For a long time I couldn’t get past the idea that God would “let me” be abused as a child.
My suffering at the hands of my father severed my faith in God … but he never abandoned me.
I prayed constantly for deliverance, for help, for relief, for anything other than what was happening to me.
I couldn’t see it at the time, but God was there helping me all the way through.
I was reading that the human response to suffering is not to try to explain why it exists, but to fight against its manifestation in the world. To explain suffering is to minimize it or justify its existence. The psalms of lament are especially instructive in this regard, in presenting prayer as resistance.
I still have doubts. I continue to work through them …I still don’t totally understand why we suffer. Sometimes I can tie it in with original sin and make some kind of sense of it. Other times it feels totally meaningless and causes me to question everything.
Even C.S. Lewis thought he had answered the question. Then he watched his wife die of cancer and realized all the theology in the world didn’t take away the intense pain and senseless feeling of it. If C.S. Lewis couldn’t solve it, then I don’t think any of us will.
I do know that God suffers with us and that we are never alone.
B 🤍