How to Find Joy “in” Suffering
Author: Brad Hambrick
Category: Blog, Live The Word Of God
Scripture, as wonderful and enlightening as it is, contains delicacies we find hard to swallow during tough times. Even Christians can find it difficult to accept passages like Romans 5:3-5 which tell us to rejoice in our suffering because of the hope we have in the gospel (Romans 15:13). We, as counselors, might try to make the teaching more palatable by offering a variant definition of “joy” (i.e., positing it as something more spiritual than happiness). Or, we might use a passage like Romans 8:28 or 2 Corinthians 4:17 to suggest that the outcomes of suffering, when filtered through God’s fingers, will be so rich that tomorrow’s pleasure will significantly outweigh today’s pain.
Either approach, at times, might be accurate and helpful. Yes, sometimes our expectations of happiness are so temporal that we need to be challenged. And sometimes God creates lasting transformation through our hardships, the results of which we would never change.
But these two options, by themselves, seem incomplete. I would like to offer a third possibility through a metaphor emphasizing the word “in.” There is a rainbow “in” every drop of water. When light passes through it, a full spectrum of colors are revealed. Depending on the source of light, shape and composition of the water, and location of the surface on which the rainbow appears, different variants of colors show up. The full ROY G BIV (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet) spectrum is there, but the thickness of each color band varies.
Here is how the metaphor plays out:
Water represents the suffering we experience.
Light represents the redemptive work/truth of God.
Each color represents the various religious affections that can be demonstrated; for our purposes, the expectation we’ll focus on will be the experience of joy.
Joy is not the only “color” that can express faith (light) in hardship (water).
There are also courage, hope, honesty, authenticity, love, etc. Too often in these suffering-joy discussions, we get hung up on one color in the rainbow. There are times—perhaps frequently in the early stages of suffering—when “joy” may be the skinniest color band in the rainbow.
Consider, “Blessed [makarios; happy] are those who mourn for they will be comforted” (Matthew 5:4). In this case the dominant color of faith is authenticity—being vulnerable about the nature of a loss. God’s light takes the form of comfort in this context of grief. The result is the capacity for joy—a very skinny color in the immediate moment. Yet, in time it broadens as precious memories of the loved one can be savored once again.
The reality is that various forms of suffering (water—pure, salted, colored) will produce different emotional experiences. How God cares for and speaks to each of these situations will be different (light—sun, fluorescent, colored). In return, the emotional form our faith takes (color—full emotional spectrum) will differ and may initially be dark or dull colors.
But, as we cooperate with God’s redemptive work in the midst of our suffering, He promises that the “joy color” will be restored to our emotional experience. Suffering cannot remove our capacity for happiness.
God does not want us to be emotionally fake—the equivalent of adding food coloring to the water to force the “appropriate” “Christian” color change. Instead, God wants us to trust Him: The pollution of suffering cannot remove our capacity for joy. While I know this is stretching the metaphor even further, I believe that sometimes God restores our capacity for joy by wiping away the droplet in the form of a tear and collecting it as His tender treasure (Psalm 56:8).
God often chooses tenderness as His “light”—even more than explanation—to restore our capacity for joy.
Those who are suffering see that God does not expect us to force a pleasant emotion on our difficult experiences. God can comfort you, or your counselee, in this moment and still bring forth the “color of joy” in the experience while honoring the genuine emotional turmoil of your suffering.
Posted on November 9, 2026