The Carpenter's Daughter at the Lecture Hall

In 2014, Yale University hosted a panel on suffering and meaning. Three philosophers debated theodicy with precision — quoting Leibniz, referencing modal logic, parsing the problem of evil into tidy categories. The audience nodded along, impressed but unmoved.

During the Q&A, a woman stood near the back. Maria Gonzalez, a carpenter's daughter from New Haven, had slipped in because the doors were open. She hadn't read Leibniz. She told the panel that her father had built caskets for a living, and that when her seven-year-old brother died of leukemia, her father built the last casket himself. Sanded it by hand. Wept into the grain of the wood. She said she watched him carry that box into the church, and somehow, in the way his rough hands held what he had made, she understood that God does not explain suffering — He enters it.

The room went silent. One of the panelists later wrote that in thirty years of academic philosophy, he had never heard the problem of evil answered so completely.

Paul told the Corinthians he came not with eloquent wisdom but with a demonstration of the Spirit's power. The deepest truths of God are not decoded by brilliant minds but revealed to those whose hearts are open to receive them. The Spirit searches everything, even the depths of the Almighty, and makes them known not through sophisticated argument but through the raw, reverent knowing that comes only from walking with Him through the wood grain and the weeping.