Suffering can feel overwhelming. But when suffering stretches on with no answer from God, it can feel unbearable. There have been times when I’ve cried out for relief and deliverance, wondering if it would ever come. I’ve brought my earnest prayers and questions before God, only to be met with echoing silence. I’ve underlined and starred these words in my Bible: “I am weary with my crying out; my throat is parched. My eyes grow dim with waiting for my God” (Psalm 69:3). My eyes have almost failed waiting for God. Have yours? While I’m waiting, everything swirls together — my anxious cries, my shattered dreams, my longing for God to rescue me. My prayers seem to bounce off the walls. Scripture feels dry and tasteless. And then doubt creeps in. Has God forgotten me? Does he see me? Does he even care? In my protracted waiting, I wonder if God knows how hard this is. I question why God is letting this continue for so long. I ass

Ecclesiastes 3:11 haunts the human mind that pretends to be secular: [God] has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. At first blush, secular answers — that is, those that refuse to acknowledge any religious or spiritual basis for human life and our world — may attract those aching to suppress the truth that God has made plain in his creation (Romans 1:18–20). But soon the sparkle wears off. Secular life does not prove satisfying — emotionally or intellectually. Secular “believers” may enjoy the initial thrill of feeling free from divine oversight and the wages of sin. But the wishful thinking of cosmic rebels proves empty sooner or later. As it always has. God made us, and made us for himself. The Potter has designs. In our sin, we want to spin away from him. Yet in the very clay of our humanity, we were made for him and cannot get around or beyond