When God's Goodness Is Hard to Believe: A 14-Day Bible Reading Plan

Every month this year we have been sitting with one quality of God’s character. Not rushing through. Not ticking boxes. Just slowing down long enough to let who He actually is settle into the places where life has stirred up questions.

May’s quality is His goodness.

I chose goodness for this month partly because of the God Is Good Summit — but also because I think it is one of the most contested truths in a believer’s inner life. We say it easily in good seasons. We sing it without thinking. And then something happens — something hard, something unexplained, something that does not resolve quickly — and suddenly those two words carry a weight they did not carry before.

Is He, though?

That question is not a failure of faith. It is often the beginning of a deeper one. The people in Scripture who encountered God most profoundly were frequently the ones who brought their most honest questions with them — Job from the ash heap, the Psalmists from the pit, Paul from a prison cell. God did not turn away from any of them.

This reading plan is designed to let you do the same.

Over fourteen days, you will move through passages that explore God’s goodness from several angles. You will start with who He is at the foundation — before circumstances enter the conversation. You will then move into how His goodness shows up in the middle of hard places: through provision, through presence, through people sent at exactly the right moment. You will sit with the question of why He doesn’t simply stop the suffering — and what Scripture actually says about how He works within it. And you will end where the biblical story always ends: not with explanation, but with the cross, the resurrection, and a promise that His goodness is not gently trailing behind you. It is chasing you down.

A few thoughts on how to approach these days:

Read slowly. These are not passages to get through. Most of them you have probably read before — which means the temptation is to skim. Resist that. Read as though you are reading for the first time, with the question “what does this tell me about who God actually is?” sitting somewhere nearby.

Bring whatever you are carrying. If you are in a hard season right now, these passages are not going to ask you to pretend otherwise. Some of them were written by people who were suffering deeply. Let that be permission to be honest in your own reading.

Let it be incomplete. Fourteen days with these passages will not resolve every question you have about God’s goodness. That is okay. The goal is not resolution — it is relationship. A clearer, more grounded sense of who you are trusting, and why that trust has roots deep enough to hold. Subscribe below for immediate access to the plan.

His goodness is real. And it is worth taking fourteen days to let that become more than something you say.