Pain and suffering, where is God?
At this point in time I can honestly say with my hand on my heart I truly believe my God is right in the middle of any and all pain and suffering. It sounds glib but I assure you this conclusion came after a long struggle, being angry at God and the world and questioning His goodness and painful experiences. Read on to find out more.
My first experience of pain and suffering was when I was about nine or ten. My Grandfather became ill and was treated for cancer. I didn’t know what cancer was or what it meant but I knew he was in pain and that everyone was worried about him. When he died sometime later it was as though it wasn’t real. We had the phone call, I saw my Dad cry for the first time ever in my life and I knew something big had happened but dead…I really couldn’t take it in. We went to my aunt’s house. All my family were there. Occasionally someone would burst out crying but there was laughter and banter too. Mum asked me did I want to see him? He was in the next room. Of course I said I didn’t really know what to expect. But there he lay still; peaceful calm, just sleeping it looked like to me. I stared and stared then I turned to mum and said “He’s breathing, he is. I can see his chest moving up and down!” She smiled and said “Yes, it’s just as if he is sleeping”. The last time I saw him was the day of the funeral. I had written a letter to him and I placed it in the coffin along with something I treasured. I can’t remember what it was now but at the time it seemed like I was sending a piece of me with him. That day was hard for my family. Everyone was so upset and I joined in the crying but I felt unconnected to it all. It wasn’t until a few weeks later when I went to the house and saw the pain and loss in my Grandmother’s eyes that it hit me, the enormity of what had happened. He had gone, gone for good. I didn’t think about where he had gone to, just that he wasn’t with us and it had left a painful hole in the life of our family.
During my childhood I heard about loss after loss with bombings, shootings, punishment beatings mostly on TV but also within the community where I lived and where my grandmother lived. I knew some of those people who were suffering. My friend’s dad was mistakingly blown up. It was a car bomb intended for someone else. Another friend at the other end of the street nearly lost her dad when he was shot in the face. A boy round the corner from us lost his brother when a gang dropped a concrete block on his head, another family lost a young child in a bombing. At times it overwhelmed me. I could not reconcile in my head how a human being could kill and maim another human being in such cold calculated ways. Still being in a bomb scare and being evacuated before bombs went off was part of life. You just got on with it. No one talked about how it made them feel just that it was awful and that it needed to end but there seemed to be no hope.
My memory is not great but what happened outside my primary school at the age of eight is branded into my brain. We came out of class and down the stairs as usual to the cloak room to get ready to leave school. As we got to the bottom of the stairs a hysterical p7 pupil was shouting to our teacher. I couldn’t quite make out what he was saying but he was pale and crying and pointing out the door towards the playground. I can’t remember what happened in between but the next memory I have is of driving through a crowd of reporters, ambulances, police, people. My friend’s mum was taking me home and I was crying uncontrollably. I looked to my left and saw the white covering soaked in blood over his body. A policeman who had been escorting us to and from school because of scuffles with a different school down the road, had been shot in the head. He was unarmed walking towards the school at chuck-out time on his own and someone had just walked up behind him and shot him. He was gone, the man who had been so friendly and knew my dad…gone. The P7 boys on playground duty had seen it all.
I remember going shopping for a christmas present the next day and thinking what’s this all about, here I am buying a present and he is dead. No one talked about it, there was no counseling at school, it was just life. It was on the news then forgotten about. Life carried on as usual, you just have to live with it. That’s when my frequent nightmares began.
I lost my Granny as a teenager, then my Grandfather whom I adored in my early twenties. I watched my Gran and my husband’s Grandmother die of cancer too, in fact we lost 3 Grandparents all within a few months of each other. My daughter was only born and I had to take her to the funerals with me. It was painful it hurt like mad but I could feel God in it all holding me up answering my prayers, strengthening me. All I could say some days was “Lord, help. I know you are there. I trust you”. The only reason I could say that with complete assurance was because of what I had learned during the hardest experience of my life to date.
About six years ago my best friend gave birth to a baby girl. Tragically she only lived until the umbilical cord was cut as she could not breathe on her own, her lungs had not developed properly. I knew my friend was booked in for a c-section that morning so when she phoned me i was excited and chirped “Well, tell me the news”. There was a silence and then I could tell by the tone of her voice that something was wrong but my brain wasn’t computing what she was saying. There was a problem and she was really sorry. I cried out “What. What, tell me what’s happened!” I started to feel sick. “I’m really sorry but the baby died”, she sounded very calm. She was saying sorry to me…I listened in shock and am ashamed to say probably wasn’t any help to her as I cried “no no no no!”.
Seeing her and her husband holding their baby girl and talking to her with such love but such pain was heart breaking. It felt so wrong, so so wrong. I couldn’t imagine how my friend must have been feeling. I looked at her with her stomach still swollen from carrying and nurturing this little one with all the right food groups. She put me to shame with her strict diet. I gazed at the baby perfectly formed with thick dark hair, cute little ears. But her lips were not the right colour and there wasn’t a baby smell or baby sound or wriggling. My husband and I felt completely out of our depth but I wanted to be there for her so I swallowed hard and just listened to her talk.
Later I thought to myself…”How could God allow this to happen?” I had prayed for that baby since I knew of its conception, for its health, development and safe arrival. But I knew God was there right in the middle of the mess. I kept praying and felt God answer time and time again over the next lot of months. Then after things had settled I felt really shaken in my faith. “Lord, if I pray and you don’t do what I ask then how can I trust you to keep bad things from me? What is the point in praying at all? I can’t cope with that. I can’t trust you.” These are only a few of the conservations I was having with Him. I can only describe that time as feeling being lost at sea with no anchor not sure about what I believed God was like any more. I prayed, I read my bible, I went to church but I felt insecure. I had no peace.
Then one morning at church we were singing and the words of the song hit me full in the face and I couldn’t sing the words “when the darkness closes in Lord still I will say blessed be the name of the Lord…you give and you take away my heart will choose to say blessed be your name…”
I could hear God saying “I didn’t promise you a bed of roses, an easy life, I promised I would be faithful and my love for you would be steadfast and that my grace would be sufficient for you, do you trust me only in the good times?” My heart melted, I asked for forgiveness. I raised my hands in the air and I knew that I had chosen him to be my rock in the good and the bad. I’ve had other things happen in my life since that time, hard painful heart breaking stuff, it’s just life and sometimes all I have had the strength to say is “Lord I trust You, help me” and He has. I trust Him because He understands. He has suffered. He choose to suffer for me so that I can be His for eternity. He knows pain, He knows loss, He experienced it to a fuller degree than me. He sees all the pain and all the loss from the beginning of time until He returns to us. It grieves Him to look on it but He doesn’t turn away. He faces it and uses it for good, for His glory. He gets right in the middle of the mess. He understands our pain, He doesn’t make it disappear but He helps us through it.
He has even given me the ability to praise Him in the midst of pain. Why? because I remember how He is perfect and Holy and how He suffered in a way none of us who call him Lord will have to suffer. He took on the wrath of God, diverted it all from us to Him. He cried out “Why have you forsaken me, Father!” and suffered and endured that loss and pain and separation so that we will never have to.
Psalm 121
I lift my eyes to the hills
from where does my help come?
My help comes from the Lord
who made heaven and earth.
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