We wish for God to stop every evil. Life hurts too much. Our world is hurting too much. It feels like evil is winning. We know people who have been decimated because of evil—and don’t know what to say to them. We just want this evil to stop.

One day it will. This is promised. But in this messy middle, I challenge you to this brave thought.

Does the presence of evil provide meaning for our lives?

Meaning doesn’t come from a world without struggle—it comes from how we engage with the world, how we respond to what is broken, and how we choose to love in the midst of difficulty. We find meaning in those brave decisions that we make.

A life without challenge, grief, or injustice would remove the very soil in which bravery, compassion, and creativity grow. (Yes, creativity.) Safety alone is not enough to shape meaning.

Our human hearts are wired to wrestle with the questions of life: Who am I? Who do I want to become? What kind of love can I give? This is the journey of adolescent development. We are never off of this journey.

Wrestle with this big thought:

“I decide to believe in the strange truth of it:  You can say there is suffering only if you believe there is a God. If there is no God, there can’t be suffering, only life and the harsh reality of survival of the fittest. To believe there is suffering implies there is injustice. But if you believe there is no God, there can’t be any injustice; there can only be pain and the natural outcome of natural selection. But if you believe there truly is unjust suffering, if you believe that babies shouldn’t die and diagnoses shouldn’t devour dreams and violence shouldn’t violate hopes your very conscience is appealing to a higher moral law. How else do you explain the indignation over the wrongness of suffering, except that the indignation itself seems to explain that you know there is rightly supposed to be more?” –Ann Voskamp, Waymaker:  Finding the Way to the Life You’ve Always Dreamed Of, p. 129

So there is a God.

These questions become louder when we encounter brokenness. If every wrong were immediately corrected, we wouldn’t experience the holy tension that shapes us, even as it messes with our trust issues and our view of who God is. A world without holy tension might feel peaceful (we daydream about this), but it would also feel hollow.

Meaning often comes from responding, not from being protected from the need to respond.

God’s intention is not to abandon us to evil, but neither does God remove the consequences of human freedom before they happen. Life matters because our choices matter. When we act with kindness, pursue justice, or offer mercy in a hurting world, we participate in something larger than ourselves. These acts of love are meaningful precisely because they push against the brokenness around us.

The story of Jesus is the clearest example of meaning arising in the midst of suffering. God did not stop the world from rejecting, mocking, and killing Jesus, but God worked in and through those events to reveal redemption, restoration, and hope. If God had removed every evil before it touched Jesus or anyone else, the profound lessons of bravery, sacrifice, and love we hold onto would not exist. Meaning often grows in the holy tension between what is and what should be.

This is why lament is such a sacred part of our faith. Lament acknowledges that the world is not as it should be while still turning toward God, trusting that God’s love, justice, and faithfulness remain. If all evil were removed, lament—and the deep trust that grows through it—wouldn’t be necessary.

Part of the meaning of our lives is learning how to grieve well with time, how to make brave decisions, and how to bring hope where despair is real. This is uncomfortable. This shapes you.

Meaning comes not from a world without pain, but from living faithfully, bravely, and compassionately within it. A life without evil might be safe, but it would be a life without depth, without the opportunity to reflect God’s love in a world that desperately needs it. That’s why our choices, our faith, and our actions matter so profoundly. You matter.

I was talking to another mom who’s adopted daughter ran away and left the relationship with lots of hurtful words. Not only are her whereabouts causing anxiety and her absence causing sadness, those hurtful words are still felt. I said to her something like this,

“You and I know the painful truth. So many others see our stories of how we have bravely loved and raised broken children and think we are so admirable…so brave. But the reality is we never feel secure in what we are doing as we press in anyway–every time. Few give us space for our insecurity because we’ve chosen to love so bravely.”

I have found meaning. Not just in the raising of my boys. Sheesh, it all does hurt…and I am forever grateful.