God is not limited to suffering
If you thought Emily Dickinson was flippant about what life brings, then you should go and read what Jennie Baddeley has to say on the EQUIP book club today. We are currently working through James in my community group, and one of the questions a couple of others and I discussed as we looked at Chapter 1 was 'are trials necessary to make us mature or complete — or the only way we can become mature and complete?'. Jenny answers that nicely. Here's a snippet (the second sentence of the first paragraph is well worth reading if you're feeling like you must have needed a lot more work than the next person):
It is true that we can know God more through suffering; but it is also true that we can know God more through the enjoyable and extraordinary things he brings into our lives as well. God is not limited to suffering, even as he is not limited by suffering — and knowing both that God can make suffering serve his good purposes and that God isn‘t required to make us suffer can be very liberating.
What Romans 8 tells us is that in our suffering we can know God has a big overarching purpose — we do not suffer accidental, random pain — and that this suffering can’t compare with the future he is determined to bring us to. God works for our good — through the enjoyable and the painful — and he works to bring us home to himself, despite all the things we meet in life which are so much bigger than we are. We are not given an answer to suffering as though ‘all things work together for good’ is meant to explain why Christians suffer. God gives us something better: he gives us a reason to trust him.