It Was There All the Time

For a couple of years now, I have been wrestling with God. My struggles are not unique, many others pose the same questions. My questions come out of a painful end to my marriage and those events effects on my children. But others will ask the same ones:

• Why did God allow this awful event to happen?
  
• If God really loved us, wouldn't he have protected us from this pain?
• I was trying to serve God, yet He didn't keep his promise to protect us. Why should I continue to follow Him?

The temptation to abandon my faith was very strong. I cried out to God to help me understand and I turned my back on him like a child who didn't get her way. And I threw tantrums and said angry words to him. Why Lord? I thought you promised me the desires of my heart if I followed you. You promised to love me and never abandon me but that is exactly what it felt like happened.

In my wrestling, I found no easy answers. God didn't hand me a neatly wrapped package explaining why this all happened. Oh, I have some answers. Selfishness, sin and such by me and others all can be factored in. But the question remained. . . if God really is all loving and all powerful, He could have stopped it. Afterall, in my case, not only was my family affected but also innumerable other people as it tore about another family and our church family too. In my mind, it was only fair to question why God didn't choose to step in at least to lessen the collateral damage.

After three years, I have given up trying to make sense of it. But there is an unmistakable pattern I can now see. Perhaps I can say that God's favor hasn't been present throughout this time. However, I can say without a doubt that none of us has lived outside of God's love. In the past few days I have rediscovered some amazing verses about God's love. A love that Paul talks about as being beyond understanding, a love that surrounds us and will never let go of us. A love that when rooted deeply in our lives will give us power and abundant life. (Romans 8:35-39; Ephesians 3 &4)

I have come to see that circumstances do not demonstrate God's love for us. We are not loved more or less by the good or bad things that happen in our lives. God's love is so amazing that it is not tied to anything I do or anything that happens to me. He loves us. That is it. That is everything. He loves us.

• In the storm, He loves us
• In the darkness of divorce and betrayal, He loves us
• In failure, in pain, in illness, in death, He loves us
• In our selfishness and sin, He loves us

This isn't easy to wrap my little ol' head around. But in the briefest moments, I do and then, I can find hope that the pain will not last forever. Hope that even though I have been abandoned by some, God never did and never will abandon me. Hope that this love requires nothing from me, it is unchanging whether I cling to it or push it away.

He loves me.

Enough said.