From Chapter Eight, Why You Don't Always Have to Experience Joy: Or, How God Vindicates the Afflicted.
There are many enemies of the virtue of patience, including our own unwillingness to suffer and our egocentric desires to be the kind of person who makes a difference in people's lives. There is also a kind of intellectual impatience, and unwillingness to wait for understanding. We can be tempted to think we must already have a solution to what philosophers call the "problem of evil," the problem of why God allows such suffering in the world. Like Job's friends, we can make the terrible mistake of thinking it's our job to defend God and explain his ways.
The Bible in its wisdom offers us no solution to the problem of evil. [...] We live without a solution but not without hope. No matter how little we know of the meaning of our suffering, we know that it is a story with a happy ending. This may not make us feel any better -- and it is a terrible mistake to demand that the afflicted feel better because of it -- but it is nonetheless the truth.
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