Why Does Life Hurt So Much?

We had to put our cat, Hazel, down on Wednesday, November 5, 2025. And it’s been messing with my heart and mind ever since. I recently read CS Lewis’s The Problem of Pain, and he writes, “The problem of animal pain is appalling … because the Christian explanation of human pain cannot be extended to animal pain.”¹

Call me a monster, but I’m not convinced that ending an animal’s pain is the answer to the problem of animal pain. Unless—that is—the death of a beloved pet is the planting of a seed for their future resurrection.

But I’ll come back to Hazel (and Combo and Frankie and Sassy)² in a bit. This post wasn’t originally meant to be focused on animals, but given my current life situation, I think I can glean something from animals that I can apply to human suffering.³

I can’t get the age-old question out of my mind: “If God is all good and all powerful, why do bad things happen to good⁴ people?”

Some background might be helpful.

My Theodicy

I had a stroke when I was two. Even at that age I knew I wanted to be a professional baseball player. But the stroke made it impossible for me to close a glove worn on my left hand and made me throw laughably with my left hand. And as a ten-year-old aspiring pitcher, I needed quicker catching reflexes if I was to make it in that pursuit.

However, I grew up in church. So I knew all the Bible stories of God healing people. I knew that if I prayed with faith, God would heal me. But he didn’t. So around the time I quit on my dream of baseball, I also gave up praying.

I was homeschooled from kindergarten through eighth grade, and I went to a Christian school for high school. It was my senior year that I first heard the argument, “If God is all good and all powerful, why do bad things happen to good people?” and I ate it up. I declared myself an atheist and decided the Bible was the biggest load of garbage.

Why?

Well, if the Bible is true, why does it describe Jesus healing people when he never healed me? I truly believed he could have, so the fact that he didn’t could only mean the Bible wasn’t true. Right?

Sure… If you don’t know what the Bible is. But that’s part of the problem with modern Christianity. I’ve been to seminary—have a Master’s degree in Biblical Studies—and I still have yet to take a class on “What is the Bible?”⁵ It’s especially troublesome because secular universities offer courses on “The Bible as Literature.”

A couple months after I declared myself an atheist, I was at a summer camp where two Scripture passages combined to completely change my mind:

If anyone does not remain in Me, he is thrown aside like a branch and he withers. They gather them, throw them into the fire, and they are burned.

John 15:6, HCSB

The Lord spoke to Manasseh and his people, but they didn’t listen. So He brought against them the military commanders of the king of Assyria. They captured Manasseh with hooks, bound him with bronze shackles, and took him to Babylon. When he was in distress, he sought the favor of Yahweh his God and earnestly humbled himself before the God of his ancestors. He prayed to Him, so He heard his petition and granted his request, and brought him back to Jerusalem, to his kingdom. So Manasseh came to know that Yahweh is God.

2 Chronicles 33:10–13, HCSB

As a result, I longed to know the Bible as well as I could. I’d always been really good at Scripture memorization, but I wanted to understand it in the original languages, the original context, etc. I wanted to know it.

So I went to Bible college. I went to seminary. I majored in Biblical Studies. I wrote a thesis on New Testament use of the Old Testament.

But I still struggle with the question that opened this post: If God is all good and all powerful, why do bad things happen to good people? And if you’re honest with yourself, you probably wrestle with this too. Perhaps it’s the very reason why you’ve chosen atheism or agnosticism instead of faith.

This is an Important Question

The best pastor I’ve ever had the privilege of sitting under used to encourage his church to get their doctrine of suffering down before they entered a period of suffering. In a perfect world, I would have to agree with him. Unfortunately, I’ve been dealing with “bad things” since I was two (I doubt I’m the only one), and it would be a contradiction for a non-believer to have a Christian perspective on suffering.⁶ So it’s often not possible to figure out why suffering happens before you go through suffering.

However, if you can get a satisfactory answer to this question before you experience deep pain, I highly recommend it. I seek to offer an answer here, but even CS Lewis offered an answer in 1940 (The Problem of Pain), and still asked, after the death of his wife in 1961: “What reason have we, except by our own desperate wishes, to believe that God is, by any standard we can conceive, ‘good’?”⁷

Because Lewis struggled so much with his own explanation of suffering in the midst of his own suffering, I think it’s worth it to wrestle with his explanation in coming to our own conclusion.

CS Lewis on the Problem of Evil

Lewis starts by admitting that the Problem of Evil is created by Christianity. “In a sense, it creates, rather than solves, the problem of pain, for pain would be no problem unless, side by side with our daily experience of this painful world, we had received what we think a good assurance that ultimate reality is righteous and loving.”⁸ This leads directly into the discussion of God being all-powerful and perfectly good.

While discussing God’s power, Lewis discusses free will. He uses the illustration of a chess game to show why God doesn’t generally override our choices:

In a game of chess, you can make arbitrary concessions to your opponent, which stand to the ordinary rules of the game as miracles stand to the laws of nature. You can deprive yourself of a castle, or allow the other man sometimes to take back a move made inadvertently. But if you conceded everything that at any moment happened to suit him—if all his moves were revocable and if all your pieces disappeared whenever their position on the board were not to his liking—then you could not have a game at all. So it is with the life of souls in a world: fixed laws, consequences unfolding by causal necessity, the whole natural order, are at once limits within which their common life is confined and also the sole condition under which any such life is possible. Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free wills involve, and you will find that you have excluded life itself.⁹

And then he discusses God’s goodness. And this is where I start to struggle with his explanation, because he clarifies the difference between love and kindness:

Kindness, merely as such, cares not whether its object becomes good or bad, provided only that it escapes suffering. As Scripture¹⁰ points out, it is bastards who are spoiled: the legitimate sons, who are to carry on the family tradition, are punished. It is for people whom we care nothing about that we demand happiness on any terms: with our friends, our lovers, our children, we are exacting and would rather see them suffer much than be happy in contemptible and estranging modes. If God is Love, He is, by definition, something more than mere kindness.¹¹

In other words, in order for Lewis to make sense of suffering, he must explain God’s goodness as a source of suffering. Just like we—supposedly—love our children enough to make them “suffer much,” God does too. For instance, he goes on to write: “I do not think I should value much the love of a friend who cared only for my happiness and did not object to my becoming dishonest.”¹²

He turns, in chapter 4, to discuss human wickedness. He introduces the chapter with these words: “Love may cause pain to its object, but only on the supposition that that object needs alteration to become fully lovable.”¹³ And he concludes the chapter by writing, “I have been trying to make the reader believe that we actually are, at present, creatures whose character must be, in some respects, a horror to God, as it is, when we really see it, a horror to ourselves.”¹⁴

In the next chapter, he discusses the Fall of Man, and how we brought suffering on ourselves.¹⁵ He concludes the chapter by noting that “good, to us in our present state, must therefore mean primarily remedial or corrective good.”¹⁶ Lest we think that all pain is a result of God “fixing” us, Lewis begins the next chapter by noting, “When souls become wicked they will certainly use this possibility to hurt one another; and this, perhaps, accounts for four-fifths of the sufferings of men.”¹⁷

So essentially, according to Lewis, Christianity creates this paradox, but when we understand that love isn’t incompatible with pain, we understand that this is how God forms our souls to love him and choose him and avoid eternal suffering. Because we are “unlovable,” God uses pain to shape us into lovable creatures (though four-fifths of our pain is just a consequence of living in a fallen world with free agents who use their freedom for evil.)

I have more to say about Lewis’s explanation, but I will sprinkle those as necessary throughout the remainder of this article. His basic model has been presented above. (If you think I have misrepresented/misunderstood Lewis’s position here, please leave a comment explaining what I’ve missed.)

Where I Struggle With Lewis

Lewis builds his whole model on a doctrine of love that seems to be foreign to scripture. (I plan on writing much more extensively on love soon, so I won’t say everything here; some of this might come back up there—Lewis’s book certainly will.)

For instance, Lewis says that we’re “unlovable.” The Bible says something similar, but also incredibly different:

But God proves His own love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us! … For if, while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, then how much more, having been reconciled, will we be saved by His life!

Romans 5:8, 10, HCSB

To call us “unlovable” is for Lewis to contradict himself as it relates to the doctrine of Total Depravity.¹⁸ In fact, two other texts also say the same as Romans 5, as it relates to God’s love:

For God loved the world in this way: He gave His One and Only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him will not perish but have eternal life.

John 3:16, HCSB

This is how we have come to know love: He laid down His life for us. We should also lay down our lives for our brothers.

1 John 3:16, HCSB

In all of these definitions of love, we see the lover opening himself to the possibility of being harmed. We don’t see him causing harm to the one he loves. (Obviously, this gets a bit more complicated within the Trinity, but that can be a discussion for another time.) In fact, when we look at 1 Corinthians 13:4, we read: “love is kind.” So kindness is part of who God is.

If “God is love” (1 John 4:8), and “love is kind,” then it follows naturally that “God is kind.” And if we follow Lewis’s definition of kindness, then it follows that God “desires to see others than the self happy; not happy in this way or in that, but just happy.”¹⁹

So Lewis’s whole argument falls flat because it is based on a faulty premise.

Weighing Two Solutions

If God is love, and if love is kind, and if kindness desires to see others happy, then why does God not stop suffering?

There seem to be two possibilities:

Either God is not all-powerful, and he actually can’t stop suffering.
Or God desires us to achieve maximum happiness, and suffering is necessary for this.

Is God not All-Powerful?

Obviously, this possibility sounds heretical to even consider. But it is an important question to ask, if only to demonstrate why it can’t be the right answer.

But here’s why we must consider this possibility. Paul talks about the foolishness of the Cross (1 Corinthians 1:18–31). As CS Lewis’s allegorical description of the cross in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe describes, the cross caused Satan to think he had defeated God, but in reality it sealed his own doom.²⁰ Could it not be possible that God had to take this approach because he knew that he was not powerful enough to win in all-out warfare?

Paul writes “God’s weakness is stronger than human strength” (1 Corinthians 1:25, HCSB). While we often explain this as “even God’s weakest point is stronger than the strongest human,” it could just as easily be understood as “God’s weakness, and how he uses it (in wisdom) is stronger than human strength.” And perhaps this is why the Bible makes such a huge deal about the wisdom of God (especially in this section of 1 Corinthians).²¹

The pro of this position is that it means that God did not actively strike me with a stroke, but neither did he sit by and allow it to happen when he could have stopped it. And whatever your pain or struggle is—the same would hold for you as well. God didn’t do it to you or decide not to stop it for some mysterious reason. And one of the big problems with Lewis’s explanation of love as seeking to fix us is that it really does leave open the possibility that God is up in heaven just hitting people with maladies in the name of “fixing them.”

However, there is a glaring problem with the idea that God is not all-powerful. The Bible portrays God as Creator (Genesis 1:1; Isaiah 40:28; Hebrews 11:3). As Creator, he set up the rules of the universe and ultimately must be the most powerful being in existence.

Allow me to explain.

As an author, I control all the characters in my story. They cannot do anything without my permission. And I can do whatever I want to them, give them whatever traumatic backstories I want, or kill them off whenever I want. While this illustration can be used to justify the view that God actively makes people suffer, Lewis is spot on when he writes, “To make things which are not Itself, and thus to become, in a sense, capable of being resisted by its own handiwork, is the most astonishing and unimaginable of all the feats we attribute to the Deity.”²²

So while God does not usually overpower his creatures’ free will, he could. He could stop all suffering and evil with a snap of his fingers. But—even if we’re not “unlovable”—we do all contain a certain amount of evil within ourselves, so at what point would the evil that God snaps his fingers to eradicate stop? With natural disasters? With sicknesses? With your enemies? Or would it eradicate you as well?

So discounting God’s omnipotence is not the solution.

Does God Want More for Us?

If God is omnipotent, then God must have a reason for allowing us to suffer. And I believe I glimpsed this as I was bawling my eyes out about Hazel on November 7, 2025. It just so happened that I was putting my daughter to sleep and playing music in the process. The song that got me was “Saturn,” by Sleeping At Last (lyrics start, and my tears, at 2:25).

You taught me the courage of stars before you left
How light carries on endlessly, even after death
With shortness of breath
You explained the infinite
How rare and beautiful it is to even exist

As soon as the first line started, I was transported back to the vet’s office two days prior, where, as we were trying to say our goodbyes to Hazel, she was trying to jump off the table (courage). She wasn’t ready to leave. And it’s a memory that continues “even after death.”

And even though Lewis believes animal pain is a separate issue from human pain, I believe that putting Hazel down helped explain the infinite (God) to me. I disagree with Lewis’s contention that “We have all met people whose kindness to animals is constantly leading them to kill animals lest they should suffer.”²³ Hazel can’t be happy if she’s dead, and Lewis argued that kindness seeks the other’s happiness. If I could do it over again, I would pay more money for surgery.

Similarly—but in an infinitely more knowledgeable way—God views us. If I’m this torn up over a cat, how torn up is God over the pain of the creation he made? Billions of people and trillions of animals that he had initially declared “Very good.” But this good creation has been wracked by sin and evil. It’s a shadow of what it was created to be. And this is where Lewis declares:

We can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.²⁴

I believe that what God shouts in our pain is “It is not good! It is not good!” Part of this is due to the reality that God entered our world as a human and experienced pain himself. So even if he was somehow unaware of the reality of humanity’s pain prior to the Incarnation—he is no longer unaware of it.

But that’s the amazing thing about our God. He never expects more of us than he is willing to do himself. Life sucks and it is hard? Jesus (God) lived life just like we do. He stepped into our shoes and saw exactly what it is like, day-in and day-out. (This is why the anti-empathy Christians really don’t have a theological leg to stand on; if Christ is our example, we should do all we can to feel what others feel and treat them accordingly.)

Lewis discusses this very topic in his book. He talks about the difference between pain and other evils, noting that “pain has no tendency, in its own right, to proliferate.”²⁵ He explains further:

When I err, my error infects everyone who believes me. When I sin publicly, every spectator either condones it, thus sharing my guilt, or condemns it with imminent danger to his charity and humility. But suffering naturally produces in the spectators (unless they are unusually depraved) no bad effect, but a good one—pity. Thus that evil which God chiefly uses to produce the ‘complex good’ is most markedly disinfected, or deprived of that proliferous tendency which is the worst characteristic of evil in general.²⁶

Now, as I quote that, I can’t remove the aphorism from my mind that “hurt people hurt people.” But beyond that—and keeping in mind that the aphorism refers more to people who were sinned against than to generic suffering like my stroke, health crises, or natural disasters—I believe Lewis is spot on here. And I believe he might have inadvertently hit the nail on the head for why we suffer.

Before diving into that, though, there’s another Lewis quote that will help guide our thinking on this topic:

If we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.²⁷

This quote brings to mind an Augustine quote as well: “Thou hast made us for Thee and our heart is unquiet till it finds its rest in Thee.”²⁸

When we put together the realities that 1) pain should produce pity in onlookers; 2) God whispers in pleasure but shouts in pain; and 3) we are far too easily pleased, it makes sense that we suffer because God wants more from us. And what he wants for us is what Augustine mentioned—a heart content and at rest in him.

I hesitate to write this next sentence, because I don’t want you to hear me discounting your pain. But if our hearts were fully content in God, suffering wouldn’t get to us as much as it does. It sounds almost Buddhist, but I think it’s just a practical outworking of Philippians 4:13 (understood in context with verses 11–14). If we are content in God, trusting him that he is in complete control, working everything for good, then we needn’t go through a faith crisis every time we suffer.

This is not to downplay your pain. Your sorrow. Your loss. Your grief. Your anger. Repressing these feelings is actually psychologically harmful. God doesn’t want us to deny the pain we experience.  But when we suffer, it should remind us that we need the hope of the gospel: Jesus is restoring all things. And they have not been fully restored yet.

This is not something to preach at others going through suffering, but it’s for our benefit. It’s an invitation for us to enter someone else’s restoration process.

You see, when we remember that “we are as he is in the world” (1 John 4:17), and that seeing suffering should produce pity in us, we are given a huge opportunity to help others experience God by coming alongside them in their moments of pain. But when we do this, we must not incarnate Job’s friends by theologizing about why or rushing their healing process. This is not helpful, and God rebuked Job’s friends for doing it (Job 42:7–9).

What if God shouts at us in our pain, not in a tone-sense, but in a volume-sense? When others come alongside us, incarnating God’s comfort and presence to us out of pity for us, we feel more firmly than any other time that God loves us and cares for us (2 Corinthians 1:3–7). Perhaps it also intimately reminds us that he truly is all we need.

A Final Disagreement with Lewis

Perhaps you’re wondering how paying to euthanize a cat explained the infinite God to me. Valid.

It might help for you to know that I started wondering, “If it’s loving to put down a cat who is suffering, why hasn’t God done the loving thing to me yet?”

And this is why that song, and my final memory of Hazel, hit me so hard. We’ve been taught that death is the end for animals, whereas for us, our last breath makes our whole life look like a breath in the face of the eternity that follows. We’ve been trained to think—whether rightly or wrongly—that in the ultimate scheme of God’s plan of salvation animals don’t matter.

Lewis sort of leans this way in his chapter on animal pain. He writes, “We must never allow the problem of animal suffering to become the centre of the problem of pain; not because it is unimportant—whatever furnishes plausible grounds for questioning the goodness of God is very important indeed—but because it is outside the range of our knowledge.”²⁹

I don’t think I’ve posited Hazel as central to the problem of pain, but I do think that animals play a crucial role in informing our understanding of this problem. Just like animal pain is “outside the range of our knowledge,” we need to admit that human pain is too. We have no certain knowledge of why we suffer, so should we stop asking this question? By no means! But a satisfactory answer to suffering will encompass all forms of suffering—animal and human, natural and perpetrated.

I believe there’s more than this life. I choose to believe this for our beloved pets as well. Our pets can help make us better people—they can encourage us to seek the Lord and empathize. And if we can have this much empathy toward an animal, why don’t we have the same empathy—or exponentially more—for humans made in the image of God? The solution isn’t to start mistreating animals. The answer is to truly incarnate God to the suffering souls we come across.

Conclusion

God is love. And he has proven his love to us on the cross.

We don’t suffer so that we can be made more loveable. As it says in John 15:13, there is no greater love than to lay down your life for someone else. So we can’t be more loveable to God than he has already shown that we are.

We suffer to draw our mind off this world. We suffer to reorient ourselves to God. We suffer to grow in empathy for others who suffer. We suffer to remind us of our God who did not consider suffering beneath him.

God doesn’t ask more of us than he is willing to do himself.

Who do you need to come alongside in their suffering today?

In this with you.

Thanks for reading.

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Notes and References

1. CS Lewis, The Problem of Pain (New York: HarperOne, 2001), 132. ↩︎
2. The post will only mention Hazel, but the featured image on this post includes Frankie and Combo as well. My thoughts about Hazel extend to these beloved cats as well. ↩︎
3. I say this despite Lewis writing, “We must never allow the problem of animal suffering to become the centre of the problem of pain; not because it is unimportant—whatever furnishes plausible grounds for questioning the goodness of God is very important indeed—but because it is outside the range of our knowledge” (Problem, 132–133). ↩︎
4. Now, I know that some of my readers will instantly push back. “There are no good people. Haven’t you read Romans 3:10–18?”
   I get it. It’s for that reason I hesitated to include the last three words of the popular question. However, I decided to include it anyways, because a quick look at the Greek reveals that Paul didn’t write “there is no one good.” He wrote, “There is no one kind,” but obviously that can’t include Christians when one of the fruits of the Spirit is kindness. And since many non-Christians demonstrate more kindness than lots of Christians, I think Paul was simply citing a Psalm that was never meant to bear the weight of a whole doctrine of sin. ↩︎
5. Sure, we know what 2 Timothy 3:16 and Isaiah 40:8 say, but these are not talking about the Bible as we have it today. But this is a conversation for another time. ↩︎
6. See the 2:15 mark in his sermon. ↩︎
7. CS Lewis, A Grief Observed (New York: HarperOne, 1994), 29. ↩︎
8. Lewis, Problem, 14. ↩︎
9. Ibid., 25. ↩︎
10. “But if you are without discipline—which all receive —then you are illegitimate children and not sons” (Hebrews 12:8, HCSB). ↩︎
11. Lewis, Problem, 32–33. ↩︎
12. Ibid., 42. It seems flippant to equate tangible, physical suffering with being confronted about dishonesty. ↩︎
13. Ibid., 48. ↩︎
14. Ibid., 62. ↩︎
15. Ibid., 63. ↩︎
16. Ibid., 85. ↩︎
17. Ibid., 86. ↩︎
18. See Ibid., 61–62. ↩︎
19. Ibid., 31. ↩︎
20. See conversations concerning “the Deep Magic” in CS Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (London: HarperCollins, 2010), 128–129, 140–141, 148, especially the Witch’s claim on p. 140–141: “And now, who has won? Fool, did you think that by all this you would save the human traitor? Now I will kill you instead of him as our pact was and so the Deep Magic will be appeased. But when you are dead what will prevent me from killing him as well? And who will take him out of my hand then? Understand that you have given me Narnia forever, you have lost your own life and you have not saved his. In that knowledge, despair and die” (Emphasis in original). ↩︎
21. See discussion in Anthony C Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, NIGTC (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000), 172–175. He specifically notes that there is a difference between “the world of human values, … [and] the world of effective reality summed up in Paul’s use of the word δύναμις, power” (174). ↩︎
22. Lewis, Problem, 130. ↩︎
23. Ibid., 32. ↩︎
24. Ibid., 91. ↩︎
25. Lewis, Problem, 117. ↩︎
26. Ibid., 117–118. Emphasis added. ↩︎
27. CS Lewis, The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (New York: Macmillan, 1949), 1–2. Emphasis added. ↩︎
28. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, ed. Roy Joseph Deferrari, trans. Vernon J. Bourke, FC (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1953), 4. ↩︎
29. Lewis, Problem, 132–133. ↩︎