A woman in my church once confronted me about sermon illustrations in which evil events turned out for good. She had lost a husband in an act of violence during a robbery. She had also had several children with severe mental and emotional problems. She insisted that for every one story in which evil turns out for good, there are one hundred in which there is no conceivable silver lining.135 What makes this emotional problem of evil so difficult is that a suffering person is usually not able to objectively