"God was with me": A qualitative study of Christian meaning-making among refugees.

In this consensual qualitative research study, we investigated the role of refugees' Christian faith in meaning-making coping. High percentages of religiosity in refugee populations support the need to understand the role of religion in their coping processes. Interviews with 20 Christian refugees from 10 African and Asian countries revealed that participants drew heavily from their faith resources to cope with their experiences. Specifically, refugees reported coping practices that included trust in God, prayer, intimacy with God, spiritual surrender, lament, worship, and social support. Although many participants described spiritual struggles, including doubting God, feeling distant from God, and questioning God, most found meaning amid refugee-related suffering and reported perspective shifts, a deepening of faith, seeing suffering as part of God's plan, experiencing a deepened sense of purpose, and growing in the likeness of Christ. Refugees also reported growth through suffering in the form of gratitude, altruism, testimony, and humility. Clinical implications include encouraging the use of religious resources for meaning-making and supporting the resolution of spiritual struggles.

When suffering contradicts belief: measuring theodical struggling.

Global meaning systems help people make sense of their experiences, but suffering can violate global meaning and create distress. One type of potential violation is conflict between one's experience of suffering and one's deeply-held beliefs about God as loving, powerful, and just. The problem of theodicy-why an all-powerful and all-loving God would allow suffering-has long been an important theological and philosophical concern, but little is known about how theodicy plays out psychologically for religious individuals facing serious life difficulties. To address this issue within a specific religious tradition, Christianity, we drew upon philosophy, Christian theology, and psychology to develop the construct of theodical struggling. Through theological and philosophical input, we generated a 28-item pool and conducted 10 cognitive interviews with a diverse sample of Christian adults. In three consecutive online studies of Christian adult samples, we reduced the scale to 11 items through PCA, found a strong one-factor solution using EFA, and found support for the one-factor solution along with preliminary reliability and validity. This newly-developed Theodical Struggling Scale represents an important advance in understanding individuals' experiences of ruptures in their beliefs regarding God's goodness and paves the way for future research on this topic. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s12144-023-04642-w.