Nothing Can Separate Us From God’s Love

It seems that nothing calls into question God’s existence and love for us, like pain and suffering.  Like most people, I, too, have struggled with why God lets us endure pain and suffering. Excruciating pain and suffering can be debilitating, crippling the most healthy and fittest of us all.  To watch a loved one endure the agony of cancer treatments, a friend trying to cope with depression, or the death of a child.  “Where are you, God,” seems to be all we can cry out in anguish.  

Several years ago, I was dealing with severe back pain for close to nine months. At first, my prayer was to be cured.   It was just so hard to understand why God, who loved me so much, would not just take my pain away.  But over time, it changed to praying for the strength to endure it.  At mid-point in those nine months, I started to wonder what God might be trying to teach me with this pain.  Not that God sent me the pain, but my prayers to be cured shifted to what God might be saying “to” me in my pain.  What might God be trying to teach me about human suffering, to uncover perhaps a unique experience of God’s love for me in my painful human condition?  

When we read about the life, passion, and death of Jesus, we so often forget that Christ in Jesus took on our same human condition, with all its aches, pains, loneliness, hurt, fear, and suffering, that each of us experience.   But God didn’t change Jesus’ human condition so that he could feel better and not endure the cross.  Why, then, would it be any different for me or you? 

It’s not for lack of God’s love that we are feeling pain and suffering.  It is the direct result of God’s love that we are even able to feel pain and suffering, to be human and alive.  It is a pure gift that a loving and life-giving God even thought of us and spoke our name into existence.  At that moment, in the midst of pain and suffering, I was able to ask for and receive God’s strength to endure.

Of course, this is all so much easier to see and say when my excruciating back pain is gone and things are looking and feeling so much brighter.  But, as a result of that painful experience, I do feel somehow different, maybe resilient, broader, more depth, and certainly more familiar with pain and suffering.  And to know that I actually endured it, lived through it, and grew deeper in love with God.  It was at that point the truth touched me; “Nothing can separate us from God’s love.”