When my best friend died of breast cancer, and two years later, on the identical day, my dad died of a heart attack, a number of well-meaning people flooded me with Romans 8:28: “And we all know that in all things God works for the great of those that love him, who’ve been called in accordance with his purpose.”
As you may imagine, those beautiful words felt ugly and complex for my broken heart.
I’ve wrestled with this verse over time, especially as someone who has walked through various seasons of loss and disappointment. How can we hold onto the promise that God works all things for good when nothing feels good about our pain? How can we process this promise of scripture, truth without bypassing or invalidating the fact of suffering, or offering low cost or tone-deaf comfort to those that’ve borne loss?
Maybe the reply is not present in rushing to elucidate away tragedy, but in trying to grasp what the apostle Paul meant when he penned these words.
Paul writes these words in the course of a chapter dedicated to the fact of suffering, and from the place of his own pain. He acknowledges that “the entire creation has been groaning as within the pains of childbirth” (v. 22) and that we ourselves “groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship” (v. 23). So, though it’s often misused in conversation, this is not a verse about bypassing pain—it’s about finding our foundation, our hope, our purpose inside it.
Paul knew suffering intimately. He’d been beaten, imprisoned, shipwrecked, and persecuted. When he wrote about God working all things for good, he wasn’t speaking from a spot of naivete but from a deep understanding of what it means to harm and yet hold on for dear life to the gospel.
The verse that follows is crucial: “For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son” (v. 29). In other words, the “good” that God works all things toward is not necessarily our safety, our happiness, and even our earthly success. It’s about our transformation into the likeness of Jesus—a process that so often involves the very suffering we would like to avoid.
What Does Good Actually Mean?
We need to learn to redefine our understanding and perspective of “good.” Good, biblically, is God’s version of excellent, which shouldn’t be normally similar to our human understanding of what is good. It’s the sort of good that transforms, breaks chains, and offers us resilience. It’s an everlasting, supernatural good. It’s a peace that passes all understanding, a shalom, a way of full justice. It’s a superb that glorifies God and shapes our souls into the likeness of Jesus.
We need to be so careful once we consider this because when God is working all things for good, this does not imply God causes tragedy or that suffering itself is inherently good—it implies that God is so able, and so committed to our ultimate flourishing that He can take even the worst things and weave them into His redemptive purposes.
In other words, God’s good is more mysterious, explosive, and glorious than we could ever ask or imagine.
Think about Jesus himself. The cross was tragic, brutal, and seemingly senseless. Yet God worked even that ultimate tragedy for the last word good—our forgiveness, our freedom, our future. The resurrection didn’t erase the horror of the crucifixion; it transformed it into something redemptive, for eternity.
Dealing with Loss
When processing any sort of pain, we must learn to accomplish that without rushing to make sense of it. Meaning will are available in time. And making meaning in pain is an element of what makes us human. But once we’re within the midst of tragedy, the final thing we want is someone explaining how this may all work out for good. In those moments, we want presence, not platitudes. We need lament, not lessons. Job’s friends got in trouble not because they got here to comfort him, but because they couldn’t sit in silence together with his pain. They couldn’t just let him grieve without attempting to “fix” it.
There’s a season for weeping, and that season shouldn’t be the season for citing Romans 8:28 to the hurting. Sometimes probably the most faithful response to tragedy is to rage against it, to mourn deeply, and to cry out to God in our confusion and hurt. The Psalms are stuffed with this type of honest, raw emotion. David didn’t hesitate to inform God exactly how he felt, even when those feelings weren’t pretty or theologically tidy.
Part of my work, writing, and ministry over time has been to provide myself and others permission to feel the total weight of loss without immediately jumping to spiritual explanations. Grief is sacred work, and it may possibly’t be rushed or bypassed with Bible verses, regardless of how true they is perhaps. God is within the slow work of grief.
Sovereignty, Community, and Long-Suffering
Romans 8:28 also confronts us with the mystery of God’s sovereignty. We live in a world where terrible things occur to good people, where prayers appear to go unanswered, and where God’s purposes aren’t all the time clear. This verse doesn’t resolve that tension—it asks us to trust inside it.
The phrase “we all know” in Romans 8:28 matters. Paul didn’t say, “We understand” or “We can guess.” But we all know. This is a deep, settled confidence—and assurance, a trust—that transcends our circumstances. This is the sort of data that comes from a relationship and intimacy with God. This is what faith looks like within the midst of tragedy—not having all of the answers but having confidence within the character of the One who does. Or admitting you don’t have the arrogance, but you might be crying out to God anyway.
Perhaps crucial thing we are able to remind ourselves about Romans 8:28 is that it’s about redemption, not explanation. God never promised to elucidate why bad things occur (I wish he did!). Instead, he guarantees to work inside them for our good. He guarantees to never leave us alone in our tragedies.
I actually have a friend, a widower who lost his wife in a tragedy, who now ministers to other widowers with unprecedented compassion. I do know a lady who struggled for years with shame from insecurity, and now leads others to freedom. I walk closely with a pair who lost a toddler and began a foundation that has helped a whole lot of families. These aren’t examples of God causing tragedy for good outcomes—they’re examples of God redeeming tragedy for good outcomes.
The difference matters. One makes God the writer of evil; the opposite makes Him the redeemer of it.
As followers of Jesus, we’re called to live in the stress between what we are able to see and what we consider, between our current pain and our everlasting hope. Romans 8:28 doesn’t eliminate this tension—it gives us a framework for living inside it.
This means we are able to mourn deeply while still trusting deeply. We can rage against injustice while still believing in God’s ultimate justice. We can feel overwhelmed by our circumstances while still holding onto the promise that God is working inside them.
Another truth that’s helpful for us to recollect in our suffering: we don’t need to do it alone. One of probably the most profound ways God works all things for good is thru the community of believers who’ve walked through similar valleys. When we suffer, we’re not only experiencing personal pain—we’re being invited right into a fellowship of suffering that connects us to others who understand.
This is an element of what Paul means when he writes about being “comforted in all our troubles, in order that we are able to comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God” (2 Corinthians 1:4). Our suffering can turn out to be a source of ministry, our wounds a source of healing for others.
Romans 8:28 also teaches us about God’s patience with His own timeline. The “good” that God works all things toward is not all the time immediate or obvious. Sometimes we must wait years, even many years, to see how God has woven our pain into His larger story.
Consider Joseph, who spent years in slavery and prison before understanding how God was working his brothers’ betrayal for the great of preserving many lives during famine. He couldn’t see it while he was within the pit or the prison, but God was working even then.
This requires a unique sort of faith—not the religion that demands immediate resolution, but the religion that trusts God’s timing even when it doesn’t match our own. It’s the religion that claims, “I could not see how this works for good in my lifetime, but I trust that God sees what I cannot see.”
Perhaps most remarkably, Romans 8:28 suggests that God doesn’t work all things for good despite us, but with us. We’re not passive observers of God’s redemptive work—we’re invited to take part in it. Our decisions, our responses, our faithfulness within the midst of pain all turn out to be a part of how God works all things for good.
When tragedy strikes, we need not rush to search out the silver lining or to elucidate God’s purposes. We have to grieve, to cry out, to feel the total weight of our loss. But we also have to keep in mind that our pain shouldn’t be the top of the story. God continues to be writing, still working, still weaving even our deepest hurts into redemption, into beauty.
That’s not cliché or trite hope—it’s costly. It’s a hope that was purchased with the blood of the One who suffered most deeply, who understands our pain most intimately, and who guarantees to work even our darkest moments for good.
Friend, He is with you today should you are hurting. He sees you. He shouldn’t be afraid of your pain. And he’s, in some way, doing something beautiful in it.
Photo Credit: © Getty Images/AntonioGuillem
