suffering and God

What if God's goodness and God's love don't necessarily remove the cruelty and suffering and injustice and pain from the world?
What if they were never intended to?
What if goodness still exists even though life is hard and cruel, and even though people suffer?
What if God's goodness wasn't meant to take away the world's suffering, but was meant to provide a refuge in the midst of it?
If these realizations are true, then the only thing that God's goodness would eliminate was hoplessness.
Because if God is good, then there can always be hope... though there may continue to be pain and suffering and injustice and cruelty and heartbreak.

There is only this and nothing more-- God is good.

It does not mean that things in one's life will always be good...but that God is good.
It does not mean that one's life will be an easy one...but that God is good.
It does not mean that one's prayers will always be answered in the way that one would like...but that God is good.
It does not mean that tragedy may not visit one...but that God is good.
It does not mean that the human struggle is not difficult...but that God is good.
it does not mean that there will not always be suffering in the world...but that God is good.
It does not mean that there will not be times when one is so overcome by sadness at memories in life that you must go outside and find a place to be alone and cry...but that God is good.
It does not mean that there will not always be many who will deny His very existence because of the pain and seeming unfairness of life they see all around them...but that God is good.
It does not mean that there will not always be many questions for which we have no answers... but that God is good.

God's goodness is the larger truth over the whole, the largest truth overspreading all of life-- over cruelty, over suffering, over tragedy, over doubts and despair, over broken relationships, over sin itself.
Why that goodness doesn't eliminate such things, I don't know. Perhaps we shall ask him one day.
For some reason our tiny human minds cannot comprehend, God has allowed pain in his universe. You and I might have done it differently, but then, we are not God.
And as such, it is impossible for us to see all the way into the depths of the matter.
We therefore cannot perceive the many ways in which the very suffering we rail against may in fact contribute to the overall eternal benefit and growth of God's universe and its created beings.

We cannot see to the bottom of such things. So we foolish creatures look at the world's hurting and say God must not exist, or if he does he must not care, or must be a cruel God. Yet I suspect, that when we are one day able to see all the way into it, we will see that Goodness and Love lie at the root even of all the suffering that was ever borne by this fallen humanity of which we are part.
Therefore, hope must be the basis for our faith, not that God will give us a happy life.
For it is that God is good, loving, and trustworthy that are the deepest truths of the universe. These are the ingredients of the soil out which grows our salvation.

For indeed, it is not the cross that is the basis of our salvation, but rather, that the cross is evidence of our salvation.

Men and women are so prone to place limitations upon what God does, or can do, or might do, so that they can explain his ways and means to the satisfaction of their small intellects.
God's love and slavation are never limited by man's interpretations or by the boundaries man would place around the extent of their reach.