Where is God When Suffering Strikes?

Late one night this past April, I was standing, in the rain by the side of an unfamiliar road in Bulgaria. I was waiting for a car coming up the hill to pass me so I could run across the street to the warmth of the hotel on the other side. 18 of us from BBC were staying there during our mission trip to Sophia.

I was tired, wet and cold, in too much of a hurry and I was completely distracted as I stood there trying to think through the series of things that I still had to do before I could sleep that night.

As soon as the car coming up the hill passed me, I ran behind it, not realizing another car was coming, full speed, in the opposite direction, and I was hit. My head broke the windshield of the car, and I was thrown to the street, rupturing my shoulder ligaments, and damaging my arm and hand.

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October 28, 2012
2 Corinthians 1:3-11, Where is God When Suffering Strikes?
Pastor Patti Ricotta, Brewster Baptist Church

Where is God When Suffering Strikes? from BBC Staff on Vimeo.

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That night, as I was lying in the intensive care unit of a Bulgarian military hospital, I couldn’t sleep. You might be thinking that I couldn’t sleep because I was in so much pain, but that wasn’t it. At that point, I couldn’t feel my legs, so you might think I couldn’t sleep because I was afraid I was going to be a paraplegic, but that wasn’t it either. Through the broken English of the doctor, I gathered that my head had been hit so hard that my brain might start bleeding internally at any moment, so I must lie very still. But it wasn’t even the distress of possible brain damage, or death that caused my sleeplessness that night.

I couldn’t sleep because I was experiencing the most intense, palpable, all-engulfing sense of the presence of God with me in the room. And, with his presence came “the peace that surpasses all understanding.” I felt as if Jesus was sitting right next to me all night long, and I just didn’t want to fall asleep on him.

All that night, I carried on a candid and probing conversation with God in prayer. I talked to him about everything; about each of our team members, about my three sons, about my life. I told him that if I was going to be a paraplegic I wanted one of those shiny wheelchairs like the one Professor Xavier has in the X-Men movies. And I asked the Lord about the meaning of what had happened, and about the purpose of pain and suffering.

The conversation I started with God that night launched a meaningful and sincere quest to understand more about the problem of pain and suffering from God’s point of view. I want to share with you some of the things I’ve been learning on my journey.

One of the most helpful passages I have found on the problem of pain and suffering is 2 Cor. 1:3-11. Listen and see if it resonates with you too.

³ Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort,

⁴ who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God.

⁵ For just as we share abundantly in the sufferings of Christ, so also our comfort abounds through Christ.

⁶ If we are distressed, it is for your comfort and salvation; if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which produces in you patient endurance of the same sufferings we suffer.

⁷ And our hope for you is firm, because we know that just as you share in our sufferings, so also you share in our comfort.

⁸ We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about the troubles we experienced in the province of Asia. We were under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired of life itself.

⁹ Indeed, we felt we had received the sentence of death. But this happened that we might not rely on ourselves but on God, who raises the dead.

¹⁰ He has delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us again. On him we have set our hope that he will continue to deliver us, ¹¹ as you help us by your prayers. Then, many will give thanks on our behalf for the gracious favor granted us in answer to the prayers of many.

It has been said that perhaps the biggest obstacle to faith in God is the problem of pain and suffering. Many thoughtful intelligent people have turned away from God because they can’t get past the question: If God is all-loving and all-powerful, why doesn’t he bring an end to suffering?

Is it that he all-loving, but just not powerful enough to deal with the overwhelming magnitude of suffering in the world? Or is he all-powerful, but doesn’t really care about each one of us enough to be bothered with things like “this one’s cancer” or “those people’s famine?” Where is God when suffering strikes?

Paul begins this passage by telling us exactly where God is. He gives praise to God, because as the Father of Compassion and the God of all comfort, God is with us to comfort us in all our troubles. The Greek verb that describes how God comforts us when we suffer is parakaleo. “God parakaleos us in all our troubles.”

What a rich word this is! What it means is that when you suffer, God “comes to be present with you; he comes to your side.” When you are in pain and don’t think you can take another step, he “urges you on” and “encourages” you. When you are anxious and melting with fear, he “instills courage” in you, and “cheers you up.” When you feel isolated and alone, he “invites you to come be with him, and go where he is going.”

It’s such a powerful word that it sort of gives us the picture that the moment you start to suffer, God drops everything to come be with you. That is exactly what I experienced on what could have been the most dreadful, fearful, earth-shattering night of my life.

God parakaleo-ed me. And instead of feeling isolated, away from my team-mates and family, in a foreign country, where not even the doctors spoke my language; instead of sinking into despair, Jesus and I stayed up talking all night long.

God’s presence with me didn’t mean that everything was going to be alright. I knew that. In fact, two days later an artery in my brain did bleed and I almost died then. I believe in healing, but at a time like that, when I didn’t know whether this was going to be the last day written for me in God’s book of life, God’s presence was far more wonderful to me than anything else I could ever have asked for.

What I want to say to you; what I need to say; what I have to say to you is that you want to cultivate a life where God is always present. And it’s never too late to start.

Suffering will come. It’s not a matter of if; it’s a matter of when. We need to practice the presence of God when we are not suffering so that when suffering comes it will be in a context that’s very familiar to us.

So spend time with the Lord every day; read his word with a reflective heart; sing worship songs to him in the car, in the shower—anywhere; make sure that your times of prayer include times of listening to what God wants to say to you; invite God into your daily activity and watch for his action in your life.

When the fiery darts of the Enemy set your life on fire, that’s not the best time to go looking for God the way you would run to find a bucket, fill it up with water and toss it on the ever-advancing flames. If you have been practicing the presence of God…he’s already there. It’s as if you and God have been building a sprinkler system of living water that turns on automatically as soon as the smoke starts to rise. His comforting presence rains peace down on you from the very beginning.

John Wyatt says, “Suffering is not a question that demands an answer; it is not a problem that demands a solution. It is a mystery that demands a presence.”[1]

In our passage Paul goes on to explain that God is not only present in our pain, but he uses the pain we suffer to make us into a powerful, empathetic presence in the lives of others who suffer.

In verses 4-7 Paul uses the same Greek verb, parakaleo to describe the kind of comfort we are meant to give each other when disaster strikes. The comfort we give is the same presence, encouragement, and cheer that we have received from God. 8 times he talks about the back and forth sway of life in which we receive comfort from God and then give it to others. In turn, they comfort us when we suffer again. Author Philip Yancy says that, “Suffering should come with a warning label: Do not practice this alone.”

I told you that I was praying for our team members throughout that night in the Bulgarian ICU, but they were praying for me too. I knew that they would be praying, and that they would call you here in the States and that you would be praying for me and all our team members, too. Knowing that was a great comfort to me. And the back and forth flow of comfort from God to you, to me, to the others, saw us all through that difficult time.

What are some practical ways we can share comfort with those who suffer? When I got home from Bulgaria I must have experienced them all. You continued to comfort me with the comfort which had been stored up in you from God at other times in your lives. People brought me food, and flowers. They prayed for me; drove me to the doctors. Bob Reynolds cut my grass. Even when the tall grass and rocks in my yard broke his lawnmower, twice, he still came back and finished the job.

See these cards? They are from you. In the early days of my recovery, I found that it was too much for me to have visitors, but these cards sustained me. Throughout my recovery, I kept them, read them, and reread them over and over. It’s not that they had some profound theological or magical words; they were your presence with me in a form I could handle. When I started back to work, I kept them in my car so I could grab them quickly if needed a boost. These encouraging and kind little notes transferred the comfort of God from your heart to mine. You eased my suffering just the way Paul says we should.

Earlier in my message I talked about the questions that keep people from believing in God: “If God is really all-loving, why would he let me suffer this way? If he is all-powerful why wouldn’t put an end to famines and tsunamis?” I’ve been saying that human suffering is met by God’s comfort through his presence and his people. Is that enough to answer the questions like the ones I just mentioned?

I heard an interview between John Ortberg and theologian Dallas Willard on the subject of pain and suffering. In the interview, Ortberg talks about a story from Steve Jobs biography.^[2] Jobs, of course, was the mastermind behind Apple’s iPhone, and other products, and he died last year of pancreatic cancer.

The biography says that early in his life, Job’s parents wanted him to have a Christian upbringing so they took him to a Lutheran church most Sundays. But that came to an end when Jobs was 13 years old. It was 1968 and LIFE Magazine had published a graphic cover showing two little girls who were starving to death in Biafra.

Jobs took the picture to church and confronted the pastor. “If I raise my finger,” 13 year old Jobs asked the pastor, “will God know which one I’m going to raise before I do?” The pastor answered, “Yes, God knows everything.” Then he pulled out the LIFE cover and asked, “Well does he know about this, and what’s going to happen to these children?” The pastor answered glibly something like, “Yes, but you just don’t understand.” Jobs then announced that he did not want to have anything to do with such a God, and he never when back to church.

In the interview, Dallas Willard addresses the issue by talking about the connection between the immeasurable preciousness of people in God’s eyes, on the one hand, and the infinite greatness of God on the other. (We see those two things together in the fact that Jesus, who is God in the flesh, loves us so much that he gave his life so that we could have abundant and eternal life.)

Now, if we can grasp something about the awesome greatness of God and the breathtaking power of his love we will be able to understand that at the right time, this great and loving God will make everything right and good—absolutely everything. God’s greatness and his love will see to it that all things will turn out right.

But in order to grasp that concept we need to have the framework of eternity.

For example, the starving children on Steve Jobs’ magazine cover lived all their short lives in pain and suffering. But when they died, they were met by a loving Father who embraced them and brought them into an eternity where they will never suffer again. Don’t you think they can accept the suffering they experienced because it meant that they existed, and therefore, they now have an eternal life of immeasurable joy? They can affirm that their lives were not lived in vain.

There is all kinds of unspeakable pain in this world, and I do not want to make light of that. But Paul says in 2 Cor. 4:16-17 that no matter what happens to us, we don’t have to lose heart because even though we are wasting away in pain and suffering, all our troubles will seem light and momentary compared to the eternal glory that is to come.

We can cling to Jesus, knowing that no matter what we suffer now, God will eventually make it all right and good. In the meantime there is the compassion and comfort we receive from God and his people.

The Bible presupposes that people will suffer. When we go through suffering we have a choice before us. Will we let our pain transform us or deform us?

At the end of our passage, Paul says that he and his companions had suffered beyond their ability to endure, so much that they felt they had received the sentence of death. “But,” he says, “this happened that we might not rely on ourselves but on God, who raises the dead.”

If we can cling to this eternal perspective when disaster strips us of the things that have held us together, we will be able to find the promise of pain. We will find a new freedom to explore greater intimacy with God, and with his people. This is, after all, what the spiritual journey is all about—loving God and loving people!

I believe in healing; but I believe in suffering too. May your suffering not be in vain, but open you up to a world of possibilities for a deeper, richer life with God and with his people.

Let’s pray:

Dear Father of compassion and God of all comfort, give us a vision of your immeasurable greatness and your overwhelming love so that we are drawn into a more intimate life with you.

Help us all to find ways to practice your presence more fully, so that when suffering strikes, we are keenly aware that you are already there with us.

Teach us how to build on what we already have with you, and so that we never have to fear what may lie around the corner of life.

Lord, make us realize that when we have Jesus, suffering is not the worst thing that can happen to us…because we know that suffering is temporary and life is beyond what we experience now.

Lord I pray for those who are suffering in our midst. You know each one. I pray that no matter where they have been in terms of their relationship with you, today will be the day they experience the comfort, the parakaleo, that you have been waiting to share with them. Also, I pray that even right now you will put into our minds someone who is in need of that human touch, transferring your comfort form our heart to theirs.

Thank you that suffering has the benefit of weaning us off our self-sufficiency and reminding us that we are dependent on God and others. Use us in the life of suffers to show our devotion and love to you and to them. Amen

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