Where is God When it Hurts?

Going through situations like my daughter’s leukemia causes you to think. You ask questions like “Why?” Sarah is 4 years old…why does she have to get this potentially fatal disease? As a father, I want to bargain with God to change the circumstances. It doesn’t cause me to doubt God or His goodness but, nonetheless, it does cause the question: “why?”

The Bible is full of stories of people who go through difficulties that, as far as we know, were not caused by things that they did. One example is the story of Joseph. Joseph’s story speaks to many different issues but one of the issues that I think God addresses is the question of suffering. We can look at the difficulties in Joseph’s life and learn a lot. We all know that there are times when difficult times/suffering/pain is a direct result of something that we have done—there are times when difficult times are a consequence of bad choices that we’ve made—these times are still difficult but they don’t (or at least, they shouldn’t) lead us to question “Why?”

But there are times when we go through difficulties, when it is natural to ask questions like “Where is God? Why do I have to go through this? What is God’s role in this situation? Why did He allow this to happen to me?” These questions can take on dimensions central to our picture of God—and even be stumbling blocks to those who aren’t Christians: “If God is loving—if God is all-powerful—if God loves me, why didn’t He show His love and power by protecting me from this circumstance? If God loves His creation, why does He allow evil to exist?” Which leads to questions about God—questions about who He is: “Is God loving? Is He powerful?”

Maybe suffering, even suffering unjustly, doesn’t touch your faith. Maybe it doesn’t touch your understanding of who God is. But maybe it touches your understanding of how God feels about you. Does the fact that you seem to suffer more than your neighbor mean that He loves you less than He loves them? You may ask, “Why do I suffer so much? Why do I have to deal with this? No one else seems to…why me?”

Joseph is an ultimate example of suffering unjustly. For the most part he did not bring his suffering on himself. He was not deserving of his circumstances. They were not painful consequences of something he had done wrong—they were results of evil done to him.

If anyone had the right to call out to God and say “Why me?”, it was Joseph—but we don’t see him doing that. What we do see is one of the most comforting, encouraging, powerful sentences in the Bible: “God was with him.”

As I look at the part of Joseph’s story found in Genesis 39, I see that with each circumstance of Joseph’s life, it says that God was with him. Each difficult situation that we would look at and say, “Surely, God left him or this never would have happened!”, and yet, we read that God was with him and God helped him rise above his difficult situation:

· Joseph’s brothers sell him into slavery where he ends up serving in Potiphar’s house and “God was with him” and allowed him to rise to a position of importance in the household.

· Joseph was wrongly accused by Potiphar’s wife and placed in prison and “God is with him” and allowed him to rise to a position of importance in the prison.

· Thousands of years later, when Stephen was testifying about God’s faithfulness, he spoke of Joseph (Acts 7:9-10): “But God was with him, and rescued him from all his troubles.”

I still don’t know the reason why my Sarah has leukemia. I know that someday I will know. But right now, I do know that God loves Sarah. And that He is with us in the midst of this. And that He has a plan that includes Sarah and her leukemia. And that His plan is for good.