Understanding how God works in our lives is not always easy to discern. What we think is God's action in our lives can sometimes be more the desires of our ego, with its agenda that makes it constantly on the lookout for circumstances and experiences that are fulfilling for us, self-serving in some way.

The ego is averse to discomfort. The ego came to be in our lives as the persona that was going to rescue us from emotional pain as a child. Now as adults, it continues to want to convince us that emotional discomfort and pain are bad, to be avoided at all costs even to the extent of asking God to collude with our ego and shape our lives and circumstances so that there is an absence of inner turmoil.

Of course, God does not want us to suffer unnecessarily. But given our human condition, and its fallen nature, there is an aspect of our suffering that is inevitable, particularly when it comes to emotional pain.