Two of Dr. Robert Smith Jr.’s children are in heaven. His son Tony was murdered at the restaurant where he worked, on a night he had taken a shift so a coworker could be home with family. Lisa Fields notes that Smith also lost his first wife, and he has lived through two strokes and three cancer diagnoses. Asked how he has kept going without knowing why, he answers: “If I know who, I don’t have to know why.”
That sentence is the question of this study. How do you keep trusting God when the explanation may never come? Smith does not reach his answer quickly. His own account moves through anger, then a slow change, then a trust that leaves the why open. This guide follows that same order, with Scripture at each stage and a writing practice near the end. You can use it alone over a week or with a small group over one or two sessions. Every reflection prompt is optional, and nothing here asks you to tell your story to anyone.
First, the anger
Smith does not begin with peace. After Tony’s death, he says, “there was a deep seated anger, and Ill will, and God had to deliver me through that.” He is just as plain about the pace: “It was not instantaneously, it was gradually.” If you are angry, you are not behind schedule. You are where a faithful pastor once was.
He tells of a younger minister, one of his students, whose two-week-old daughter had just died. The father asked him, “How do I pray to a God that hurt me?” Smith did not answer with a sermon. He let the man be angry and gave a reason anger could be spoken aloud: “God is not fragile, he’s faithful.” He told him, in effect, to say it all to God, because God could take it.
That freedom matters, because the most common religious responses to loss often shut it down. Everything happens for a reason. God needed another angel. This was his plan. Smith uses none of them. Of hurricanes, cancer and early deaths, he says, “all of that was not part of God’s plan.” Then, at once: “but God is going to redeem that.” The first sentence refuses to call the loss good. The second refuses to let it have the last word. Neither pretends to explain this particular death, and Smith adds that faith is “not a matter of the pie in the sky by and by with a cherry on top. No, we do suffer.”
Anger and grief can also wear a person down in ways prayer alone will not reach. If you cannot sleep, eat, or get through the day, a grief counselor or therapist belongs in this stage too. Jude 3 teaches that seeking therapy is not a failure of faith, and that caring for your mind is part of stewarding the life God gave you. Getting that help is one way of being honest about how heavy this is.
Then, slowly, a change
The phrase Smith returns to comes from Dr. William Hall, a former provost at the university where he taught: “Tragedy is not redeemed by explanation, but by transformation.” Notice where that puts redemption. Not on a page of reasons, but in a person, over time.
For Smith, the change began with a hard recognition: “But I had to realize Tony didn’t belong to me. Tony was loaned to me.” He connects it to 1 Corinthians 4:7, where Paul asks, “what hast thou that thou didst not receive?” Handle this with care. It is what Smith came to after months, not a line to offer anyone at a graveside. He admits the distance between knowing it and living it: “conceptually, I knew that, but existentially, experientially, I wasn’t accepting that.”
Out of that gap he drew a sentence worth keeping: “you don’t know what you believe until it’s time to believe it.” Grief tests beliefs we held comfortably. Discovering that a belief does not yet hold you is not the same as losing your faith. It may be the point where faith stops being borrowed.
The change eventually reached as far as forgiving the man who killed his son, though Smith refuses any credit for that, saying, “Forgiveness is impossible without God.” You are not being asked to arrive there. What his account shows is that change came without the pain disappearing. Of an old saying, he offers a correction: “Time doesn’t heal all wounds, time, redresses wounds.” When he attends a funeral for a young man, Tony still comes back to him. A wound that is redressed is tended, not erased.
Then trust, with the why still open
Lisa Fields names what happens when the answer becomes the condition for moving on: “if you’re waiting for the why to get free, you’ll never be free.” She is not telling anyone to stop asking. Even a full answer would not return the person or the health that was lost. Smith’s deepest support for trusting without explanation comes from the place where Jesus himself asked why. Read Mark 15:33-39 before going on.
At the ninth hour Jesus cries out, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34). He is praying the first line of Psalm 22. The Gospel records no spoken answer before he dies. The question you may be asking was asked by the Son of God, and Scripture treats it as prayer, not unbelief. Smith points out that angels attend Jesus at his birth, in the wilderness, in Gethsemane and at the tomb, yet none comes to deliver him at the cross. His conclusion is short: “So God understands.”
Look closely at the word my. Jesus does not cry out to God in general. He holds on to God as his own in the same breath that he asks why he has been forsaken. That is the shape of the trust Smith describes. It does not wait for the answer before it speaks to God.
Smith also points to an earlier scene. Before Jesus heals a man who is deaf and can barely speak, the text says, “And looking up to heaven, he sighed, and saith unto him, Ephphatha, that is, Be opened” (Mark 7:34). The Gospel does not explain the sigh. Smith hears in it grief that the world has gone wrong. Whatever else the sigh means, it shows that Jesus did not handle damage to a human body with detachment. The one you are praying to has met brokenness with grief before he met it with power, which is why your grief is not something you have to hide from him.
Paul, writing in chains, puts the same trust in four words: “for I know whom I have believed” (2 Timothy 1:12). His confidence rests on a person. The verse says nothing about why he is in prison.
Observation prompts
- In Mark 15:34, what words show Jesus still relating to God as his own? What does the verse allow him to say and still be faithful?
- In Mark 7:31-35, what does Jesus do before he speaks the healing word? What would the scene lose without it?
- In 2 Timothy 1:12, what is Paul sure of, and what does he leave unsaid?
When the who feels hidden too
An honest objection belongs here. Telling someone to trust the who can sound like telling them to stop asking. Smith anticipates the suspicion: “I’m not trying to say something that rhymes. It’s true.” His trust is not blind. It rests on what God has already shown: faithfulness over time, the incarnation, the cross and the resurrection. That is why he insists on holding Friday and Sunday together, warning that “you can’t have resurrection without crucifixion.”
But for some people in grief, the who is as hidden as the why. God does not feel faithful. He feels absent. If that is where you are, Scripture does not send you away. Psalm 88 prays, “LORD, why castest thou off my soul? why hidest thou thy face from me?” (Psalm 88:14), and the psalm closes without any turn toward relief, its last word being darkness. That prayer is in the Bible. You can pray from a place where God feels gone, and still be praying to him.
One more tension should not be hidden. Smith says these losses were not God’s plan, and he also says the cross happened by the predetermined counsel of God. Faithful Christians differ on how God’s sovereignty relates to particular evils, and this study does not settle that question. Both of Smith’s claims agree that God is not indifferent to what he permits and does not leave it unredeemed. Trust still carries the ache of waiting. Of Tony, Smith says, “I know that he’s waiting on me.”
A practice for the week: two columns
Set aside twenty minutes once this week, and a few minutes on later days if it helps. Take one sheet of paper and draw a line down the middle.
- Left column: what I do not know. Write the questions you cannot answer, as plainly as you can. Why this person. Why that night. Why I survived. Smith was once held at gunpoint as a young father and lived, while Tony did not, and he says of it, “I’ll never understand that question.” Your questions can stay unanswered on the page.
- Right column: what I have seen of who God is. Smith tells grieving people to remember how faithful God has been, that in Christ God became human and shared what we go through, and that God sustains and keeps his people. Make those specific. Write actual times God was faithful to you or someone you love. If nothing comes, write what this study has shown from Scripture: he sighed over a broken world, he cried out on the cross, he was raised.
- Pray across the line. Take one question from the left and speak it to God, beginning with my God, as Jesus did. You do not have to resolve it. Then read one line from the right aloud. If the right column feels empty, pray the words of Psalm 88:14 instead.
Smith’s left column never fully closed. The point is to see whether the right column can bear weight while the left stays open, and to add to it when something comes.
Questions for reflection or discussion
- What is the why you most want answered? If it were answered fully, what would it change, and what would it leave untouched?
- Smith describes months of anger before anything shifted. What has your anger needed to say, and to whom has it been safe to say it?
- Smith says you do not know what you believe until it is time to believe it. Has grief exposed a belief you thought was firmer than it was? What did you find underneath?
- Which familiar comfort has hurt you or someone you love? What made it land badly?
- Jesus asked why and still said my God. Psalm 88 prays from darkness. Which of those prayers is closer to where you are?
- What would it mean for this loss to change you without being called good?
For anyone leading a group
Let people pass on any question, and do not ask anyone to share the two-column sheet. If someone reads from it, receive what they say without correcting it. Resist using Smith’s line about the who and the why as a quick answer to fresh grief. He reached it through years of loss, and the student he describes was allowed to be angry first. Lisa Fields says in the conversation that “you have to get it out of your mouth to get it out of your heart.” Your job is to make it safe to say the thing out loud.
If someone discloses a recent death, a loss surrounded by violence, or grief so heavy they no longer want to live, do not work through it in the group. Stay with them afterward and help connect them with a pastor or counselor. If they mention thoughts of suicide, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available by call or text at any hour.
Carrying it forward
Smith describes what he has done with what his losses left behind, and it is modest enough to try today: “we take our brokenness and our hurt and our pain, and we ask the Lord to pick up the broken pieces of our lives.” You can make that request without an explanation, and even on a day when the right column is thin, to the God you are still allowed to call your own.