Craig Groeschel has spent decades preaching about God’s goodness, but he’ll be the first to admit that goodness doesn’t always feel obvious. When someone you love gets sick and doesn’t recover, when prayers echo back with silence or when the news feels unbearably heavy — like it has this week — that’s where faith either fractures or deepens.
Groeschel has seen this struggle up close. A woman in his office, someone he describes as “like family,” finally conceived after years of trying. When the pregnancy ended in heartbreak, it didn’t just crush her hope. It rattled her belief in God. She was a new Christian, and loss this severe threatened to undo it all.
Groeschel knew she didn’t need a neat theological answer or a sermon. She needed to know she wasn’t abandoned. So he wrote her a letter. What began as a few pages turned into dozens, an outpouring of empathy and faith in the middle of her pain. The next day she told him the words had been the difference between holding on to God and walking away.
Years later, Groeschel’s own daughter became gravely ill. He found himself returning to the letter he had written long ago, now with fresh eyes.
“I cried all the way through it,” he said. “It was like someone else had written it for me.”
The same words that once held up a friend now held him up too. For Groeschel, that experience crystallized something he had long preached but never fully felt: faith has to be strong enough to survive without a happy ending.
The question of how to believe God is good when life is not is as old as faith itself. Every generation has wrestled with it, but Groeschel says American Christianity has developed a particular blind spot. Too often, he argues, believers absorb the idea that if they love God and live faithfully, things will work out the way they hope. When suffering comes, the assumption is either God doesn’t care or they’ve done something wrong.
“That’s really bad theology,” he said. “Our faith can’t be built on the outcome we want. It has to be built on who God is — his character, his nature, his goodness, his sovereignty.”
That conviction reshaped how Groeschel began to preach. He recalls teaching through the Old Testament book of Habakkuk, which became a sort of roadmap for how he sees suffering and faith. Unlike Job, whose story ends in restoration, Habakkuk’s prayer ends unresolved. The prophet begs God to act against injustice, and the miracle never comes.
Still, Habakkuk concludes with one of the most defiant declarations of hope in the Bible: “Though the fig tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines … yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will be joyful in God my Savior.”
What struck Groeschel wasn’t the poetry but the tension. The name Habakkuk itself means both “to wrestle” and “to embrace.” For Groeschel, that’s the paradox of faith. You can push back on God with your questions, cry out in confusion and still cling to him at the same time.
“That’s where faith gets real,” he said.
When he taught Habakkuk at Life.Church, he warned his congregation upfront: these weren’t going to be tidy sermons.
“In sitcoms, everything is solved in 30 minutes. Most sermons end the same way — with a Romans 8:28, God works all things together for good. And that’s true. But the good isn’t always the good we want it to be,” he explained.
Instead, he let each message end unresolved. Habakkuk still had questions. Habakkuk still carried the weight of disappointment. But he refused to let go of God. That kind of ending unsettled people at first, Groeschel admits, but it also gave them permission to be honest about their own struggles.
This permission is what Groeschel believes many believers desperately need. Hope isn’t about plastering over pain or promising a miracle is just around the corner. It’s about trusting that God has not abandoned you, even when nothing changes.
“Some people expect hope to mean you’ll feel better instantly,” he said. “But real hope is knowing God hasn’t left, even when the pain doesn’t go away. That doesn’t sound dramatic. It’s not a miracle ending. But it’s enough to keep going.”
For those who have been told that doubt is a failure of faith, Groeschel offers a different vision. Wrestling with God is not a sign of weakness but a sign of intimacy. It means you still care enough to fight.
“There’s power in not having the fairytale ending,” he said. “Because that’s where we actually have to trust God.”
He has seen how this message lands with people walking through loss, depression, divorce or disappointment that lingers far longer than they thought it would. The comfort isn’t in an explanation — it’s in the presence of God that remains when explanations run out. That presence doesn’t erase grief or guarantee resolution, but it does make survival possible.
Groeschel knows many churches prefer victory stories. But he believes a fuller faith also makes room for lament. It’s not about pretending the pain isn’t real, but about holding grief and gratitude at the same time.
“Even though my prayers aren’t answered, I’ll still praise you,” he said, echoing Habakkuk.
It’s not resignation. It’s defiance. It’s a choice to believe that God’s goodness outlasts the darkest circumstances.
In the end, the lesson Groeschel keeps returning to is simple: the absence of answers does not mean the absence of God. Faith does not guarantee a happy ending. But it does guarantee that even in the silence, even in the loss, you are not alone.
Because sometimes hope in the dark is the only kind of hope that lasts.
