God is Good (& Why I Talk About Despair)

All the time, God is good.

I realize that when I tell you about my suffering, it could sound like a contradiction to this statement, like a complaint. It can sound like a request for you to make it better. However, when I tell you about the anguish that assaults me, I am not looking for your sympathy or tips on how to feel better. My suffering is not the point. I want to share what I've learned. I want to testify about the goodness of God, and I want you to listen.

There are places I've been that you haven't, just as you've walked paths I cannot follow. There are secrets and hidden compartments in my heart that have held me in agony, and there are words and experiences that have changed everything. People you've never met have molded my outlook, and I struggle to reclaim my perspective. Relational hurt and psychological pain have colored the world I see, but those are not the entirety I want to share with you.

What I want to get across is that God is good. That He is love Himself and Light for the world. The thing is, this declaration lands differently depending on who says it. Maybe one person is wealthy and in good health, has a circle of caring friends and family, and lives a life of relative ease. This person has much to praise God for. The next person has been beaten and bruised, is far from family and friend, and has no tangible hope. This individual does not have the same reasons for praise, and should they make the same declaration as the first person, we would give greater pause.

Likewise, I have seen my reasons for gratitude dwindle. Financially insecure and jobless, daily fatigued by hypersomnia, isolated by shame, and assaulted by suicidal delusions, I have cried out to know where God was hiding. What does His goodness look like when nothing in my life is going right? Is it my fault? Is He not blessing me because I don't have enough faith? Am I abandoned?

But that is where He meets me. When I have nothing left, on the brink of death—when every comfort has fled, when I look on every loved one with self-impaling shame, when I feel like a black hole of evil and madness—He meets me. Not in a powerful moment of deliverance. Not with rationale and explanations. Not even with words of affirmation. He meets me with a question, a challenge: will you live for Me? With this question, He bestows on me something worth more than all riches, health, and relationships combined: life.

It's a life of belovedness, of purpose, of kindness and meekness and power, of wonder, of great adventure, of Light and clarity, of mystery, of an infinitude of joys birthed from every sorrow, of courage, and of hope. Offer me a trillion dollars and I'd laugh. Nothing could tempt me away.

What about pain, you ask? Yes, pain can try to pressure me away, but it will not succeed. It might push me to the edge, to the brink of sacrificing this life for a moment of comfort, but I have answered God's question. I have vowed to live for Him, and He has affirmed this covenant. He has taken the penalty should I fail. I am His. In life, in death, I'm His.

That is what I mean when I tell you that God is good. I hope you see the context of my struggle lends deeper significance to this declaration. When I tell you I have suffered, what I'm trying to tell you is that God is good and that He will never leave me.