By Leslie McCaddon 
I have spent most of my life in faith. Not circling it or analyzing it from a distance, but inside it—learning its language before I even realized I was learning it, shaping myself around it in ways that felt as natural as breathing. I was raised in Christian Science, which is a very particular kind of faith. It’s not really about “believing” in the way most people think. It’s about understanding. Aligning your thoughts with what is ultimately true about God and reality. If you can understand rightly, you can be well. If you can see clearly, healing follows. So we didn’t use medicine. Not because we didn’t care, and certainly not because we didn’t love each other deeply, but because we understood this to be the higher way. For a long time, it made sense. It felt ordered. It felt clean and coherent in a way that gave the world a perfect structure.
Until it didn’t.
My mom had a severe asthma attack—the kind where every breath is a fight, where panic rises because the body is no longer cooperating. I remember the fear of that moment more than anything else. The helplessness. The way everything we had relied on suddenly felt…insufficient. Then medicine saved her. Two weeks in the ICU saved her. Prayer had little to do with it–at least in the way I had been raised to understand prayer.
My faith broke. My certainty shattered. The lines between God and faith and religion blurred so completely that the safest thing for a time was to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
I spent the next decade searching for solid ground again. I found myself inside the Catholic church without being a part of it. I found myself learning I could have faith without certainty, belief without understanding, and suffering without striving for a solution.
By the time my child got cancer, I was many years removed from Christian Science, but I was still very much a person of faith. I still believed God was good. I still believed life had some kind of order to it, even if I couldn’t explain it. And then you hear the word cancer attached to your child, and there is no gentle transition into that reality. Life splits in two—before and after—and everything familiar suddenly feels fragile.
What I remember most is not theology, but the texture of those days: the hum of machines, the strange elasticity of time in hospital rooms, the way your mind keeps reaching for something stable and can’t quite find it. And underneath all of it, this quiet, persistent question rises: how is this allowed? Not in a philosophical way, but in the most human, maternal, bone-deep way. How is this allowed? I had already let go of the idea that understanding perfectly would keep suffering away, but I still believed suffering must fit somehow, that it must belong to something larger that would eventually make sense. But watching your child suffer doesn’t feel like something that belongs. It feels like something that shouldn’t exist at all. I couldn’t explain it. I didn’t want to explain it. I didn’t want a reason. I wanted it gone.
An ancient Portuguese nun and Fr. Bob showed up and simply told me to stop trying to solve the suffering. They offered me a portal to be a part of the church. To be in communion with the faith I was learning to live with. They offered me love and relationship. And from that day forward, I sought to believe from within a universal church of believers.
Years later, my husband died by suicide, and even now that sentence feels like it lands outside the structure of language, and far outside a life of faith. There is no way to make it sit neatly inside a story. He was here, and then he wasn’t, and everything shifted again. People showed up with kindness. They brought food, they sat with me, they tried to offer comfort in the ways they knew how. Everything happens for a reason. God will forgive him. You’ll understand someday. I know those words were meant to help, but they didn’t. They felt like a second layer of pain because they tried to make something devastating into something meaningful too quickly. And I remember thinking, with a kind of quiet clarity: No. If this has a reason, I don’t want it. If he’s let off the hook for the devastation he caused us, I don’t know what to do with that version of God. If God doesn’t forgive him, I don’t know what to do with that either. I couldn’t reconcile a God who permits that kind of loss, so I didn’t try. I let that version of God go—the controlling, explanatory God who assigns suffering and calls it good. What remained was something quieter, less defined, but more honest. A God I could not explain, but could still stay in relationship with. A messy, argumentative, but always ultimately safe, relationship.
There is a moment in Scripture when Jesus is standing at the tomb of Lazarus. He knows what is coming. He knows resurrection is moments away. And still, He weeps. He doesn’t rush past the grief. He doesn’t offer an explanation. He doesn’t correct anyone’s sorrow. He enters it. God is not standing outside of suffering explaining it, but stepping into it, feeling it, allowing it to be what it is. Not fixing first, not teaching first, but being present. That moment in Scripture has become my touchstone. The way I stay in communion, even though suffering doesn’t make sense. Because I think God was showing us through His Son that suffering doesn’t make sense. It is painful. And hard. And meant to be eradicated.
I understand why someone would walk away from God entirely. I really do. If faith requires everything to make sense, if it requires suffering to be justified, then there comes a point where that framework simply does not hold. But somewhere along the way, I stopped asking God to make suffering make sense. I stopped expecting an explanation that would resolve the tension. Instead, I began asking a different question: Where are you, God, in this? Not as a demand, not as a test, just as a quiet reaching.
I don’t always have a clear answer, but I notice things. I notice the people who show up and don’t try to fix anything, who sit beside me and say, “I’m here.” I notice moments of beauty that don’t erase the pain but somehow exist alongside it. I notice a kind of strength that rises when I think I have nothing left. There is a line in Scripture that says to weep with those who weep, and that feels true to me in a way so many other things do not. Not explain, not fix—just be with. Sometimes I feel God with me. Sometimes He sends me friends and strangers to make me feel less alone.
I am still in relationship with the Church. Not because I agree with everything—I don’t. There are places where I see it get things wrong, where I feel the tension between what is taught and what I know, in my bones, to be true about love and dignity. I don’t ignore that tension, and I don’t resolve it neatly. I hold it. Because for me, faith is no longer about perfect agreement. It is about a living, evolving, sometimes uncomfortable relationship that makes room for questions, for disagreement, for growth.
There is a prayer by a father in the Gospel that I come back to again and again: I believe; help my unbelief. It doesn’t resolve the tension or tie anything up neatly. It simply tells the truth. And that, I think, is where I live now—not in certainty, not in answers, but in honesty. I no longer believe that everything happens for a reason. I don’t think suffering needs to be justified in order to be survived. But I do believe that meaning can exist anyway, not because the suffering was necessary, but because love is still possible inside it. Because presence is still possible. Because we can still choose, again and again, to stay in relationship with a God we’re only beginning to know and understand from our feeble position in His vast creation.
My faith now is softer, less certain, and somehow stronger because of that. It has been shaped by real life—by cancer, by loss, by illness that does not resolve, by questions that do not get answers. It is no longer about understanding everything correctly or believing the right things in the right way. It is about staying in relationship. Still reaching. Still hoping. Still choosing, quietly and imperfectly, to remain open to God, even when I don’t understand. And for now, that is so much more to me than any alternative I’ve considered. Living a life without this imperfect relationship, means living a life without a foundation built on hope. Without hope, so much suffering would make it all seem so pointless. I wouldn’t get up in the morning. My husband’s choice to end his life would make sense. No, I’d rather that never make sense. I’d rather the hope of continuing to grow, of more opportunities to love and be loved, more rainbows, more snowcapped mountains, more crisp morning air, more creative accomplishments, more mountain-climbing highs, and cooing infants, and puppy kisses.
My relationship with the divine is what gives me hope. By choosing to accept—not understand—suffering, I find I can still believe that God is very, very, good.
by Jennifer Batchelor 
by Kelli Bachara 
