Why Is God Not Helping Me?
Being a kid is hard, even when you’re God’s kid.
If there is a God who loves us, then why does he allow such horrible suffering? It’s a question that every person of faith has grappled with, and one that prevents many from having faith at all, as it’s hard to understand why a loving God would ever allow such things to happen.
As people of faith, our usual response to this question is simply that God has a plan and is working all things for our good. And then we wait and try to see what good will come of it. Or, if we’re the pro-active type, we will work to create our own good out of it.
Others will say that God did not create suffering, rather we created it for ourselves. I certainly believe this is true as well, but I think it’s only half of the answer. The real question is not who created suffering, but rather what is God doing about it? When we hear stories or read in the Bible that God has the power to intervene in our lives and spare us from harm, that only leaves us asking, “Why didn’t he spare me?”
For those people who have experienced almost unbearable hardship, this answer is simply not good enough. If God is truly in control, and his motive is to create good in our lives, then why doesn’t he just intervene when we call on him if he has the power to intervene?
I’ve often found myself asking this question. And I’ve also seen people wait their whole life for something good to come from their suffering and they never see it. But maybe that’s the whole point. I’m still convinced that God is not so far away as he seems.
Frustrated Plans
The other day as I was about to run water for a bath, I noticed a little spider hanging out by the drain, so I decided to try to get her out of the way first. If you’ve ever tried to get a bug to crawl onto your hand, you know what a struggle it can be. This poor little spider went through quite an ordeal simply because it had no understanding of what was going on. It didn’t trust me. Every direction she turned, I blocked her path, and I eventually had to force her to submit to my hands.
From her perspective, she went through a really trying experience for no apparent reason. I ruined her plans and forced her to start over somewhere else. In the struggle to lift her out of harm’s way, I said to her, “Don’t you know that I’m trying to save your life?” She had no idea that her life had just been spared.
I wonder how often this happens to us, as God tries to guide us away from physical or spiritual harm and we fight his guidance simply because we have no understanding of what he’s doing. We’re quick to acknowledge God when our efforts are succeeding, but when they’re not, we have a hard time seeing God’s hands in the situation. All we see is an obstacle to our plans. We can’t believe that God might actually be opposed to our will.
We see it as a time of trial when every direction we turn leads to a roadblock, everything we set our hands to do leads to failure, or when we’ve worked so hard for something and it gets taken away. These are usually the times when we get frustrated and even mad at God. We wonder why he is allowing this to happen. It may be that God is looking at us and saying, “Don’t you know that I’m trying to save your life?”
Suffering and Death
In the greater scope of our world, however, we’re obviously talking about a level of evil, cruelty, and sorrow that is much more painful than just some frustrated plans. And though we try to believe that God is working everything for our good, we often never see anything good come from it, at least in our understanding of good. But if we do in fact believe that our lives are eternal, then we have to acknowledge that God’s ultimate purpose is not necessarily to make our human lives good, but to make our eternal lives good.
We often refer to our relationship with God in terms of a parent-child relationship. Our human lives can similarly be viewed as a childhood experience and our eternal lives as adulthood. In that light we have to consider how our childhood experiences, which at the time may have seemed awful, made us grow and become better adults.
When I first learned to ride a bike, I was always excited to cruise on my new wheels, gaining speed, freely cutting through the wind, reveling in my liberation as I began leaning left and right, winding back and forth in complete control of my destiny, until I finally lost control and half of my knee was ground off by the jagged surface of our chip-and-seal road.
I was mad at myself. I was mad at my bike. I was mad at chip-and-seal. And I was mad at my dad when I cried to him for help and his response was to pour hydrogen peroxide into my wound. I asked for help and all I got was more pain. It seemed that the entire situation was a punishment that I did nothing to deserve. I was just trying to enjoy my gift.
So, what loving parent would give a child a bicycle, knowing that they are going to fall and possibly tear a gaping hole in their knee?
It’s not that we want our children to suffer, it’s just that we see the bigger picture and we know the experience is for their benefit, even though they might not understand how. Often, when a child sees blood, they react as if life is over. As adults, we know their wounds are going to heal. We still believe that riding a bike is worth the risk. And life is not over.
So, what loving God would give us such a dangerous gift as freedom if he knew we would be reckless with it, abuse it, and get seriously hurt or even die in the process?
We have to remember that God has an eternal perspective of our lives. He sees the bigger picture that we can’t see. When we see death, we react as if life is over. But God knows that freedom is still worth the risk. He knows that even our mortal wounds will still be healed. And life is definitely not over.
The Cost of Following Christ
Suffering is not merely a consequence of a lack of faith, or a punishment for disobedience. It’s a natural and necessary element of human growth, and probably even more so for spiritual growth.
From the Christian perspective, we like to quote Romans 8:28 which says that God is working all things for good, but we usually stop reading before we get to verse 29 which states the purpose of that good, which is to be conformed to the image of his son. In other words, all things work together … to conform us to the image of Christ.
That being said, we have to remember that becoming like Christ is not going to be easy. On the contrary, it’s actually extremely difficult. And even if we were successful in becoming Christlike, we still have to remember that the life of Christ was not an image of prosperity and success by our human standards. Rather it was a life marked by love without limit in lowliness and humility, denying reputation and wealth, making himself equal to the poor, sick, sinful, and oppressed, refusing the authority of the popular culture, resulting in rejection and persecution, and ultimately ending in betrayal, torture, and death.
This is not to say that God is leading us all to martyrdom, but we need to remember who it is that we are following.
In relation to eternity, our human lives are a fleeting moment of childhood. And surely, God is much more interested in who we will become in our real lives after this life ends, than in shielding us from hardship in our brief human experience. It may be important to God for us to have a firm understanding of the worst kind of evil, an understanding of the magnitude of the consequences of living apart from him, in order for us to become who he wants us to be when we are with him.
This doesn’t diminish the intensity of the pain we feel, and it probably won’t even prevent us from being angry at God when we experience the anguish that often comes with being human. We may never even see the justification for our suffering.
Even for those who believe that life is eternal, it’s still difficult to remember sometimes that our human lives are not the totality of our existence. And when we talk about how God is working all things for our good, it’s not necessarily for the good of our current human condition. So, the answer to this question lies not so much in trying to justify our suffering, but rather in seeing it in perspective, in relation to a life that doesn’t even begin until we die.
I still have faith that when we are finally with God, we will look back on our human suffering and realize that it was all part of growing up. Just as a child has a difficult time seeing past their present state of pain, not able to understand that in the greater scheme of things, this moment of distress is only a temporary burden, we too have a hard time remembering that our real lives have not even begun yet.
