You do not ask this question in a classroom. You ask it in a waiting room. You ask it after the test results, after the empty chair at the table, after the night you cried so hard you forgot about it by morning. And the words coming out of your mouth are “why,” but the thing underneath the words is older and simpler. You are asking if anyone is there.
Here is the answer a Jude 3 Project panel kept circling, and it is not the one most people expect. God is present in your suffering, not watching it from a safe distance. He sees the tears. He enters the wilderness. And, more often than not, he has already placed what you need there before you arrived. The question on the table is not whether he is there. It is whether you can see the well he prepared.
That answer came from three voices at once. Priscilla Shirer, Dr. Cynthia James and Lisa Fields, founder of the Jude 3 Project, each took a different door into the same room, and what they found inside agreed.
Why Does God Feel Absent Right When I Need Him Most?
Let the question keep its weight. When the pain is real, the silence feels like a verdict. If God is good, he would care that I am hurting. If he is powerful, he could do something. He has not. So either he is not good, or not powerful, or not paying attention. A lot of people leave their faith standing right here, and you cannot blame them for the math.
But notice the hidden move in that math. It assumes that if you cannot see God working, he must not be. The panel pushed back on exactly that assumption, not with a clever argument but with a story. When Shirer opened Genesis 21, she was not building a case. She was pointing at a woman.
Does God Actually Do Anything When I’m Suffering?
Hagar had been used, discarded and left in a desert with a dying child. She was not weeping quietly. The text says she lifted up her voice and wept, and God heard the voice of the boy (Genesis 21:16–17). What strikes Shirer is what God did not do. He did not rebuke her tears. He did not tell her to pull herself together. He entered her experience, and then he opened her eyes to a well of water that had been there the whole time:
“And God opened her eyes, and she saw a well of water; and she went, and filled the bottle with water, and gave the lad drink” (Genesis 21:19).
That last detail is the hinge. God did not magic a well into the sand the moment she cried. The well was already there. He had placed it before she ever stumbled into that wilderness, knowing she would need it. Shirer reads that as a direct word for anyone walking through a diagnosis, a loss, a grief right now. The provision was planned before the pain showed up.
God’s sovereignty is so complete that he’s got wells of water in those wilderness experiences, that he sat there well before I even arrived, knowing that I would need those to sustain me and refresh me even as I walked through it.
— Priscilla Shirer
So the honest answer to “does God do anything” is yes, but not always the thing you are watching for. You are scanning the sky for rescue. The water may already be at your feet.
Do I Have to Go Through Suffering Alone?
No, and Dr. Cynthia James found the proof in a brutal story most people skip. Jephthah’s daughter, in Judges 11, is handed an unbearable sentence through no fault of her own. She does one remarkable thing before the end. She gathers her friends (Judges 11:37–38). She refuses to suffer in isolation. James sees in those unnamed companions an Old Testament picture of the Holy Spirit, a presence that does not always speak but simply stays.
“I don’t have to suffer alone. There are people I can invite into that space of pain, that space of dire desperation,” James said. That is not a soft suggestion to find a support group. It is a claim about how God designed us to carry weight. The instinct to crawl off alone when life caves in is the instinct to fight, and it is exactly backward.
Fields added a smaller, sharper image. God bottles our tears: “Put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book?” (Psalm 56:8). He knows about the nights you cried yourself to sleep and forgot by morning. Grief is not invisible to him, and nothing you have wept over slipped past his notice. James pulled the two pictures together. What if the tears Hagar and her son cried became part of the very stream that led her to the well? You do not have to shut your grief off to find refreshment. The weeping and the water are connected.
Why Won’t God Just Explain Why This Happened?
Because an explanation was never the thing that would heal you. This is where the panel’s answer lines up with other Jude 3 Project voices who have stood in the same place.
Dr. Robert Smith Jr. puts it as bluntly as anyone: “If I know who, I do not have to know why.” The mind wants the reason. The soul needs the person. Smith goes further and says “tragedy is not redeemed by explanation, but by transformation.” An answer to the why question would not raise the dead or undo the abuse. The presence of God can do something an answer cannot. It can change the one who is suffering.
Dieula Previlon, who works with women in deep trauma, names the real prayer underneath the why. It is “Do you even see me? Do you care?” That is Hagar’s question in modern clothes. And the women Previlon serves answer it from the far side of the wilderness: “If it wasn’t for the Lord, I would have died already.” They did not get an explanation. They got a presence that kept them alive.
Jennifer Lucy Tyler, on the days when prayers seem to hit the ceiling, says the same thing from another angle: “Instead of the answer, we may receive comfort from the Holy Spirit.” She is not lowering the bar. She is telling you what God actually hands out in the wilderness. Not a memo. A companion.
What Does It Mean to Suffer Well?
When Yana Conner asked Shirer that question, Shirer went straight to Luke 22:
“And the Lord said, Simon, Simon, behold, Satan hath desired to have you, that he may sift you as wheat: But I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not” (Luke 22:31–32).
Notice what Jesus prays. He does not pray that Peter would dodge the trial. He prays that Peter’s faith would hold through it. That one shift reframes the whole thing.
The point of prayer in suffering is not only removal. It is formation. Shirer said the abundant life on earth is not the absence of pain. It is having the Holy Spirit inside you, so that where you would normally be paralyzed by fear, you can walk through the storm with a sense of wellbeing instead.
She also named what she called the Western problem: the reflex to pray our way out of anything uncomfortable as fast as we can. She contrasted that with believers in other parts of the world who pray first, “Lord, help me to see you in this. Help your name to be glorified in this.” Glory before relief. That order is not resignation. Shirer’s own prayer names it directly: “Help me to suffer well. My primary prayer first is that you would receive glory while I suffer.”
And lest that sound like a tidy lesson, hear the objection it has to answer. Asking God to be glorified in your pain can sound like spiritual bypassing, like skipping over the hurt to keep God comfortable. It is not. Shirer is just as clear that you can bring God your raw questions. There is a way, she says, to ask questions of God without questioning God’s character. You can cry the tears, say “I don’t understand,” and still hold that he is who he says he is. Tyler says it plainly too: “God can handle our questions, our concerns, our fears, and our doubts, our anger.” Honesty and trust are not enemies. They share the same prayer.
Where Was God in Priscilla Shirer’s Worst Season?
Shirer was not teaching this from a distance. Her family lost eight people in two years. Her mother died on December 30, 2019, after a rare cancer. In her last months, Shirer watched her keep praising God as her body failed, and heard her tell the family to stay vocal and unapologetic about Jesus. Watching her mother face the end with peace and hope is, in Shirer’s words, “all the encouragement I think I will ever need for the rest of my life.”
That January, Shirer had surgery to remove the upper lobe of her left lung. Weeks later her mother-in-law, healthy and living with the family, died unexpectedly in her sleep. Through all of it, the thing Shirer kept landing on was not an answer to why. It was evidence of who. The God who was present in Hagar’s wilderness had been present in hers. “If that does not prove that God is real,” she said, “I don’t know what does.”
None of this will make the suffering stop hurting, and the panel never pretended otherwise. Pain is supposed to hurt. If an answer numbs you to it, the answer is broken. What the panel offered instead is harder to argue with and slower to receive. Not a reason that wraps the pain in a bow, but a presence that sits in it with you. The well is already in the wilderness. The work, the only work, is to let God open your eyes and see it.
Quick Answers
Does God see me when I’m suffering? Yes. Genesis 21 says God heard the voice of Hagar’s son as she wept. The Psalms say he keeps your tears in his bottle. Dieula Previlon names the real question under the pain, “Do you even see me? Do you care?” and Scripture’s steady answer is that he does.
Why won’t God just explain why this happened? Because an explanation would not heal you. Dr. Robert Smith Jr. says “if I know who, I do not have to know why,” and that tragedy is redeemed by transformation, not explanation. God hands out his presence in the wilderness, not a memo.
Is it okay to ask God hard questions while suffering? Yes. Priscilla Shirer says there is a way to ask questions of God without questioning God’s character. Jennifer Lucy Tyler agrees that God can handle our questions, fears, doubts and anger. Your circumstances do not change who he is.
Do I have to go through suffering alone? No. Dr. Cynthia James points to Jephthah’s daughter gathering her friends and sees in them a picture of the Holy Spirit, a presence that stays. Inviting people into your pain is strength, not weakness.
What does it mean to suffer well? Shirer points to Jesus praying not that Peter would skip the trial but that his faith would hold through it. Suffering well is staying present to what God is forming in you, not getting out of the pain as fast as possible.
Listen to the Full Conversation
This piece draws on the Jude 3 Project panel with Priscilla Shirer, Dr. Cynthia James and Lisa Fields, released February 20, 2021. Listen to the full conversation, “Where Is God in All This Suffering?”, to hear them work through it in their own words.