Is God Still Good?

Have you ever questioned the "goodness" of God?
In the midst of trials and heart-breaking, life-changing circumstances, I know I have.

I wanted to share an excerpt of a devotional that I read a couple of days ago that encouraged me so much and put things into perspective a bit...

"Goodness is the very essence of who God is, and we can't see God without seeing his goodness. Conversely, if we don't see His goodness, we haven't seen God.
But sometimes a voice deep inside us says, 'Something is wrong with this picture! This is not what goodness looks like!'
Sometimes our circumstances seem like anything but evidence of God's goodness. But that is because we tend to define God by what we have deemed as good.
We have to turn that around.
We have to learn to define goodness by who God is and what He does.
God is eternally, intrinsically, abundantly, infinitely, perfectly good.
God himself is the standard by which we should compare anything we want to label as "good."
He is the source from which everything that is truly good emanates.
God alone is absolutely good. If God ceased to be good, He would cease to be God.
Can God be any less good to you on a dreary and difficult Monday morning than He was on that monumental Friday afternoon when [His son] hung on a cross in your place? Absolutely not! And God will be no less good to you tomorrow either, because God cannot be less than perfectly good.
His goodness is not the effect of His disposition but the essence of His character; it is not an attitude by an attribute."

(taken from "One Year of Hope" by Nancy Guthrie)