Beginning last night into this evening, fierce winds and rain have blown across the Northeast. Weather news people with their characteristic catastrophizing have talked about a “bomb cyclone.” I don’t know exactly what that means but in easy terms it is a winter hurricane. In my world it means that I want to be home. I want to be warm. I want to be safe. Aren’t those the cries of all of us at so many points during life and the cries of so many at this moment throughout the world?
It seems fitting then to talk about suffering, and that difficult question posed so often throughout history. Why would a good God allow suffering? How can we believe that God is good when life is not? From ancient texts to modern day influencers, we see people attempt to tackle and explain the impossible. It turns many away from religious faith altogether, it makes cynics out of believers, it crushes those who used to walk with a lightness to their steps and life.
Those of us who continue to embrace our Christian faith have no less questions. Ask my friend Brit, whose husband died just weeks after the birth of their first baby. Ask someone with debilitating pain who still chooses to believe. Ask the Palestinian woman who has lost children in the recent attacks. No – we still have questions. Lots of questions.
At the end of a life, every single human being has a reason to believe God is not good. But the opposite is also true. At the end of every life, there is evidence of God’s goodness in every breath we’ve been given.
How do we say that God is Good when Life is Not?
While each person’s circumstances are different, what all who suffer (yet continue to have faith and belief that God is light and love, that God is present in the midst of suffering) have in common is the belief that suffering is not the end of the story. In the mystery of faith, suffering, when accepted instead of resisted, has the power to transform us and increase our capacity to see others through a lens of compassion and love. Instead of being meaningless, it can be meaningful. In Man’s Search for Meaning, author Victor Frankl says that “life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.” It’s a bold statement and one that I often want to argue against. And yet – over and over I have found it to be true.
This year as we journey through the season of Advent, I am entering into it not only as a season of preparation, anticipation and waiting, but also as a reminder that our suffering, that our world’s suffering is not meaningless, not the result of an absent deity who wound up the world and watches without thought or care as we struggle through it.
For in the midst of terrible suffering around the world, we press on during Advent. We press on during the time of the year when the nights are longer than the days. We walk in the shadows longing for the light. We try to make sense of a story that began in a world so different, yet so similar to the one we live in. A world of occupation and suffering, a world of disease and sadness, a world that was waiting for a Savior. We watch as a young woman named Mary, the “Theotokos” (God-bearer) and someone of no significance to the occupying empire, enters into the significant and eternal salvation story, willing for a sword to pierce her soul. We remember a story of internally displaced people, a man and wife heading to a foreign city, trying to find a place to stay, a place that is warm and safe for the woman to give birth. We enter the timeless mystery of the birth of Christ and the first unlikely visitors to the Christ child. In truth – everything about this story surprises us. Nothing is as it seems.
Perhaps during this Advent too, nothing is quite as it seems. We search for joy, and we somehow find it in the midst of suffering. We persist in the face of our own and others disbelief. We press on in our belief that God is good even when life seems so awful, and we pray the words “Lord I believe – Help my unbelief.”
Marilyn R. Gardner 