Where is God in my Pain?

It’s sobering to think it’s been a year since we were here. So much happens in a year. When I looked back over it, Steve and I welcomed our third grandchild, our son was ordained as a deacon in his church, our five-year-old grandson had his first trip to emergency when he cut open his chin, and we’ve gotten older. (You haven’t, but we have). So much has happened in your lives as well: births, graduations, retirements, weddings, new jobs … and deaths. Some of these happenings have been welcome and some have not. Some left us praising God, and others may have left us asking: Where is God? That’s a question that has been asked and cried through the centuries. A question that haunts theologians and sufferers alike. A question that never gets old and seldom gets answered.

Our text today from Psalm 40 opens with: “I waited patiently for the Lord.” The next line reads: “He drew me up from the desolate pit, out of the miry bog, and set my feet upon a rock, making my steps secure.”
The lines come one after the other, but the reality is, there’s a lot of life between line one and line two —
a lot of pain, grief, and struggle. The Hebrew word for “desolate pit” reads: pit of tumult. It’s easy to read this psalm and think the rescue is quick. But the psalmist says: “waited patiently.” There’s no need for patience if it’s instant. How much time, how much suffering was there in the waiting – between the first line and the next?

Maybe you’re experiencing a pit of tumult in this season and every day you’re wracked with physical pain
and you struggle to get out of bed or out of the house — to do the things you used to do or that others do with ease.

Maybe every day you wrestle with the emotional agony of an estranged child, of losing a spouse, the roller coaster of trying to conceive, or debilitating regret.

Maybe every day you fight with mental anguish, trauma, anxiety, fear, or depression and all you long for is to know, feel, or sense God. To experience God comforting you, holding you, reassuring you, lifting you out of a pit of tumult. But Instead, all you experience is a cold and empty silence.
WHERE IS GOD?

You pray but your prayers feel empty. They bounce off the ceiling and come crashing down in thundering silence. You feel alone, abandoned, betrayed even. GOD, WHERE ARE YOU? “Isn’t this when I need you most? Isn’t it now that I should be experiencing your presence?” Where’s the warm glow, the aura that people talk about; the testimonies you’ve heard from so many. Corrie ten Boom was a holocaust survivor
who daily endured starvation, flea-infested beds, freezing cold and the fear of the gas chambers. She said this: “I have experienced God’s presence in the deepest darkest hell that men can create.” That’s nice. It’s good to know that when I’m in that kind of hell I’ll experience that. Except, I’m not feeling it. Instead, I cry: GOD, WHERE ARE YOU?

Now is that a question you’ve felt comfortable asking in church? Surrounded by people going on about their God experiences. Do you feel excluded? Like you’re the exception? Like you don’t belong? And what about those verses: “God is near to the broken hearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit” (Psalm 34:18). Or the next line of Psalm 40:1
“He lifted me out of the desolate pit, out of the miry bog; he set my feet on a rock making my steps secure.”
But you’re just not feeling it! GOD, WHERE ARE YOU? Where is your presence? Isn’t that what we expect?
Isn’t that what we should expect? After all, Jesus said: “I will never leave you nor forsake you.”

I think instinctively we blame ourselves. Maybe we got it through teaching. Or, we just assumed that for some reason we’re not worthy of God’s presence, or not in tune enough, or not spiritual enough, or not wired that way, or we don’t read our Bible enough, or pray or fast enough, or, or …

For many of us raised in a version of Christianity that presents faith as something you strive after,
successful faith means: a sense of connection with God, living in a state of inner peace all the time.
Life is, or should be, a warm glow.

Experiencing the silence of God feels like falling through river ice in the dead of winter, or eating alone in a busy cafeteria of peers. We’re left feeling helpless, abandoned, invisible, forgotten, neglected, even betrayed. Maybe that’s why so many have left the church or been disillusioned by faith.

There is often a large gap between what we expect from the Christian faith and what we actually experience. And the gap creates incredible disappointment. And it’s a gap that we don’t feel comfortable talking about in church.

That’s what we’re wrestling with today: Where is God in my pain?

Much like the question of “Why is there suffering?” this too, has no concrete answer. There’s no formula or solution to acquiring God’s presence. That’s what makes this both difficult and easy to tackle – difficult because there’s no answer, and easy because there’s no answer. What we can do, what I hope to do, is to alleviate some misconceptions and angst. To give windows of understanding into what feels like absence or silence or a barren desert; to hear from those who have experienced this and to see what the Bible has to say.

This isn’t light stuff. It’s real, raw and may hit close to home. Or, if it’s not where you’re at, I hope you’ll glean some insight into where others might be at and maybe how to journey together with them through the deafening silences. And hopefully you’ll create safe space to ask this question in church: GOD, WHERE ARE YOU? And space to acknowledge: I’m just not experiencing God’s presence.

Philip Yancey wrestled with and has written much on this subject. His father died when he was a year old. He never knew his dad, but he lived under the shadow of unanswered prayer and misguided faith. His parents, convinced God would heal his dad of polio if they acted in faith, removed him from the iron lung that kept him alive — basically took him off of life support – and he died nine days later. His whole childhood was haunted and overshadowed by disappointment and confusion. As a journalist, he went on a quest to understand, and he spoke to and interviewed hundreds of people. He said that when people heard that he was writing a book titled, “Disappointment with God” they asked if they could speak with him. He became their confidante. He received letters that read: “I haven’t told anyone before, but my life as a Christian has included times of great disappointment.”

Why had they not told anyone before? It’s likely because of a sense of failure, shame, and isolation. We don’t say that in church, right? We don’t admit that we’re not experiencing God regularly. We don’t share that we wonder if there’s even a God on the other side of prayer. They felt that they were the only ones experiencing God’s absence rather than God’s presence.

Many of us were weaned on a steady diet of books, sermons, and personal testimonies of triumph and success in the Christian faith – that mountain-top experience in the valley of despair. I don’t doubt any of those stories. They’re exceptional stories! Stories that give us hope. But exceptional stories are the only ones we hear because they’re exceptional and we wrongly think they’re the norm and we’re the exception – that something’s wrong with us. When that’s all you hear, you become conditioned to expect dramatic evidence of God presence and when you don’t see results, or at least feel God’s palpable presence, it’s only natural to be disappointed, to feel betrayed and alone. Most of us didn’t question what we were told
and so there must be something wrong with us — we must be exception.

In his book Prayer, Yancey recounts the story of Karl, an air Force lieutenant colonel who was in a cycling accident and was paralyzed from the chest down. It meant the end of his military career and now he’s a chaplain in a long-term care home. There were so many adjustments to his life. He needed an accessible home, lost his career, forced to live with no bladder or bowel control, continually fighting muscle spasms and internal infections, and he had to have steel rods implanted along his spinal column. But what shocked Yancey the most was what Karl said: “I must say, though, there has been one change more difficult than any of those adjustments, even more difficult than the “Why?” questions that I can’t help asking. God’s presence has withdrawn. Just when I need God most, I can no longer sense him. I keep on praying, and believing, but it’s as if I’m praying to the ceiling. I get no response.” This is Karl, the Chaplain, the one who encourages, prays, and counsels others in pain. The one we’d assume would experience God.

In 1940, C. S. Lewis, author of Narnia Chronicles, wrote a book called The Problem of Pain, exploring the subject of pain and suffering. It’s brilliant and he tackles the subject with the intellectual rigour we’d expect from Lewis. It’s still in print 80 years later. However, not long after, his wife, Joy, died of bone cancer and he wrote a very different book — A Grief Observed. This time he wrote of his personal experience of loss and grief. This was not an academic book, but a personal testimony. Grief defies explanation. In fact, it mocks explanation. At her funeral someone said, “Your faith must be such a comfort to you at this moment.” He replied, “My faith is no comfort at all.” This is the great C. S. Lewis, author of The Problem of Pain.

And who of us hasn’t heard of Mother Teresa, now saint Teresa? Nobel Peace Prize winner for her work in the gutters of Calcutta, ministering to the dying and destitute, icon of godliness, contemporary symbol of selfless love and service. She wrote to her mentor, “The silence and emptiness [of God] is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear.” This was not a passing weekend thing. For the last almost 50 years of her life she felt the absence of God. This is the great Mother Teresa.

They are all in good company. Job too, experienced the silence of God. In Job 23:8-9 we read:
“If I go forward, [God] is not there; or backward, I cannot perceive [God]; on the left [God] hides, and I cannot behold [God]; I turn to the right, but I cannot see [God].”

This is a person in pain who longs to know that God is present, by his side, cheering for him, comforting him, reassuring him. But instead, only deafening silence.

And we can’t stop there. Remember Jesus’s final words? “My God my God, why have you forsaken me?”
(I think if this scene happened today in the triumphalist churches of North America, where we all ‘should be’ experiencing our best life now, we might see John at the foot of the cross saying,
“Oh don’t say that Jesus. God hasn’t forsaken you. Have a bit more faith. Read your Bible more. Pray more.”) But this is Jesus and Jesus is experiencing the very real absence of God. Whether God is absent or not is irrelevant. When he needs God most, God seems absent. Of all the people who were closest to God, of all the people who should have experienced God’s presence, shouldn’t it have been Jesus?
What does that tell us? There’s no easy answer. Jesus experienced what we experience. Jesus knows the pain and sting of feeling abandoned by God. And if Jesus experienced this, why would we think something is wrong with us?

There has not been a spiritual great who has not experienced this sense of absence. Assuming some deficiency in ourselves is self-defeating – like salt in a wound. So what do we do? Where does that leave us? I believe we have been given two, at least two, gifts or tools to use in these situations. First, is the lost practice of lament. The Bible is full of lament. Fully two-thirds of the Psalms – that’s 100 out of 150 of the Psalms — are prayers of lament, prayers of mourning, of protesting.

For instance, look at Psalm 13:1
How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?
2 How long must I bear pain in my soul
and have sorrow in my heart all day long?
This is a demand, a protest.

Or Psalm 22:1-2
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?
O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer;
and by night but find no rest.

These are protests. The tone of protest is often lost in our English translations and sanitized in our tidy worship gatherings. But the flavour is protest, demand. God’s character, justice, and integrity are being called into question. It’s anything but tidy. (If these were phone texts to God there would be shaking fist and red-face emojis)

Right in the pages of Scripture, we are given permission to rage and rail at God. In the silence we continue to pray. We lament; we cry out to God. And we lament together. These are prayers written primarily for a community to be prayed and wailed together, in solidarity.

So the first gift is lament. And the second is one another. In the silence we cannot minimalize that we are God to one another. Episcopal Priest Liz Tichenor recounts her experience at the graveside of her little baby. There she was on her knees, throwing handfuls of dirt into the tiny grave, sobbing and convulsing in grief, paralyzed by sorrow. At one point, she looked up and saw that she was not alone. Her whole church family were all around her, and not just observing her from a safe distance, not just politely wiping tears and sniffles. But on their hands and knees in the dirt with her. They too were digging into the earth for handfuls of dirt to put into the grave. They too were participating in this messy grief ritual. As she said: she had to walk this path — to do this as a mom — but they didn’t. They didn’t have to open themselves up to such grief — to be there, literally kneeling in the dirt of her grief. But they were and they did. They chose to carry her grief with her and for her. And they continued to do so in the months following – to be the tangible presence of God. So where was God? Right there, with handfuls of dirt, kneeling at the tiny grave.

God usually works through people and God usually shows up through people and God’s presence is most felt through people. We have a word for that in theology: incarnation. It comes from the Latin in + made flesh. God came in the flesh of Jesus and God continues to come to us in flesh to break the silence through people, through each other. Wiping our tears, holding hope for us, giving witness to our pain, and even believing on our behalf when faith fails us. Being God in the silence. Being, incarnating, the presence of God. God hasn’t changed God’s method – God came in the flesh and God still comes in the flesh. Can we imagine that kind of one-another-ness in our churches?

Not long ago I sat with a mom in grief — a mom struggling to hold onto hope. And I said to her as I’ve said to others: let us hold hope for you; let us have faith for you. And over the past couple of years, I’ve had to rely on my circle of friends to do the same for me. When all looked dark and God seemed silent, others held hope and even faith. I can testify that lately I have experienced God not in tingly sensations or spectacular encounters, or remarkable mental pictures, but in the gentle, faithful presence of others. I’ve heard God in their prayers. I’ve felt God through their gentle, compassionate presence — God, incarnate through others. God in the flesh through others. Do you see our responsibility?

So back to our question: Where is God in my pain? In Jesus’ promise: I will never leave you nor forsake you. God is right there — present in silence. God is present through the presence of others. In their tears, their casseroles, rides, compassion, and their prayers. In the presence of those who dare to wade into our pain, if we dare to let them, if we dare to ask in church, where is God?

God is present in our lament and in one another. Those are the two gifts. Jesus’ incarnation – God with us, and Jesus’ promise — I will never leave you nor forsake you, continue among us. It’s why the church is called the body of Christ. Let’s not minimalize that. God has not changed God’s method of showing up. God still comes in flesh and blood – in the flesh and blood of God’s church, God’s people, you & I.

There may be times we experience tingles, or be overcome with spectacular sensations of God, and of course that’s wonderful (I don’t deny it and even envy it). But most often, when God comes to us, God comes in and through another; in the small, the humble, the ordinary.

The bottom line is that the Church has often presented itself as the people with the answers but we are called to be the people of presence. Answers will always disappoint; presence will not. So let us be a people of God’s presence. Let us be those who are willing to dig in the dirt of another’s pain and be Jesus — be the presence of God, be the answer to their question: WHERE ARE YOU GOD? I’m here. I’m here with you.

Amen