I listened to a friend share her story. She spoke of her struggle with mental illness and addiction. In the middle of it, she made a simple comment that stayed with me.

She said she was married, had a good job, and had all the things life had told her would make her happy. Yet she wasn’t happy at all. In many ways, she was miserable. There was a void in her soul, a longing for something more.

How could that be?

Could it be that the things we think will bring us happiness often do not? Or at least, they do not bring the deepest and most complete happiness we imagine they will?

I’ve heard the debate many times that money doesn’t bring happiness. I really can’t speak from great experience there. I’ve never handled large sums of money. But the money I do have has certainly made life easier. It has removed some built-in unhappiness: hunger, insecurity, lack of shelter, lack of water. It even allows for a little entertainment now and then.

One of the most misquoted passages in the Christian Bible says that “money is the root of all evil.” That is not what the passage says. It says that the love of money is “a root of all kinds of evil” (1 Timothy 6:10).

But my friend was not really talking about money. She wasn’t debating wealth or possessions. What she was pointing toward was something much deeper: what happens when we have everything we were taught should make us happy, and we still aren’t?

We are told to do the right things.

Sometimes we do, and tragedy still strikes someone we love. We try not to lie or cheat, only to become disillusioned by how much lying and cheating we see around us. We try to love and are met with rejection, indifference, or even hate.

The things we thought would protect us from unhappiness often fail us.

One reason I have always been open to Christianity is not simply what I am asked to believe, but where I am asked to believe it. Christianity does not ask me to believe only in the places where life makes sense. It does not ask me to find God only in goodness, happiness, success, or certainty.

Sometimes I think we move too quickly from the crucifixion to the resurrection. We know how the story ends, so it is easy to hurry past what comes before.

But before the resurrection there is a person of perfect love and compassion meeting a terrible end.

He is falsely accused. Betrayed. Humiliated. Whipped. Paraded through the streets. Spit upon. Beaten. Nailed to a wooden beam and left to suffocate.

There is something about that story that feels very real to me.

Christianity does not tell me that goodness will always be rewarded, that love will always be returned, or that doing the right thing will protect me from suffering.

Instead, it tells me that God can be found there too.

In the darkness.

In the confusion.

In disappointment.

In the places where the life I expected falls apart.

Maybe that is part of what my friend’s story revealed. The trappings of life were never meant to save us from emptiness, suffering, or uncertainty. Perhaps faith begins when I stop demanding that life look the way I was told it should and become willing to look for God somewhere else.

Maybe I have spent too much of my life deciding ahead of time where God should be found.

And maybe God has been waiting for me in the places I wasn’t looking.