Where is God in my suffering?

The following is a post that I had kept private until now; however, given that it does have some very helpful perspectives to share, I have decided to de-identify it as much as possible and share it.

A few weeks ago, I had a very interesting chat with a friend who suffered from a severe and debilitating chronic physical illness. She asked me a few questions that led me to ask about her views about God in the midst of her illness. In ministering to her in her illness, I ended up saying some words that I really needed to hear for myself haha.

I asked her why she blamed God rather than Satan for her illness. Her response was:
“I blame God for my illness because He didn't stop Satan from destroying my life when He could have. 

“Say you see a lil kid on a busy highway, about to get mowed down by a huge semi-trailer. To save him, all you had to do would be to yell "kid, look out!" And the kid would look up, see the huge truck bearing down on him so run across to the other side of the highway and be saved. But you don't do anything, so the truck runs over and squishes the kid, kills him. You could rightfully say, "I didn't do anything, the truck killed the kid." But by not doing anything when you could have, you are exactly as bad as the truck that squished and killed the kid.

“My point exactly with God. Maybe He didn't destroy my life, but He let Satan do it without lifting a finger to prevent it when he could have. That's why I blame God.”

My response to that was:
“It's a fair analogy but I think you've got the positioning wrong. You're on the road, Satan's driving the truck, but God is sitting in front of you waiting to be run over first.

“When Jesus died for our sins, he literally took on ALL our pain and suffering. What you're going through right now, Jesus experienced [in full] in some miraculous supernatural way on the cross, and quite a lot more. Yes He didn't stop the suffering from happening; but He's not distant from it. He let himself get hit first to take the brunt of it.

“He didn't stop it, but He provided an answer to it. If it wasn't for Jesus dying on the cross, the only answer to your suffering would be that you're going to suffer a lot more in hell afterwards. That's pretty hopeless. But because Jesus got run over first, there is now a possibility for you to be fully restored at the end of Time. And that's the only hope we have.”

She didn’t give a response to that. But I suppose the question she could have potentially asked (but didn’t) was: “But why? If God could take away all this pain, why didn’t He do it? Why even go through the whole drama in the first place?!”

To which I would have had to answer: Who knows? Who can understand God, how He thinks and what He’s got planned? (Job 40:1-14; Isaiah 55:8-9) Yes, He could have chosen to take all the pain away and saved us (and Himself) a lot of pain. But He chose not to. Instead He chose to enter into that pain WITH us; in fact, He took into Himself a LOT more pain than we would EVER have to even contemplate. That’s crazy, but that doesn’t make Him evil. It makes Him Sovereign, Other-worldly, DIFFERENT. It makes Him God.

All we have is His Word to us that He is a good, faithful and loving God, and that we can trust Him despite everything that happens to us on this Earth. Then He hands it over to us as to whether we will choose to have faith in that Word, or whether we will reject that Word. Oh, He does send Jesus to die on our behalf as proof of His love for us. But He doesn’t go out of His way to explain everything so that we could understand it all. (As if we possibly could!). Otherwise that wouldn’t leave room for faith. And I suppose that’s what He’s trying to get: people who believe in Him by faith, who take Him at His Word.

It was a very interesting exercise for me to say all that to my friend; because I needed to hear it so much for myself. Even if my suffering isn’t as great as hers, I definitely FEEL it intensely. I have cried out, “Why, God? Why me?” many, MANY times in the dark as I wept in my bed. I haven’t gone to the stage of blaming God; but I could definitely have. And responding to my friend’s questions helped me to realise that the most important answer to all of this is that He isn’t distant from our suffering, but that He is there, taking ALL of it in and sharing our experience, and more. He has not left us to fend for ourselves; He is there with us, enfolding us in His loving embrace, suffering with us.