Many times, many of us have questioned whether God really exists.
“Is there really a God?” we ask ourselves when we look at the things happening around us. We see suffering, sickness, death, broken families, financial struggles, injustice and dreams that seem to collapse despite years of prayer.
Our understanding of God is that He is a loving Father who cares deeply about His children. So, why would a loving Father allow His children to suffer?
Why would He allow a mother to lose her child or let someone who has prayed faithfully for healing continue to battle with sickness?
Why would a person who has worked hard and trusted God still experience disappointment after disappointment?
These questions can become especially difficult when suffering comes to our own doorstep.
It is easy to talk about God’s goodness when everything is going well. But when life takes an unexpected turn, our faith can suddenly be tested.
That is when many of us find ourselves asking the same painful question: “God, where are You?”
The Question Is Not New
The question, “Where is God?” is not unique to our generation. The Bible is filled with people who experienced suffering and struggled to understand God’s ways.
Job is perhaps one of the most famous examples. Job was a man who loved God, yet his life was suddenly devastated by tragedy. He lost his children, his possessions and his health. The man who had once enjoyed prosperity found himself sitting in pain and confusion.
He did not pretend that everything was fine. Job cried and complained. Yet God did not condemn Job for bringing his pain before Him.
This teaches us something important: having questions does not necessarily mean having no faith. Sometimes, our questions come precisely because we care deeply about our relationship with God.
A person who does not care about God may never ask, “Where is God?” But someone who has trusted Him may struggle deeply when God’s presence seems difficult to see.
Faith does not mean that we never ask questions. Sometimes faith means bringing our questions to God instead of walking away from Him.
A Rabbi Who Found Himself Asking the Same Question
Rabbi Greg Hershberg also found himself confronting this difficult question.
In his book At Death’s Door, Hershberg chronicles his experience during a serious medical crisis that brought him frighteningly close to death.
His heart stopped, his body began to collapse, and he spent fifty days in the hospital. Fifty days is a long time to lie in a hospital bed.
For Hershberg, those days were filled with fear, uncertainty and the possibility that his life might be coming to an end.
What makes his experience particularly powerful is that he was a man who had spent much of his life speaking about hope and faith. He had encouraged thousands of people, preached about God and told others to trust in God’s faithfulness.
But now he was the one lying helpless in a hospital bed. Now he was the one facing uncertainty and the one asking difficult questions. In the darkness of his own experience, he found himself asking: “God, where are You?”
Even Jesus Experienced the Pain of Feeling Forsaken
The Bible gives us another remarkable example. Jesus Himself experienced the anguish of feeling abandoned.
As He hung on the cross, suffering intensely, He cried: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Those words are powerful because they show us that the experience of feeling abandoned by God is not foreign to the Christian story.
Jesus knew suffering, rejection, betrayal and loneliness. He knew what it felt like to cry out in anguish.
Therefore, when we find ourselves asking, “God, where are You?” we can remember that God understands the depth of human suffering.
Our pain does not make us weak Christians, and our questions do not automatically mean that we have abandoned our faith.
Sometimes we are simply human beings trying to make sense of circumstances we cannot understand.
God’s Silence Is Not God’s Absence
One of the most difficult lessons of faith is learning that God’s silence does not necessarily mean God’s absence.
There are seasons when we pray and do not immediately receive an answer. We ask God for healing, but the sickness remains. People pray for open doors, but it remains closed.
We ask Him to rescue us from a difficult situation, but the situation seems to become worse.
At such moments, it can feel as though God is silent, but the Bible repeatedly encourages believers to trust God even when they cannot see what He is doing.
Sometimes God is working in ways we cannot immediately recognise, and sometimes, we only understand what God was doing when we look back years later.
Finding God in the Darkest Place
The story of Greg Hershberg ultimately points us toward a profound truth about suffering. Sometimes we encounter God not on the mountaintop but in the valley.
Not when everything is going perfectly, but when everything appears to be falling apart or when we have all the answers, but when we are forced to admit that we do not understand.
The darkest moments of our lives can become places where our relationship with God becomes deeper. Suffering may change us, and it may lead us to discover a strength we never knew we possessed.
Most importantly, it can remind us that our hope cannot depend entirely on circumstances.
He Is Still There
Perhaps you are reading this today and asking the same question: “God, where are You?”
Maybe you have prayed for something for years and are dealing with a situation that makes no sense.
If that is where you are, remember Job. Remember Greg Hershberg and also remember Jesus on the cross.
You are not the first person to ask God difficult questions, but there is another truth you must hold on to: God’s presence is not measured by the absence of problems.
Sometimes He is with us in the hospital room, in the lonely bedroom, when the bank account is empty, and sometimes, when we think we are walking alone, He is the One carrying us.
Keep believing and holding on because the God who promised, “I will never leave you nor forsake you,” has not changed. The night may be dark, but morning will come.
