The call to faith is a summons to engage the heart, to attune it to resonate in sympathy with principles and values and ideals that we devoutly hope are true and which we have reasonable but not certain grounds for believing to be true.  There must be grounds for doubt as well as beleif, in order to render the choice more truly a choice, and therefore the more deliberate, and laden with personal vulnerability and investment.  And overwhelming preponderance of evidence on either side would make our choice as meaningless as would a loaded gun pointed at our heads.  The option to believe must appear on one's personal horizon like the fruit of paradise, perched precariously between sets of demands held in dynamic tension....We are acted upon, in other words, by appeals to our personal values, our yearnings our fears, our appetites, and our egos. What we choose to embrace, to be responsive to, is the purest reflection of who we are and what we love. That is why faith, the choice to believe, is, in the final analysis, an action that is positively laden with moral significance.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 4

Reason must be a part of any solution to the mystery of life that we find satisfactory.  A supreme diety would no more gift us with intellect and expect us to forsake it in moments of bafflement, than He would fashion us eyes to see and bid us shut them to the stars.  Our vision draws us to that which lies beyond our ken--too distant, or too small, for our mortal powers of perception.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 4

But the reconciliation that Jesus offers is not as distant from reconciling ourselves to the mixture of pain and joy in the world as we may at first think. Nailed to a cross, in the midst of his execution, he said "Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do" (Lk. 23:34). He reconciled himself to his executioners though they had not repented of what they had done, though he had received no recompense for his suffering at their hands. He found the joy of reconciliation while yet in pain.

Jesus' reconciliation to his enemies did not require either their repentance or his heavenly reward. It happened in the midst of his suffering. That infinite, divine reconciliation ought to be our model of the reconciliation for which we aim both now and in the future. If we have taken Jesus' name on ourselves, we owe it to him and to our Christian covenant to identify ourselves with him to learn to be reconciled as he was, not after the fact of suffering but in it.

That does not mean allowing criminals to go free, refusing to hold them accountable for their crimes. It means, though, not allowing the need for justice to overcome the demand for reconciliation. Justice is an appropriate part of reconciliation, but we cannot refuse reconciliation because we are not yet satisfied that justice has been done. If vengeance is the Lord's and not ours (Dt. 32:5), then our demand for justice cannot be confused with a demand for vengeance. And when it is not, then it is compatible with reconciliation.

The Christian message is that reconciliation is possible, both now and, ultimately, in the presence of God. Jesus taught us that reconciliation does not mean the end of all pain, but the reconciliation of our pain with our love for others. That is certainly true in this life. Perhaps it is also true in the next. The promise is that families as narrow as a couple or as wide as the human race can be reconciled in their pain.

James Faulconer, "Reconciliation in Suffering," Patheos Blog