Today is Christmas Day. It is a slightly odd one for me, since my family cannot meet together. We all know the reason for that and it is being repeated in many homes all around the world. So I feel a whole lot more reflective, and given that I engage with the Christian faith daily in one way or another, this entry is more religious than usual.

If you believe in God then you will sometimes struggle with the question of suffering. It is an age-old one - consider the Books of Job and Ecclesiastes - and comes up often enough in modern discourse. If God is all powerful, loving and genuinely engaged with humanity, then why is there suffering? How come good people come to grief? Why are there pandemics, earthquakes, wars and the like? Why do the wicked (looking at you Trump) prosper?

You can pick these kinds of questions to pieces if you like and I often do. I don't have any trouble reconciling belief in God with the messy world we live in. Theologians talk about Original Sin and The Fall, which I find unconvincing, unless we can see sin as the many imperfections of human nature. Christian commentators also tend to talk about our inability of seeing the wood for the trees. In this analysis, God sees everything from the beginning to the end and knows that ultimately, all will be for the good. This does not diminish the horror of the human condition, but it offers some kind of balm.

I have raised before another option in this debate, that being the question of free will. It goes - if we do have free will - the capacity to freely make our own choices, then the world has be an unmediated, messy place. If God intervenes to help us avoid poor choices, or waves a wand to remove suffering, then can it be said that we are truly free? In this scenario, we become little more than actors in a simulation, the program written to accommodate this forever sunny outlook. But this is a universe of natural laws and we are bound by them. You cannot unjump off a cliff. Or so it goes.

So, wherever you are today, in whatever circumstances you find yourself, have a Happy Christmas. Or at the very least, make the best you can of the day.