The Presence of God in Difficult Times
There are times in life when seeing God feels pretty easy. When prayers are being answered, things are going well, and life seems to be falling into place, it’s easy to recognize His goodness. But what about when life doesn’t go the way we hoped? What about when we’re hurting, confused, disappointed, or praying for something and God seems quiet? I think sometimes we feel like having those questions means our faith isn’t strong enough. But when we read the Psalms, we find people asking those exact same questions. David begins Psalm 13 by asking, “O LORD, how long will you forget me? Forever? How long will you look the other way?” (Psalm 13:1). I love the honesty of that. David isn’t pretending everything is okay. He’s hurting, and he tells God exactly how he feels.
C.S. Lewis wrestled with this after losing his wife. In A Grief Observed, he wrote, “Not my idea of God, but God.” I think there’s something powerful in that. Difficult seasons can challenge the picture we have created of how God is supposed to work. We want God to fix things, answer our prayers the way we want, and keep painful things from happening. But Scripture never promises us a life without suffering. What it does promise us is that we won’t walk through it alone. Psalm 34:18 says, “The LORD is close to the brokenhearted; he rescues those whose spirits are crushed.” Sometimes seeing God in our suffering doesn’t mean finally understanding why something happened. Sometimes it simply means recognizing that He is still with us in the middle of it.
By the end of Psalm 13, David says, “But I trust in your unfailing love” (Psalm 13:5). I think that’s a pretty good prayer for the difficult seasons of life. We don’t have to pretend we’re okay. We don’t have to have all the answers. We can bring God our questions, disappointment, anger, confusion, and grief. And even when we can’t see what He is doing, we can keep coming back to what we know: God is still here. He is still good. And His unfailing love has not left us.
- Jamey
