Back to Basics: Learning to Rely on a Loving God
“Where’s the milk?” asks the time-pressed, breakfast-hustling husband.
“Where it always is—on the shelf in the fridge,” chirps the patient wife.
Life is punctuated with countless seemingly “urgent” questions that have simple and often overlooked or even ignored answers. One such question that bounces around in the mind of almost every human, sometimes almost as a petulant demand, at other times, just a silent, drifting cloud of wonder, is this:
Where is God when I need him?
To that challenging and often anger-darkened question, Jesus, in his serene majesty—like that indulgent wife countering the querulous husband--provides a simple but often overlooked answer, clearly, succinctly and trenchantly: “Surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age" (Matt. 28:20). Right here with us!? So that’s where he is! That promise implies not only perpetuity (“until the end of the age”), but also continuity (“always”).
That divine presence almost cries out for our sustained awareness. The positive love-charged awareness of this truth is called the practice of the presence of God. When practiced in the midst of suffering—“when I need him”—it is not only comforting and consoling, but also enormously soul-sanctifying.
The basic truth of our Creator’s unwavering presence is reasserted insistently throughout his word: “God has said, “Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you” (Heb. 13:5); and this segues into a quote from Psalm 118, urging us not to fear adversities. God’s promised presence was given to all of Israel (Deut. 31:6), and reaffirmed to Joshua (Josh 1:5) and Solomon (1Chron. 28:20).
However, Jesus also tells us that someday our very demanding questioning about his presence in our anguish (“when I need him”) will become irrelevant to us: “You are now in anguish. But I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy away from you. On that day you will not question me about anything” (John 16:22-23).
“On that day”—the day of his Second Coming—our petty questioning of God’s presence “when we need him” will seem utterly silly. On that day faith-anemic souls—that’s most of us—will be embarrassed by having questioned or doubted God’s presence in our suffering, especially as we recall Jesus’ own question, in response to our question: “When the Son of Man comes again [to restore peace to fallen humanity] will there be any faith left on earth?” [at the close of the great tribulation] (Luke 18:8).
Job, though he was the holiest man on earth in his time, questioned the Lord about the apparent “absence of God” in time of suffering, often with no answer to prayers for relief (like Paul’s apparently non-answered prayer in 2 Cor. 12:8-9. Job’s questioning of God was countered by God questioning him (Job 40:4). Then the Lord staggered him with a stultifying theophany (42:3-6) that answered, for him alone, his questions as to why innocent people suffer, with God often apparently absent or ignoring them. That answer will be crystal clear to each of us at the time of Jesus’ Second Coming (John 16:23).
As spiritually anorexic children of God, we have a starving need to be nourished with God’s life-sustaining love, while at the same time never denying that suffering itself is a mystery for us in this life—an ineffable, inscrutable, and disturbing mystery. Jesus’ prophesied period of our non-questioning coincides with the non-suffering period—“when your hearts will rejoice.” That mystery ends with the Parousia (Jesus’ Second Coming) and will be clear throughout eternity. The mysterious aspect provides the perfect opportunity to practice faith. The stronger our faith in the face of mystery, the greater the grace-flow.
As we grow in our reliance and trust in God’s loving presence, and in his mysterious providence that fashions crowns from crosses, we’ll find ourselves, like Paul, advancing from complaint to gratitude (2 Cor. 12:9) for our life’s lacerating thorns. As we strive to cope with our harrowing trials in this vale of tears, while snuggling into God’s compassionate embrace, heaven itself will begin to come into view even as we suffer. But this “joy in facing trials of many kinds” (James 1:2), and Jesus prophecy, “your hearts will rejoice” can be experienced only by those whose faith in God (trust) is firm enough to avoid petulantly demanding answers to “where is God when I need him?”
We’ve all heard the many “why?” questions uttered by persons suffering pain and misfortunes. Why me? Why this hurt rather than another kind? Why doesn’t God answer my prayer? Why does God allow others to cause or aggravate my suffering? Why do some get miraculous healings and I don’t? Why does my suffering last so long?, etc., etc.
The question, “Where is God when I need him?” is a generic question that implicitly embraces many forms the “Why?” questions. All such “why” questions clearly reflect a weakness in one’s faith, and ultimately an absence of trust in God, as well as an insincerity in reciting the Lord’s Prayer—“Thy will be done,” because when unaware of his presence they don’t relate to him in a personal way, and hence don’t see the Lord as being “in the driver’s seat” by his loving providence, by which all unavoidable sufferings are the unfolding of God’s will.
Commenting on Paul’s words, “In God we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28), St. Anthony Claret remarked that in his own life he felt that he related to God like a fish in water or a bird surrounded by air.” This brought him overwhelming support in his many hardships and sufferings.
St. Teresa of Avila said, “Those who pray or offer their sufferings while aware of God’s presence, feel that he is looking on them, while others may go for days without even once recollecting that God sees them at every moment.” This insight of St. Teresa is reminiscent of the words of James 4:8: “Come near to God and he will come near to you.”
And that scriptural pericope is reminiscent of this bumper sticker that I saw recently, which epitomizes the entire spiritual issue of cultivating the practice of the presence of God—especially for suffering persons:
“IF YOU FEEL FAR FROM GOD, GUESS WHO MOVED!”