Where is God when it hurts?
Blog by Debbie Williams, MitE Volunteer Coordinator
As a Christian chaplain my role is to provide spiritual and pastoral support to people of all faiths or none. This means meeting people in the place they are experiencing in that moment, however joyful or sad that moment may be, however happy or difficult a time they find themselves in.
Many of the conversations revolve around day to day issues, maybe things that are in the news, hobbies, issues relating to work-place anxieties, concerns or frustrations, possibly something at home.
My role as a chaplain is to listen and to help people to find a way to re-frame their response to a situation, to find some hope or light within it; something that makes sense to the person, rather than advising on what makes sense to me. It’s important that the person I’m talking to knows that although my Christian faith frames my personal response to situations, I accept that it may well not make sense to them. I am not there to try to convince them of my way of thinking and believing, I’m simply there to help them to recognise and embrace their own sense of hope and resolution within themselves. When people want to talk about God, if they have questions, some of the main ones are:
‘How can you believe in God when there is so much badness in the world?’
‘How can you believe in a God who allows natural disasters and illness to kill children and innocent people?’
‘Why does he allow so much cruelty?’
Currently it is something like: ‘If there is an all-powerful God who wants only good for his people, why has he allowed this Covid-19 pandemic to affect and kill so many people?’
These are questions that Christians often discuss amongst themselves too and there are no easy answers. As we think through these questions for ourselves and read Scripture and what some theologians have to say on the matter, there are three outcomes.
We either come to an explanation that we can accept.
We continue to struggle and pray, asking God to help us with these questions.
Sometimes, even Christians are unable to reconcile these questions with their faith and so they walk away from it and lose their connection with God.
In the latter case, I believe that doesn’t mean that God is not there, every moment, walking with them, waiting for them to turn back to Him, it simply means that they are no longer aware of Him, like when your shadow moves from in front of you to behind you as the sun changes position, you are no longer aware of it but it is still there with you. As a chaplain I will not pretend that I know the answers to these questions but I can tell you what I believe and how I answer these questions for myself at the moment, though I am still very much learning and growing in my relationship with God.
In Genesis we learn that God made us in His image, He gave us free will, the ability to choose to know the difference between good and evil and thereby He also gave us the ability to choose to do good or evil. He also created a world that has natural laws of evolution and made us stewards of this world. When we cause problems through ineffective and unfair stewarding, destroying natural habitats through greed in the name of progress, we upset the balance of the ecosystems and natural laws that God put in place to protect His creation. Sometimes within the ecosystems that God created, natural disasters and diseases occur.
In the Psalms we learn that it is OK to express anger, pain and confusion about the situations that we find ourselves in. God understands our hurt, He answers our cries but not always in the way that we ask. Sometimes He will send us a person who will provide us pastoral care, or who will speak into a thought or dream that we have had that refuses to leave us alone. Sometimes He sends us a change in our situation, but not always the change that we have prayed for. Sometimes He gives us the space to take a step back and to find that we have more tolerance and resilience than we realised. We don’t always recognise these incidences and even when we do, we call them coincidences and don’t recognise their importance.
In the New Testament we learn that God sent Jesus, His Son, to suffer and die for us. To show us that suffering and pain are all too often part of life in this broken world. But by sending Jesus to suffer and die for us, and then by resurrecting Him, God showed us that suffering could be overcome, that we could still have some healing in this world and definite hope for the future. Jesus never taught that we would be materially wealthy and physically healthy if we follow Him. In fact, He warns us that there will be suffering along our journey with Him and yet if we trust and believe in Him, we can still experience love and joy on this journey. It is my belief that God is right here with us in the midst of suffering, that He is constantly working to create something good from the bad. There are more people recovering than dying despite the terrible losses that so many people have experienced. There is a reduction in pollution making air quality so much better in countries where this has been a problem for decades. There is even wildlife coming back to the canals of Venice.