"Where is God when it hurts?
Really for most of us, this is the first thing we do when we are confronted with difficult questions in life - we seek God. However, in those moments God has a way of remaining hidden and silent. We are left struggling, groping for answers and relief, wandering and wondering. Where is He? Is He standing afar off, arms folded, watching as we haplessly struggle to tread water without going under.
I wonder whether this is how a person in the world feels when he is faced with a loss or pain. Have we been able to empathize and meet them at their level rather than expect them to come to our level, our programs, our activities. They watched, waited. No one has come forward. The church will go on, the world will go on, the activities will remain as they are, everyone goes on with their lives, the suffering continue to suffer, silently.
Pain they say is good, at least physical pain. It acts as a warning system to alert us of inherent dangers to our everyday life. But what about emotional pain? Something that is not very apparent and obvious. Can we stare at the face of someone suffering or someone dying and see beyond the physical pain to see the emotional pain? Do we take the trouble to do so? What do we do?
"God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts to us in our pain" - CS Lewis. I wonder why we still religiously perpetuate the image of the priest and the Levite who walk by with blinkered eyes, muffled ears and muzzled mouths as we side-step the inconvenient and leave the responsibility to the uncelebrated Samaritan? Our view of the world remains that of trees walking.
Can we do without pain? Can pain be avoided? It's all around us, the hospital wards filled with the chronically sick and the dying where death seems to be the only certain relief to pain and suffering, the streets of the underprivileged with faces of anxiety for whom life's daily challenge remains food, shelter and clothing, the undernourished staring back at us with gaunt eyes and emaciated bodies, the lives of those abused looking into an uncertain future. Maybe that is why God chooses to remain silent - so that He can be heard through us; and He chooses to remain hidden - so that He can be seen in us or He chooses not to do anything - so that whatever He does is done through us. Where is God when it hurts? I wonder.....
MT
21 December 2010
If I may ask you a question.
ReplyDeleteIf I get you correctly, you are half saying that God could be folding His arm and stands by doing nothing when people suffer.
If this is true, what would you think He should do, or what would you want Him to do?
I don't think God does nothing. But that is the way we feel sometimes. And sometimes we fail to recognize it when he does something.
ReplyDeleteMost of the time, a lot of what He does is done through ordinary people like you and me who are prompted and moved whenever we see something. The question is, do we step out to the plate?
We always want God to act with a big "bang", something that we can see very clearly. Sometimes He does that. Most of the time, it is the subtlety of the way He acts that leave us guessing (and frustrated). I remember the Bible says, that His ways are past finding out! (Rom 11:33).
We want Him to be at the forefront, but He usually acts in the background by gentle persuasion, and leaves us the privilege of being seen.
We want God to act according to our time-table. But the reality is He is God and not us. (Someone should produce a film, 'If I could be God for one day.....). That is always sobering but often times not easy to accept.
Thanks for the reply.
ReplyDelete