotional state is even more remarkable when you consider that David is autistic. Now, it could be a lot worse. David is what is known as "high functioning." He’s fairly bright; he’s not shut off from the outside world like other autistic children; and, he’s got what his neurologist calls "a decent prognosis," presumably of being able to live in a quasi-independent manner. But, that’s not entirely comforting to his mom and me. We live with the knowledge that David may never go to college, marry, have children æ the kind of things all parents want for their children.

While I don’t have an answer to this kind of evil and pain, I have the next best thing to an answer: hope. I have the assurance that David’s present circumstances aren’t the last word on what he will become. Hope isn’t the same as optimism. Optimism is spin control. It’s looking at the world with "rose-colored glasses." It can’t offer a reasonable explanation for believing what it does. It believes for belief’s sake.

In contrast, hope sees things exactly as they are. But, it also sees beyond our circumstances. How? By remember who made us and for what purpose we were made. That purpose is a relationship with God, or as one catechism puts it, to "share in [God’s] own blessed life." Now, the word "blessed" is a tip-off that this is a relationship that’s quite unlike any human relationship. Recall the best relationship you ever had æ one where you could always count on the other person. Now, multiply that times infinity (I know it’s impossible, but work with me) and that’s what God is offering each of us.

What’s even harder to get our minds around is that we’re talking about eternity here. Time is not a defining quality of our relationship with God. Our lives, however long, are but an infinitesimal fraction of the time He will spend loving us — something scripture compares to the blinking of an eye. Likewise, our sufferings, however painful, are an equally small part of all the experiences we will have. It may sound like "pie-in-the-sky-in-the-sweet-bye-and-bye," but it’s true. Until very recently, the idea of eternity shaped the way people throughout history have thought and felt. Countless people were comforted by the knowledge that there’s more to their lives than what Hamlet called "this mortal coil."

It’s only recently that we’ve moved away from this consideration of eternity. And, what have we got to show for it? Despair. Cynicism. Even sadder is the fact that every western alternative to the Christian perspective begins by assuming "there is no God," or "there is no life after death." (Eastern spirituality has a different conception of time, which is cyclical as opposed to the linear understanding of the west.) So, the despair and cynicism is the result of reasoning that begs the question it supposed to be answering.

Blaise Pascal, the seventeenth-century French mathematician and all-around genius, made the case for the reasonableness of Christian hope in what is known as "Pascal’s Wager." As Pascal reasoned, if you didn’t believe, and you were wrong, your despair here on earth would be followed by an eternity apart from God. If you did believe, and you were wrong, you lost very little, since the belief brought you comfort in this life. And if you were right ... Bingo! (Not exactly Pascal’s words, but you get the point.)

Okay, the fact that God desires a relationship with us, and the perspective of eternity offers us a reasonable basis for hope. But, why do things have to be so difficult at times? Or, as you’ve probably heard more than once, "why does this relationship have to be so much work?" The best insight I’ve ever found on that question comes from another Boundless contributor, John Eldredge. In his book, The Sacred Romance, co-written with Brent Curtis, he depicts God as a lover, and our lives as a romance. Now, for many of us, the word "romance" brings to mind cheesy paperback novels with pictures of Fabio on the cover. That’s not the kind of "romance" Eldredge has in mind. He uses romance in the medieval sense, an adventure story involving a quest. It’s filled with setbacks and triumphs, and unexpected plot twists. On his quest, the hero must overcome great hardship.

What’s more, as Eldredge writes, while God is a lover, He is a "wild lover," or as C.S. Lewis put it in his Chronicles of Narnia, when speaking of Aslan the lion, "he’s not tame, but he’s good." What does that mean? It means that while God loves us more than we can imagine, he’s not going to do things the way we would want Him to. We can’t mold into our image, the way we do with our human lovers. And if being in control of your life is what matters most to you, well, there are going to be problems. In our relationship with God, we are going to be asked to do things we would rather not do, and go places we would rather not go.

But God didn’t exempt his own son from this ride. As the author of Hebrews put it, "During the days of Jesus’ life on earth, he offered up prayers and petitions with loud cries and tears to the one who could save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverent submission. Although he was a son, he learned obedience from what he suffered ..." Jesus was as human as you and I. Part of him definitely didn’t want to suffer and die. Yet, after agonizing in the garden, he said "yes" to God’s purposes.

Why? Because, as Hebrews put it, "the joy set before him." What was that "joy?" It was the knowledge his death would begin the process by which somewhere, someday, all that is wrong will be made right. Things will be as they should be. Thomas Howard, in "Christ The Tiger," describes this joy much better than I could: " ... Behold I make all things new. Behold I do what cannot be done. I restore the years the moths and locusts have eaten. I restore the years which you have drooped away upon your crutches and in your wheelchair. I restore the symphonies and operas which your deaf ears have never heard, and the snowy massif your blind eyes have never seen, and the freedom lost to you through plunder, and the identity lost to you because of calumny and the failure of justice; and I restore the good which your own foolish mistakes have cheated you of ..."

The price we pay for letting our pain shut us off from joy and hope is a price, as Pascal told us, that we end up paying twice æ not a good wager. In contrast, Christian hope, grounded in a relationship with God, is why Saint Paul, who was no Pollyanna, when he wrote: "I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us."