God is most near when we suffer

Do you remember the Lynn Anderson song, Rose Garden? Though the lyrics describe a rocky, temporary relationship, the lines, “I beg your pardon, I never promised you a rose garden.  Along with the sunshine there’s got to be a little rain sometime”, are words all of us can take to heart.

Our Lord never intends any of his children to live out their lives without rain.  He desires us to grow and the only way to grow is with rain. A slow drizzle of adversity is good for strengthening our resolve to serve the Lord, and we may feel we are growing in our faith.

But what happens when the drizzle becomes a monsoon? Is God in it?  Does He expect us to grow in it, or will we give up and die? In the book of Isaiah, God comforts his people by telling them:  "When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you.”

The floods will come and the monsoon will try to uproot us, but God is near, and if we hold on to his hand we will come through our calamity.

We waste our time when we forever try to avoid the rain or shorten its duration.  Instead we have to see the good in it and know that if our eyes are fixed on God there is  good in all our suffering.

Author Simone Weil wrote, “The supernatural greatness of Christianity lies in the fact that is does not seek a supernatural remedy for suffering but a supernatural use for it.”

Pastor Wurmbrand, founder of Voice of the Martyrs, testified in his book Tortured for Christ that when he and his fellow Christians were being tortured in Romanian prisons, their souls were lifted up away from their bodies and from their torturers and the prison cell walls became as glistening diamonds with the presence of God.

God was with them; God was in their suffering, and God gave them the resolve to endure, not shorten, the pain.  If God can help those who are in the most dire of circumstances, He can also help us.