Where Is God When It Hurts? (excerpt)

(p 260-261)

For a good portion of my life I shared the perspective of those who rail against God for allowing pain. Suffering pressed in too close. I could find no way to rationalize a world as toxic as this one.

As I visited people whose pain far exceeded my own, though, I was surprised by it's effects. Suffering seemed as likely to reinforce faith as sow agnosticism.

The problem of pain will have no ultimate solution until God recreates the earth. I am sustained by faith in that great hope. If I did not truly believe that God is a Physician and not a Sadist, I would abandon all attempts to plumb the mysteries of suffering.

My anger about pain has melted mostly for one reason: I have come to know God. He has given me joy and love and happiness and goodness. They have come in unexpected flashes, in the midst of my confused, imperfect world, but they have been enough to convince me that my God is worthy of trust. Knowing Him is worth all enduring.

Where does that leave me when I stand by a hospital bed the next time a close friend gets Hodgkins disease? After all, this search started at a bedside. It leaves me with faith in a Person, a faith so solid that no amount of suffering can erode it.

Where is God when it hurts?

He has been there from the beginning, designing a pain system that, even in the midst of a fallen world, still bears the stamp of His genius and equips us for life on this planet.

He transforms pain, using it to teach and strengthen us, if we allow it to turn us toward him.

With great restraint, he watches this rebellious planet live on, in mercy allowing the human project to continue in its self-guided way. He lets us cry out, like Job, in loud fits of anger against him, blaming him for a world we spoiled.

He allies himself with the poor and suffering, founding a kingdom tilted in their favor. He stoops to conquer.

He promises supernatural help to nourish the spirit, even if our physical suffering goes unrelieved.

He has joined us. He has hurt and bled and cried and suffered. He has dignified for all time those who suffer, sharing their pain.

He is with us now, ministering to us through his Spirit, and through members of his body, who are commissioned to bear us up and relieve our suffering for the sake of the Head.

He is waiting, gathering the armies of good. One day he will unleash them, and the world will see one last terrifying moment of suffering before full victory is ushered in. Then God will create for us a new, incredible world. And pain shall be no more.

"Listen, I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we will all be changed...in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality. When the perishable has been clothed with the imperisable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: "Death has been swallowed up in victory"

Where, O death, is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting?

( I Corinthians 15:51-55)