Contingency in the believer's life

At connexions, Kim has gained valuable insights from chronic illness:

As Job discovered, the recognition that anything can happen - and, as Job’s friends didn’t, that from this fact no conclusions can be drawn - is crucial to the life of faith. You know the phrase “with God all things are possible”? I now understand it to mean, not that God can do anything, but that nothing is necessary. Creation is grace.

Kim does a find job of expressing the place of contingency in the life of the believer:

Above all: how totally misconceived is the relentless search for explanation, and how utterly repugnant is the notion that there is a reason for suffering, that suffering is for something, let alone that it is sent, as a trial perhaps, or worse, as a punishment. I am more convinced than ever that theodicies are not only inherently futile essays, they are indeed potentially (how ironic!) evil projects, in intention justifications of God, in practice demonstrations of human pride, projects that satisfy our piety at the cost of both our moral sensibility and the moral integrity of God. The only theologically appropriate theodicy is the anti-theodicy of the cross - and at the cross one does not speak, one falls silent in wonder and praise.

The irony of theodicy. Yes.