Answered by people who lived it
Where is God in all the suffering?
This is the hardest question, and the honest testimonies below do not pretend to solve it with an argument. They do something different: they are the accounts of people who found God not after their suffering was explained, but inside it while it lasted — a teenager kidnapped into slavery, a man broken in a prison cell. What they report is not a theodicy but a presence.
Seized by raiders at about sixteen and enslaved in Ireland for six years, Patrick did not find God after his ordeal ended but during it, herding sheep on the mountain:
“Now, after I came to Ireland, tending flocks was my daily occupation; and constantly I used to pray in the day time. Love of God and the fear of him increased more and more, and faith grew … And before daybreak I used to be roused to prayer, in snow, in frost, in rain; and I felt no hurt; nor was there any sluggishness in me — as I now see, because then the spirit was fervent within me.”
For Jerry McAuley the depth was a cell in Sing Sing — at the bottom of it, not lifted out of it first, is where he says he was met:
“All at once it seemed as if something supernatural was in my room. I was afraid to open my eyes. I was in an agony, and the sweat rolled off my face in great drops. Oh, how I longed for God's mercy! Just then, in the very height of my distress, it seemed as if a hand was laid upon my head.”
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T.S. Baker — testimonies in their own words, free sources linked.