I travel and work in areas where the predominate theme is suffering. It's tough even as a christian with a biblical worldview to process much of it even after years of ministry in these areas. Many who aren’t Christ-followers wonder where God is to be found in this hurting world. Why he seems so distant. How do you reconcile His presence and sovereignty with the reality of suffering? Even those of us who are followers still struggle at times with doubt and are broken and alienated by its lies instead of being broken and brought near by truth. I believe an understanding of what took place on the cross can shed light here. The cross alone has the power to bring us to full intimacy with the Father. Jesus could have bypassed the pain and suffering of the cross but would have himself been alienated from the Father’s heart as well and left us broken and apart from God. But in allowing himself to be broken, he draws us into intimacy with himself and the Father.

So let’s take a fresh look at the cross and let its implications sink in. Let’s not avert our eyes but look straight at it. We will be undone by it and questions will force their way to the surface as we see the tragedy of it. Let’s linger with our questions. Don’t rush the grieving process of the “why.”

I was moved recently in reading a story from Night by Elie Wiesel. During the holocaust, he, along with the whole concentration camp he was in, was forced to watch the hanging of three fellow prisoners. Two were adults and the third was a boy. The adults died quickly but the boy, being much lighter, strangled for quiet some time on the gallows before he finally died. Elie was losing his faith as he watched the hanging, asking in a growing crescendo "WHERE IS GOD?" He was struggling with the “WHY” of it all. Elie came to a partially wrong conclusion at the time, that he had witnessed God dying on the gallows and that God must surely be dead. Let this poem I wrote not too long ago and the conclusion of it, be something that strengthens our faith rather than weakens it, as we see the answer to Elie's question, but through the eyes of faith and hope, not fatalistic despair.

-GOD WHERE ARE YOU-

What can you learn from a victim of rape
Or a boy swinging wildly from the gallows of hate
Where is your God Oh you derelict fool
As children are slaughtered in the sanctity of school

I searched and I looked as the terror flew in
I listened in the thunder and the mighty whirlwind.
Some speak of his justice and his sovereignty too
But I couldn’t see either from my dreadful view

I thought I might find him looking down from above
With eyes full of sadness and surely with love
But it seemed he was hiding or absent in deed
At the moment my life had the most terrible of need

Although I had missed him in my desperate search
As I gazed up to heaven and pursued him in church
I found him at last, not at all where I thought
And yet right in the midst of the places I sought

He was swinging from the gallows; he was hanging in a tree
He was buried in the rubble of the tower’s debris
Being sold as a slave and robbed of his rights
Then pimped out to johns in the darkest of nights

He’s shot with a bullet and stabbed with the knife
Abused alongside of a tormented wife
He’s ripped from the womb and smothered with a bag
He’s beaten in the streets with a man called a fag

He’s orphaned and starving and tossed to the side
Violently raped as a child…. and he cried
“You'll find me if you look at the least one of these
In as much as it’s done, it's being done unto me.”
Roger Patterson ©2013

One day suffering will be gone and the tables will be overturned on evil once and for all. Christ's incredible passion and intense love will rage a final war on evil and all of it's pain. Can't wait to ride out with him on that mission.....

-Roger