Start here: the Bible agrees with you that this world is not the way it's supposed to be. It does not call cancer good, or pretend that grief is small. A third of the Psalms are complaints and cries — "How long, O Lord?" (Psalm 13:1). God is not offended by the question. He invites it.
So why is there suffering? The Bible's answer isn't a tidy formula; it's a story. God made a good world and made us free — and freedom that can love is also freedom that can wound. Evil entered through that freedom, and creation itself was fractured. Much of what we suffer flows from a world in rebellion against its Maker, not from God reaching down to harm us. "The whole creation has been groaning together" (Romans 8:22), Paul wrote — and we groan with it.
But that only explains so much, and it never reaches the person weeping at 3 a.m. So the Bible says something far more startling than an explanation. It says God did not stay safely outside our pain. In Jesus, He stepped into it — homeless, betrayed, tortured, executed. On the cross God Himself screamed the very question we ask: "My God, my God, why have You forsaken Me?" (Matthew 27:46). Whatever else suffering means, it does not mean God is distant or indifferent. The wounds are on His own hands.
That changes the question. It no longer has to be "Where is God in my suffering?" but "What is God doing in it?" The promise is not that pain is good, but that He can weave even this into something He refuses to waste — "for those who love God all things work together for good" (Romans 8:28). Not all things are good. But none are beyond His reach to redeem.
And there is an ending. The same Bible that's honest about the groaning is just as honest about where the story goes: a day when "He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain anymore" (Revelation 21:4). Not pain explained away — pain undone, and every loss answered.
If you're hurting right now, you don't need a finished theory; you need to not be alone. The God who entered our suffering is near to the brokenhearted (Psalm 34:18), and so are we. You can talk to Him as you are, and you can talk to a real person who will simply sit with you. That's a good next step, and it's free.