By Hermann Gschwandtner, NCM Regional Coordinator - Europe and South Asia

Tens of thousands of internal refugees were streaming into the UN brokered “safety-zone” that was anything but safe. Around them raged the final battle of the 26-year-old civil war in Sri Lanka. Over time it had gotten worse rather than better. People fled, trying to make it behind government lines for some possibility of safety. Among them was one small family. They waded through the surrounding lagoon. Suddenly shots rang out from behind. Their eleven year old son sank lifelessly into the lagoon.

“We just let him die there,” the anguished father said. “What should we have done? At least we saved our own lives.” How can God allow things like that to happen? Astonishingly, the father never asked that question. Actually, it is a question rarely heard in many countries of the world although people go through countless atrocities. Their religions do not encourage questions like that.

No, they don’t forbid the question. They may even provide answers to the question of suffering. For example, they may teach that suffering leads to purification—the next stage on the road to a higher level after rebirth or a step closer to enlightenment. The simple fact is that their gods do not care for the individual believer, not to mention loving him or her.

Did you ever consider how grateful you can be that the Father of Jesus Christ welcomes and understands the cry, “My God, my God why have you forsaken me?” God actually cares for us in our anguish as much as he cared for his son on the cross. He cries with us for his heart-broken children. It is, however, not a cry of helplessness, but of compassion.

Sure, there are great theological questions and answers that relate to suffering in our world and whether God is just. Often these questions and answers help us wrestle with and understand that God is present in the midst of our suffering. Suffering happens all around us and we do not understand why, we do not often understand where God is in the midst of suffering, and we struggle to understand who God is. Yet, we know we have a God who hears our cries of suffering. We may find comfort in the questions and answers of theology, though they do not always speak to the personal experience of suffering. They may not fully touch the anguished cry and cure the bleeding soul. We need more than this, certainly.

Now that the Sri Lankan civil war has ended, there are hundreds of thousands on both sides whose suffering is stifling their future and whose hurt has turned into hatred. They have no psychotherapists who can tell them how to live in the aftermath of their horror or how to better cope with it. There is, however, hope to be found!

It happened during a special training session. Pastors, lay-workers, and some of the people who had gone through the civil war and barely survived were together. The speaker was a highly qualified specialist, but he chose a different route than all the therapists and specialists in conflict resolution and trauma counseling. He led the people to the heart of God. Some had never heard that there is a God who cares and loves them. Others had heard it, but hardly understood it in a personal way. A dam broke, and Christians and non-Christians together fled to the God who cares in the midst of a society and families torn apart and destroyed. They found God’s presence and God’s comfort in the midst of suffering.

Does that answer the Christian questions of, “Why, God? How could you let this happen, God?”  Maybe or maybe not. The fact of the matter is that there are many things about God and about suffering that we will never know and that we cannot understand. But this answers a far more important question: Does our God care, and does God love me? Yes, he does, Jesus said, and he is there with you, he cries with you, and he will carry you! God hears our cries and loves us. And God offers us a community, called the church, who can share God’s care and love with us. God is present and his love can give us comfort and strength even in the midst of a world of suffering and pain.