When Trust Hurts: Where Is God in the Tragedy?

In light of this morning's tragic shooting at Annunciation Catholic School, today's reflection is a bit more somber. What do we do with tragedy? You pray for your children’s safety. You ask God to protect your home, your health, your loved ones. You try to live a good life. Then the unthinkable happens and everything feels like it shatters.

Where was God?

It’s a question that haunts anyone who’s lived through tragedy. Monsignor Charles Pope calls it the great mystery—the problem of evil and suffering. If God is good, powerful, and just, why does He allow horror to strike? Why do some prayers go unanswered, while evil seems to flourish?

But as Monsignor Lorenzo Albacete once said, “Suffering is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be lived.” The “why” behind suffering isn’t something we can fully grasp this side of eternity. And maybe that’s not the point. Maybe the real invitation is to live through it, with God and with others.

Scripture shows us that suffering entered the world not because God desired it, but because love requires freedom, and freedom means the possibility of sin, loss, and pain. Even so, God didn’t leave us to fend for ourselves. He entered into the very suffering we created. On the Cross, Jesus didn’t avoid pain, He embraced it and transformed it into the way home.

Still, trusting God in the face of pain is hard, especially when He doesn’t always protect the ones we pray for. But real trust isn’t about controlling outcomes. It’s about believing we’re not alone in them. We trust that Christ walks with us in the fire. That He weeps with us, stays with us, and somehow, in the end, will redeem every loss.

And here’s the grace we often miss: we’re not meant to walk through this mystery alone.

We need each other. We need brotherhood. In seasons of tragedy, grief, and questions with no answers, having a band of brothers who will listen, pray, and simply be present can be the difference between despair and hope. Brotherhood won’t fix the pain, but it reminds us that we’re not carrying it alone.

So bring your pain to God. Bring your doubts too. And bring them into the light with other men who are fighting through the same storms.

Faith doesn’t erase suffering, but it refuses to let it have the final word.
God is still good, even here, even now, even in this. And so are the brothers who stand beside you.

We at Heroic Men pray for all the families affected by the tragedy at Annunciation Catholic School and who have to walk through the dark wonder of “why”?