However strong our faith, however much we try to trust and depend on God, there are times I'm sure when all of us want to shout at God, to rant at him, to ask him "Why God?" or "Where are you now?". Usually these times come when we, or someone we know is going through what we can only see as unfair or unnecessary pain and suffering.
The question of suffering is huge, and the question "Why does God allow suffering?" is one that many minds, better trained, more experienced and more theologically grounded than I have tried to answer, but still, at the end of the day, I don't think I've ever read or heard a totally satisfactory answer, one that doesn't leave me saying "Yes, I agree with all that, but what about this....". And, in my experience, the times when we are struggling the most with questions like this are the ones when the answers, however good they are theologically, however clear, however understandable, are not the answers we need, because really, these are times when all we can do is to cry out those "Why?" questions to God.
Its not a new phenomena. Several of the Psalms include passages of crying out and asking these difficult questions (it was reading Psalm 44, and thinking about that in connection with some things that are happening back at my parents' church that prompted this line of thought and this blog). And if it was okay for David, the king who God Himself described as "a man after My own heart", then actually, its okay for us.
God is big enough to take it when we get angry and upset with him. He's big enough to let us have our rant, to shout and stomp our feet and demand answers. Because actually, in dying on the cross, God himself, in the person of his son Jesus, experienced every kind of suffering - he understands the feelings of pain, abandonment and loss. He prayed his own lament "My God, Why have you abandoned me?" on the cross, and he will be there with us through our own times of pain, even if we don't feel it.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor, martyred for his faith just 23 days before the surrender, of Nazi Germany wrote "Now we know there is no longer any suffering on earth in which Christ will not be with us and praying with us -- Christ the only helper". My prayer, for myself, and for those I know who are in pain at the moment is that we will not just know this truth in our heads, but feel it in our hearts.
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