When you or I are suffering, the why question is one thing. Why did this happen? Why me? Why didn’t God stop it?
But if God really does exist, then there is another question that can become even more personal.
Where is He when I’m in the worst of it?
Where is God when I’m hurting and nothing seems to be changing? Where is He when I pray and don’t feel anything? Where is He when I feel completely alone?
I’ve been in places where that question felt very real, and I’ve sat with people whose pain was so intense that, whatever they believed about God, they simply couldn’t sense His presence.
So I don’t want to give you a neat answer and pretend that if you understand the right Bible verse you’ll suddenly feel better. But I do think Christianity has something important to say about where God is when we suffer.
In another conversation, Does Everything Happen for a Reason?, I talked about how not everything happens because God secretly intended it to happen.
God does not need to cause something in order to redeem it — to make something good out of what happened.
But that leaves this question:
If God didn’t cause what happened to me, where is He while I’m going through it?
For me, the answer begins with Jesus.
God isn’t watching from a distance
God isn’t standing at a distance, watching what happens to us. In Jesus, He came into our world and experienced suffering Himself.
Jesus knew what it was to be tired and hungry, misunderstood and rejected. He knew betrayal by someone He trusted, fear about what was coming, physical pain and the grief of losing someone He loved.
So when I say that I believe God understands suffering, I don’t just mean God knows suffering exists.
The Christian answer to suffering is not, first of all, “Here’s why.”
It is:
“I’m here.”
Jesus stood at a grave and cried
One of the things I love about the story of Jesus is what happened when His friend Lazarus died.
By the time Jesus arrived, Lazarus had been buried. His sisters, Mary and Martha, were grieving. And Jesus knew something they didn’t — He knew Lazarus was about to live again.
But when Jesus saw Mary crying, and saw the people around her grieving, He didn’t tell them to cheer up because everything was about to work out.
He cried too.
The Bible simply says:
“Jesus wept.”
I think that matters.
Jesus knew how the story was going to end, and He still stopped and cried with the people who were hurting. Knowing there is hope doesn’t make pain unreal. Knowing there is resurrection doesn’t mean death doesn’t hurt.
And sometimes what you or I need most in suffering isn’t someone explaining what happened.
We need someone willing to be there with us in it.
That is what Jesus did.
Jesus even knows what it feels like to be abandoned
Then there is the cross.
Near the end, Jesus cries:
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
I don’t believe God the Father had actually left Jesus, or that somehow the Trinity had broken apart. But Jesus’ anguish was real.
He knows what it is like to be in terrible pain and cry out to God as though God is nowhere to be found.
And I think there is something important there for you and me.
Those two things can feel exactly the same when you’re in the middle of suffering. But they aren’t necessarily the same thing.
Sometimes what we feel is so loud we can’t sense anything else
Our feelings matter. I’m not interested in telling someone who is hurting that what they feel isn’t real. It is real.
But our feelings don’t always tell us everything that is true.
When grief becomes intense, it can fill almost our entire field of vision. The same thing can happen with fear, pain, anxiety, exhaustion or loneliness. Sometimes what we are feeling becomes so overwhelming that we simply cannot sense much beyond it.
You can be surrounded by people who genuinely care about you and still feel completely alone.
I know something about that myself.
I told part of this story in the booklet When Life Hurts More Than It Should, so if you’ve read that, some of this will be familiar.
A few years ago I found myself a long way from home. I was sick — the kind of sick that empties you out. There were more than a hundred people around me, and I have rarely felt so alone.
I couldn’t reach the one person I most wanted to talk to. I struggled to get out of bed and, when I did, I couldn’t stay standing for long. I’d love to tell you that I discovered some profound lesson that night and woke up the next morning transformed.
I didn’t.
It was wretched.
The worst part wasn’t simply that I hurt. It was feeling that I was in it on my own.
I’ve also supported people through that same kind of experience. They may know that their family loves them. They may know their friends are there. They may even know what they believe about God.
But in that moment they simply cannot feel any of it.
That doesn’t make the feeling false. But it also doesn’t necessarily mean everyone has disappeared.
And I think the same thing can be true of God.
I don’t think it helps to say, “But God is with you, so you shouldn’t feel alone.” That just adds guilt to the pain.
I think the better question is:
Could God still be present even when I cannot sense Him?
I believe He can.
Nothing can separate us from God
That is one of the reasons Romans 8 means so much to me.
Paul isn’t describing some easy Christian life where suffering disappears once you trust God. Quite the opposite. He talks about the whole creation groaning. He talks about us groaning. He even talks about moments when we are so weak that we don’t know what to pray.
I know what that feels like. Maybe you do too.
Sometimes prayer isn’t an eloquent conversation with God. Sometimes it is simply:
“God, I don’t know what to say.”
And Paul says that even there, the Holy Spirit is helping us in our weakness.
Then he comes to this extraordinary conclusion: nothing can separate us from the love of God in Jesus. Not death. Not life. Not what is happening now. Not what might happen tomorrow.
Nothing.
That doesn’t mean I will always feel close to God. It means my ability to feel Him isn’t what keeps Him close to me.
There can be moments when all I can feel is the suffering.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean God has gone anywhere.
Sometimes God’s presence looks like another person
There is another part of this that I don’t want to miss.
You and I were never meant to do suffering alone.
Paul uses this picture in 1 Corinthians 12. He says Christians are like parts of one body, and then says that if one part suffers, every part suffers with it.
Sometimes I think the person sitting beside us is one of the ways God makes His presence tangible.
It might be the friend who turns up, the person who brings dinner, the one who drives you to an appointment, someone who listens without trying to fix you, or someone who prays when you don’t know what to pray.
Sometimes it is simply the person who stays.
Christians and churches don’t always do this well. Sometimes we have been among the people offering explanations when we should have just sat down and listened.
But this is what Christian community is supposed to be.
If you are suffering, you should not have to carry it completely alone.
Joni
I first read Joni Eareckson Tada’s autobiography when I was about seven years old. Her accident had happened only a little over a decade earlier, and her story stayed with me.
Joni was 17 when a diving accident left her paralysed. She has spoken openly about the depression and fear that followed and about learning to trust God in a life that did not suddenly return to what it had been before.
Her life left an impact on me because God continued to be at the centre of her pain, in a life that for nearly six decades has been shaped by that one terrible event.
Not because Joni somehow became a spiritual superhero who learned to suffer better than everybody else.
The paralysis didn’t disappear. The difficult days didn’t disappear.
Her testimony is that God walked with her in it.
If you want to hear Joni tell her own story rather than me telling you about her, you can explore it through Joni and Friends.
Corrie
Corrie ten Boom’s story is very different.
During the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, Corrie and her family hid Jewish people in their home. They were eventually arrested, and Corrie and her sister Betsie were sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp.
Betsie died there.
Corrie survived.
Her book The Hiding Place tells that story.
Corrie is one of my heroes. But I don’t want to tell her story as:
Look how strong Corrie was.
One of the things that has always struck me about Corrie is how often she talks about her own weakness rather than presenting herself as someone with extraordinary faith who never struggled.
Fear was real. Weakness was real. There were things she simply could not do in her own strength.
The remarkable thing isn’t that Corrie was always strong enough.
It is that God was faithful when she wasn’t.
Joni and Corrie lived through completely different kinds of suffering. Neither story tells me that trusting God means suffering disappears.
Their testimonies point somewhere else.
God walked with them in it.
If you want to explore Corrie’s story for yourself, I would start with The Hiding Place.
God has already moved towards us
There is one brief connection I want to make back to something we’ve already talked about.
In Romans 5, Paul says that God demonstrated His love for us through Jesus while we were still separated from Him, and that through Jesus we can be reconciled to God.
That matters when God feels distant.
Christianity begins with the claim that God has already moved towards us.
The cross isn’t a picture of God standing somewhere safely away from suffering. It is God entering it.
That doesn’t answer every question about why something happened. It isn’t meant to.
But it tells me something about where God is.
The valley is still a valley
Which brings me to Psalm 23.
You may know it even if you haven’t spent much time around the Bible.
David talks about walking through the darkest valley.
Notice what he doesn’t say.
He doesn’t say:
God kept me out of the valley.
He says:
“You are with me.”
I think there is a world of difference between those two ideas.
Christianity doesn’t promise you or me that there will be no dark valleys. It doesn’t promise we will always understand why we are there.
And it doesn’t even promise that, while we are walking through them, we will always feel God walking beside us.
Sometimes the valley is so dark that all we can see is the valley. Sometimes grief is so loud that it drowns everything else out. Sometimes fear, pain or loneliness can become so intense that God feels a million kilometres away.
That feeling is real.
But it doesn’t necessarily tell us everything that is true.
Jesus understands grief. He understands fear. He understands physical pain. He even understands what it is like to cry out and ask why God seems absent.
Romans 8 tells me that nothing can separate us from God’s love. The Holy Spirit helps us when we don’t even know what to pray.
And sometimes the people around us become the hands, feet and voice of that presence when we cannot sense it for ourselves.
So where is God when I’m suffering?
I can’t promise that you will always feel Him. I can’t promise you’ll understand what is happening. And I’m certainly not going to tell you that if your faith were stronger, you would somehow find all of this easier.
But I do believe this:
God isn’t standing at a distance, watching what happens to us.
In Jesus, He came into our world and entered human suffering Himself.
And Psalm 23 gives us a promise that is quieter than an explanation, but perhaps much more useful when we are actually in the valley:
“You are with me.”