What is your Picture of God?
What is your picture of God when it comes to suffering from the consequences of living in a Real World with Real People?
Is it Jesus' picture of God?
"Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for bread, will give a stone? Or if the child asks for a fish, will give a snake?
"If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him?" (Matthew 7:9-11)
Is it the picture that Jesus, the human face of God, has of himself?
"The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they might have life, and have it abundantly." (John 10:10)
and
"I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep." (John 10:11)
Is it St. John's picture of God?
"God is love." (1 John 4:8)
Finally, consider this picture which God revealed to the prophet Ezekiel (34:15-16):
"I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep, and I will make them lie down, says the Lord God. I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak. . . ."
Conclusion
As I mentioned earlier, whenever we suffer, for whatever reason, in whatever way, we need to know that the God who created us is for us; the God who is Emmanuel is with us, and the God who is our Comforter is on our side.
And whenever we pray, and whenever we love and minister to others, we are cooperating with God's will— God's desire— God's delight— "on earth as it is in heaven."
Or, to use a perfectly correct substitute for
"your will be done on earth as it is in heaven":
"your thrill be done on earth as it is in heaven."
Finally, because I have spoken mainly about the chosen Suffering for the sake of the Kingdom of God, and the unchosen Suffering of Sickness and Injury, I want to say more about the unchosen suffering of innocent persons and peoples by persecution, oppression, institutional violence, prejudice, and state terror, domestic terror, and international terror.
The Slave Trade, the Shoah, or Holocaust, and the Sex Trade are among the great and terrible exemplars of this type, and the recent murderous violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, and at the Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, synagogue, are recent examples.
Confronting such evil for the sake of the Kingdom of God is a choice with which all persons of faith are called to struggle.
Hurricane Harvey's unprecedented flooding disaster in 2017 demonstrated another kind of unchosen Suffering from the consequences of living in a Real World with Real People. In this case, Real World climate change combined with Real People land development created an epic event.
Unchosen suffering, whether from sickness or injury or accidents, or from human evil or natural disasters, is never the will of God— they are the consequences of living in a Real World with Real People like us, who have been given the terrible freedom to love sacrificially and hate demonically, to choose wisely and recklessly.
In view of all this, I conclude with these comforting words from St. Paul (Romans 8:35, 37-39):
"Who will separate us from the love of Christ?
"Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?
"No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.
"For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord."
In 1963, a racist bomb attack on an Alabama church killed four black girls.
John Petts, in Llansteffan, Carmarthenshire, designed this window,
with Jesus' words from Matthew 25:40: "You did it to me."
This window from the people of Wales was installed in 1965.