Why people ask it
Usually because of something specific — a diagnosis, a loss, an injustice they watched happen. The philosophical version is rarer than the personal one.
Short answer
Christianity does not claim suffering is good or that it always has a visible reason. It claims that a world with real freedom allows real harm, that our vantage point is limited, and that God entered suffering rather than explaining it away.
Deeper answer
There are two versions of this objection and they need different responses. The logical version claims God and evil are strictly incompatible. It has largely faded even in academic philosophy, because it requires proving that no possible sufficient reason could exist for permitting any evil — a claim nobody is positioned to establish.
The evidential version is stronger: given how much suffering there is, and how pointless much of it looks, God seems unlikely. Here the response is threefold. A world with genuine moral agency requires the real possibility of harm. Our vantage point on any given event is extremely limited. And the Christian claim is not that suffering is acceptable but that it is not final, and that God did not observe it from a distance.
Most importantly: notice that calling suffering genuinely evil — not merely unwanted — requires an objective moral standard. The objection quietly assumes moral realism, which is itself worth talking about.
Common mistake
Answering a grieving person with philosophy. If there is a story behind the question, the story is the question.
Conversation-ready response
""I am not going to pretend I have an explanation that makes that okay. I do not. What I would say is that Christianity never claimed suffering was fine — it claims God stepped into it. That is a different kind of answer, and it is the one it actually gives.""
Source notes coming soon.