Friday, July 4, 2008

Meeting God in Your Suffering


Your pain and anger seem so palpable, your sense that everything you ever believed in is gone from you, not just your babies, but also your faith—for which you so deeply long.

I honestly do not believe that God is gone from you. I believe that every time we turn to God, even in anguish or anger, in longing or in fear, it is God at work in us. We cannot turn to him unless he turns our hearts.

I think that if you believe that God has spoken to you in the past, that he still speaks in your life and that God wants you to continue to listen for him. In my experience, God speaks in many ways to many people and in different ways at different times in our lives.

Yes, your story is different from the ones to which you are comparing yourself, but I know your story is not so very different from the multitude of stories of women and men throughout the history of our faith who have been called by God to a deeper and more authentic faith through horrible struggles with pain and suffering.

I do not believe that God causes our suffering, I could never believe in a God who would take my three children, leave me childless and alone and have taken my parents lives while they were so young. I do believe that the God of the cross is a God who meets in our deepest suffering and shows us the way out. Paul called it the faith of fools and folly, yet he knew in the depth of his being. It is easy to have faith in a God who rushes in to save the day. It is a deeper and more profoundly faithful heart that continues to seek and listen for God when all seems lost.

I wonder what encouragement you might find if you asked God to speak to you in the silence. I wonder what hope you might find in asking God to meet you in your fear and offer you there his hand so that you might be led, in the living of your days to a kind of happiness and fulfillment which is never proclaimed by the prosperity preachers, portrayed in TV movies, written about in feel good books. The kind of happiness and fulfillment which comes to those who are willing to do the deep and tender work of bringing their suffering to God-of-suffering-and-the-conquering-of-suffering and pray for hope and faith, and trust that that God will bring your living to a new and better place than any you can imagine.

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