Human Suffering (3)

I ended my last post on suffering with a comment about “the mysterious will of a personal, powerful, just, and compassionate God.” I can just about hear a critic responding, “Yeah, yeah, yeah! You Christians always take refuge in mystery, but you won’t let us do it. Your insane ideas are mysteries while the difficulties with our materialism are contradictions. Well, I think that what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.”

This is a reasonable response given the way many believers do retreat into mystery whenever they cannot explain something. The oft-heard reply, “It’s a mystery; you just have to believe it!” means something like, “I’m scared of facing hard questions, and you are an evil person for asking them.”

By way of contrast to the carping critic and the befuddled believer, I think it is helpful to distinguish two legitimate uses of “mystery.”

First we may speak of a mystery when the general principles of a matter are tolerably clear, but the details and specifics far exceed our comprehension. Quite a few laypeople have a basic grasp of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. They know that as an object approaches the speed of light, its mass approaches infinity; they know that gravity bends space and slows clocks. They may even appreciate how Minkowski’s space-time interpretation of Special Relativity helped Einstein to formulate his General Theory of Relativity. Not many laypeople, however, can make any sense out of the series of partial differential equations that express Einstein’s theory in mathematical form. Those equations are a mystery.

That is what I meant by “the mysterious will of God.” The Bible’s general explanation of human suffering is clear. The Bible explains the origin of human suffering; several of the purposes suffering serves in the lives of believers and non-believers; what God has done and will do to end suffering; and even how suffering fits into God’s comprehensive plan for human beings. These things are not, properly speaking, mysteries. I have written quite a bit about them elsewhere.

The mystery of suffering lies not in the general picture. It lies in the specifics of the countless happenings in the lives of the billions of human beings who inhabit our planet. It would be, in principle, impossible to write a book that would explain everything about everybody. Of course, people are always making guesses about such things: “This happened to me because….” I can’t prove it, but I suspect that these guesses are totally wrong ninety percent of the time and less than half right even when they are partially correct. What God is doing in our individual lives is mostly a mystery to us.

Second we may speak of a mystery when we have clear evidence that two apparently incompatible things are both true. With careful thought, we may be able to define and describe them in such a way that they no longer appear contradictory, but we still have trouble putting them together in our imaginations.

Light is a good example. By the mid-19^th century, it was clear that light acted like waves on the surface of water, but in 1905 Albert Einstein showed that it also acted like bullets shot from a gun. How can light be both waves and particles? Our minds have trouble picturing such a thing. We can, however, speak of these two behaviors of light in a non-contradictory way. Light propagates as a wave, but it is absorbed as if it were a stream of particles. In other words, light behaves in different ways in different situations.

Light is like the doctrine of the Trinity. God is both three and one, but He is not three in the same way that He is one. He is one essence and three persons. Although it is difficult to define essence and person, it can be done in a non-contradictory way. The mystery arises from our inability to find any exact parallel to the Trinity in creation. There is not another being to whom we can adequately compare Him. In other my writings, I have explained why many of the common illustrations of the Trinity are more misleading than helpful, and I have provided some other illustrations (and explained their limitations). My point is that the Bible’s statements about the Trinity are clear enough, but our world lacks a suitable analog that would enable us to understand how God experiences His threeness and His oneness. The great mystery is not in the doctrine of the Trinity, but in God’s inner being.

(It is worthwhile pointing out that the so-called trinity of the great gods in Hinduism is quite different from the Biblical picture of God. Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva do not act together with one purpose and one energy in every divine work, as the Father, Son and Spirit do.)

Why does it make sense to accept one mystery, but not another? The wave-particle nature of light suggests two criteria. First, there is compelling evidence that both aspects of light’s behavior are true. Second, the mathematical equations that bring these two behaviors together also describe many other phenomena as well. The result is Quantum Mechanics, one of the two most powerful theories of the twentieth century. (The other is the General Theory of Relativity.) We can fruitfully apply these two criteria to the doctrine of the Trinity.

First, compelling evidence. The compelling evidence for the Trinity is, in a word, Jesus. As I suggested in my previous essay, the New Testament consistently shows us God interacting with God. God in human flesh speaks to God as His Father. And yet this God in human flesh insists that there is but one God. An acceptance of the Trinity begins with the FACT of Jesus. The biblical Jesus has been often distorted or denied, but it has not been found easy to get rid of Him. He is too powerful a figure for that. In every age, there have been those who tried to remake Jesus into something easier for the human mind to digest, but if we leave Him as we see Him in the New Testament, we have the embryo of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity.

“Trinity” is not a biblical word. It was made up in the third century by a theologian who wanted a shorthand way of expressing what the Bible teaches. The tri-unity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit leaps off the pages of the New Testament. There we see three who act together in distinct ways, but they penetrate each other so fully that they are one Being, one life.

A Christian is someone who has found the New Testament portrait of Jesus so attractive and compelling that he has cast himself on Jesus as Savior and committed himself to Jesus as Lord. Therefore, the very best way for a non-Christian to hold on to his unbelief is to avoid reading the New Testament with a seeking heart. As soon as one is committed to following Christ, if He should prove Himself true, then that person is in real danger of becoming a convert. Jesus said, “If anyone is willing to do His will, he will know of the teaching, whether it is of God or whether I speak from Myself” (John 7:17).

Second, explanatory power. It took a little over three centuries for the early church to come to grips with the amazing data of the New Testament. It was clear from the beginning that Jesus was divine, but it was very hard to come up with ways of speaking about God that did justice to the full scope of the Bible’s teaching. Every possible aberration of the biblical picture was tried and found wanting. As soon, however, as suitable terms and definitions had been agreed upon, the church began to realize that it had been given an inexhaustible treasure. Like quantum mechanics, the doctrine of the Trinity provided answers for all sorts of problems it had not been devised to explain.

For example, philosophy has been unable to solve the problem of the one and the many: Is reality ultimately one (Hinduism) or is reality ultimately a set of disconnected facts (materialism)? If reality is one, are the particulars illusory? If reality is many, is there any overarching purpose toward which all the individual things are moving?

The doctrine of the Trinity insists that ultimate reality is both one and plural. Individual people really do exist, and history has a unified direction and goal set by the one God. Both of these truths are essential for making sense out of suffering. If our individual existence is an illusion, so is suffering. If history has no goal, our pains are real but meaningless.

The earlier essays in this series pointed out that we cannot adequately explain why we are outraged by suffering if ultimate reality is impersonal. We might not want to suffer, and by placing ourselves in another person’s shoes, we might feel sorrow at the sufferings of others. Even animals sometimes appear to grieve the loss of a companion. Aversion to pain, sorrow, and grief are not problematic. Outrage, however, arises from a sense of injustice, a sense that a great moral wrong has been committed. As that old atheist, Friedrich Nietzsche clearly saw, (and as some of the “new atheists” seem determined to ignore) true moral wrong depends on true moral righteousness.

Moral righteousness is always personal and relational—one person can be rightly related to another. Two stones cannot be rightly related to each other. In the Bible, righteousness is not a standard above God, which He must obey. Neither are right and wrong determined by God’s arbitrary command (which appears to be the case in Islam). God’s righteous character consists of the right relationships between the members of the Trinity. The Father loves the Son and gives Him all that He has; the Son loves the Father and obeys Him perfectly; the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and Son together uniting them in perfect harmony. (See my The Beauty of God for a Broken World, chapter 10).

The foundation for our moral outrage at suffering reflects a deep sense of a broken relationship, a sense that a covenant between persons has been violated. That is exactly what the Bible claims has happened. God’s covenant with man has been violated; man’s covenant, under God, with other men has been violated. But God’s inter-Trinitarian covenant insures that these other covenants will eventually be put right.

Thus, the doctrine of the Trinity turns out to be essential for understanding—

Ø        our own personhood,

Ø the nature of righteousness,

Ø the reason for our outrage at suffering,

Ø and the reason for our hope that all that is broken will be made whole.

When we accept the mystery of the Triune God, a great light shines into our darkness. That is the reason the church treasures this marvelous doctrine.

Human Suffering (2)

My previous post explored human suffering in the light of four non-Christian worldviews. All of them are fundamentally flawed because they are untrue to our deepest intuitions about life. In this post, I turn to the Christian Scriptures. The Bible’s teaching on suffering is broad and multi-faceted, so all I can do is present a few of its more important concepts.

I must begin with a disclaimer. The Bible will not tell you why you are afflicted with cancer, poverty, or loneliness. It will not tell you why God allows a human monster to push a lighted cigarette repeatedly into the flesh of his girlfriend’s baby before he drowns it in the toilet. Only an infinite mind is capable of encompassing all the individual horrors that human beings have experienced in all the days of earth’s long history.

The Bible is clear that human sin brought suffering into the human race, but it is equally clear that many of those who suffer horribly are relatively innocent compared to those who torment them. How can we begin to make sense of these things? The Bible alone can help us.

Suffering is real, and it is wrong. It is not an illusion of the mortal mind as much eastern thought insists. Disease, disaster, mayhem, and murder are not natural, at least for human beings. Something is wrong with the world. There is such a thing as injustice and our hearts cry out for the crooked to be set straight. God Himself is outraged by man’s inhumanity to man, and He will see justice done. See Amos 1:1-2:8 for a sample.

God is sovereign. Some people, in an effort to get God off the hook, limit God’s control over the world. They attribute all suffering to the devil, to evil men, and to nature. “God didn’t cause you to suffer,” they say. “This pain did not come from Him.” To save God from Himself, they propose to un-god God. Certainly, the Bible recognizes these secondary causes of suffering. It insists that God Himself does not do evil, but He permits it, and He is able to stop it if He wills.

Lamentations is a lament (what else could it be) over the destruction of Jerusalem. The men were slaughtered, the girls were raped, the pregnant women were ripped up with the sword, and the survivors were driven away like cattle to become slaves. In these pages, the prophet weeps because all he has known and loved is gone. Strangely, he does not blame the Babylonian warriors. Neither does He blame God. He blames his people for their sins, and he ascribes the disaster to God’s hand.

The Lord has done what He purposed;

He has accomplished His word

Which He commanded from days of old.

He has thrown down without sparing,

And He has caused the enemy to rejoice over you;

He has exalted the might of your adversaries (Lamentations 2:17).

God is passionately involved with His creation.

He is not a distant deity, aloof and uninvolved with His creatures. His wrath is passionate, but so is His love. He sings and shouts and celebrates with joy over people who repent and come back to Him (Isaiah 62:5; Zephaniah 3:17; Luke 15:7, 10).

God grieves over human suffering—even when it is deserved.

Say to them, “As I live!” declares the Lord GOD, “I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that the wicked turn from his way and live. Turn back, turn back from your evil ways! Why then will you die, O house of Israel” (Ezekiel 33:11)?

My heart cries out for Moab [one of Israel’s enemies];

His fugitives are as far as Zoar and Eglath-shelishiyah,

For they go up the ascent of Luhith weeping;

Surely on the road to Horonaim they raise a cry of distress over their ruin….

Therefore I will weep bitterly for Jazer, for the vine of Sibmah;

I will drench you with my tears, O Heshbon and Elealeh [places in Moab];

For the shouting over your summer fruits and your harvest has fallen away (Isaiah 15:5, 16:9).

When He [Jesus] approached Jerusalem, He saw the city and wept over it, saying, “If you had known in this day, even you, the things which make for peace! But now they have been hidden from your eyes. For the days will come upon you when your enemies will throw up a barricade against you, and surround you and hem you in on every side, and they will level you to the ground and your children within you, and they will not leave in you one stone upon another, because you did not recognize the time of your visitation” (Luke 19:41).

Every Surah (chapter) in the Qur’an (except Surah 9) begins with the phrase, “In the name of God [Allah], the Compassionate, the Merciful,” but according to Muslim theologians, Allah cannot be touched with our infirmities. Furthermore, He has done nothing to inspire our confidence in His compassion. He has not revealed Himself as a pardoning God (compare Micah 7:18), but as one who weighs good and bad deeds (Qur’an 23.102-103).

The big question: Is it conceivable that an infinitely powerful, infinitely wise, infinitely holy, infinitely loving God might have a plan in which horrendous suffering has a good and just place? If you say no, you are left with the hopelessness of Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and Materialism. If you respond with a tentative “yes,” you may properly ask what God has done to justify our trusting in Him. The answer in a word is Jesus.

The claims of Jesus are outrageous (if they are not true). Here is a sampling. He claimed divine power to forgive sins (Matthew 9:6). Although He scathingly denounced the Pharisees for evading God’s commandment to honor our parents (Matthew 15:1-9), He said, “He who loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me; and he who loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me” (Matthew 10:37). The Old Testament prophets pointed the people to God where they might find rest, but Jesus said, “Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28). After God gave the Sabbath commandment to the Jews, the first recorded Sabbath-breaker was stoned (Numbers 15:32-36), but when the Pharisees accused the disciples of Jesus with breaking the Sabbath, He claimed that He was “Lord of the Sabbath” (Matthew 12:8). As His earthly ministry was drawing to a close, He repeatedly predicted His death and resurrection (Matthew 16:21; 17:22-23; 20:17-19). Not only that, but He said that He was going to “give His life a ransom for many” (Matthew 20:28). To top it all off, He claimed that after His death and resurrection, He would eventually come again with power and great glory to rescue His people and to judge the earth (Matthew 24:30-31, 37-39).

The Buddha never made such claims; neither did Muhammad or any other major religious teacher or philosopher. Certainly, no one else in history has predicted his own death and resurrection and then pulled it off. Such a thing has never even been claimed for any other historical figure. The disciples of Jesus claimed that they saw Him after His death in several widely separated locations and that on one occasion more than 500 people saw Him at one time (1 Corinthians 15:6).

Now set aside for the moment the question of whether the Bible is inspired by God. Set aside for the moment the question of the general historical reliability of the New Testament (for which there is ample evidence). If the gospels are only works of fiction produced by a believing community, the world has not seen another creative genius—much less a group of men—audacious enough to make such claims within the living memory of a well-known teacher. (And, by the way, most of the apostles gave their lives, not for preaching a noble ideal, but for claiming the Jesus rose from the dead.)

So what has this to do with suffering? In the death of Jesus as a ransom for many, we see exactly what we need in order to trust God in the face of horrendous suffering. Jesus, according to His own testimony, was more than a man. He was the Son of God. No one can make God suffer, so Jesus insisted that no one was going to take His life from Him, but that He would lay it down voluntarily (Matthew 26:52-54; John 10:14-18).

As the apostle Paul summarized Jesus’ teaching about Himself, “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself” (2 Corinthians 5:19). In the cross of Christ, we see God’s passionate hatred of sin and His passionate love for people. God was willing to become a man for the specific purpose of suffering to redeem sinners from His own wrath. Furthermore, the resurrection of Christ is God’s answer to our plea for evidence that He is able to defeat death, decay, and despair.

What Christianity offers to a suffering world is a God willing to suffer with and for His suffering creatures, a God who does not make light of suffering, a God who is powerful enough to end suffering when His plans are complete, and a God who calls us to trust in His goodness when we cannot see it.

Only in the God of the Bible do we find the ultimate reality that makes human life anything but a bit of flotsam cast up on the vast impersonal shore of the universe. Only in Jesus Christ do we find adequate evidence that this God exists. Suffering presents us with mysteries that seem insoluble, but we can live with mysteries if we have enough evidence to warrant accepting them. We cannot live humanly with an ultimate reality that dehumanizes us.

My heart can rest in the mysterious will of a personal, powerful, just, and compassionate God. It cannot find rest anywhere else.

Human Suffering (1)

Human suffering is very great. Much of it seems senseless. Much of it is so evil that I cannot comprehend it. Vile violence against women and girls, perhaps more than anything else, pierces my heart like a knife.

What anchors my faith in Christ in the face of senseless suffering and brutal inhumanity? In The Beauty of God chapter 8, I have explored some of the reasons for God permitting pain and evil to afflict His good creation. Scattered throughout other chapters I have provided some analysis of various alternatives to the biblical worldview. In this post I want to bring the major alternatives to biblical revelation together. When my heart is burdened by suffering in the world, I run through them in my mind, and I see afresh how impossible they are.

There are really only four major worldviews (aside from Christianity) that are viable candidates for adoption by all people. My purpose is to show that they are all fundamentally flawed in their approach to human suffering. I am well aware that people are often either better or worse than their theoretical convictions. I am not criticizing the adherents of these views. I am critiquing their understanding of the ultimate foundation of life.

In subsequent postings, I hope to give an analysis of the Bible’s teaching on suffering and why it succeeds where the others fail. Whenever I think through the options available, I realize afresh that there really is no other place to turn except the Triune God of the Bible.

There is no hope in Hinduism. The doctrine of Karma insists that your lot in this life is your well-merited fate because of sins committed in a prior existence. Hindus (by the grace of the true God) are often better than their religion. Tens of thousands protested the gang rape of a young woman on a private bus in New Delhi in 2012, but their doctrine should have taught them to say, “No doubt, she deserved it.”

Furthermore, the suffering of the body does not really touch the soul. In the Indian holy book, the Bhagavad-Gita, the god Krishna encourages Arjuna not to feel guilty about killing his wicked cousins in battle because death is only an illusion: “As a person puts on new garments, giving up old ones, similarly the soul accepts new material bodies, giving up the old and useless ones. The soul can never be cut into pieces by any weapon, nor can he be burned by fire, nor moistened by water, nor withered by the wind.... It is said that the soul is invisible, inconceivable, immutable and unchangeable. Knowing this, you should not grieve for the body” (2.22-25). Therefore, logically, the rape of this young woman did her no harm. If we believe Krishna, we should say that we are outraged at her rape because we cannot see past the outer shell of the body.

The more refined forms of philosophical Hinduism may say that the Atman (the self) is Brahman (ultimate reality) “within” and Brahman is the Atman “without.” The individuality of the self is an illusion. The self and Brahman are one. The goal of life is to escape reincarnation by acquiring good Karma. Then the tiny drop of individual consciousness will be dissolved in the great ocean of impersonal, universal Brahman. This sounds very noble until one realizes that pain and pleasure or God and the devil are therefore only names for our misperceptions of the all-encompassing, impersonal Being. The horror of rape and the pleasure of a good dinner with friends are equally illusory.

There is no blessedness in Buddhism. The Buddha traced suffering to desire. If one can quench self-centered desire, he will no longer suffer. This is the enlightenment that Buddha achieved. Setting aside later developments that virtually deified Buddha and other enlightened beings, we are left with a set of psychological techniques for achieving a state in which one is not bothered by the vicissitudes of life. After enlightenment, the flame of an individual life will no longer have to pass through the weary round of suffering, death, rebirth, and suffering. Instead, it will enter Nirvana. Nirvana is not a place. It is the impersonal, ultimate reality. Buddha would not describe Nirvana, except to say that it is bliss. The problem, however, is that bliss is a personal trait which is inconsistent with the impersonality of Nirvana. Bliss and the extinction of desire (the blowing out of the flame of life) are fundamentally incompatible.

Of course, some eastern philosophers claim not to be bothered by logical contradictions. In their view A and Non-A may be equally ultimate, but this is only a mind game. They do not and cannot live as if the real world is ultimately contradictory. No Buddhist or Hindu philosopher will act as if being run over by a car is the same as escaping such a fate.

In the end, Buddhism, which began with Buddha’s distress over suffering, offers only an anesthetic.

There is no inspiration in Islam. Islam claims to be based on revelations given to Muhammad (d. AD 632) by the archangel Jibril. Its references to biblical characters and events are clearly only a mishmash of stories picked up by Muhammad from contact with Jews and Christians and various cults in his travels as a trader. The Qur’an says that Muhammad never read or wrote a book. His followers wrote down his sayings on any material that was handy. After his death, his sayings were collected to form the Quran. The Qur’an encourages Christians to read the Injil (the gospel) because then they will see that Muhammad is a true prophet. However, the Injil, as it exists in manuscripts from the second century onward, clearly contradicts the fundamental teachings of Islam. For example, the Qur’an specifically denies that Jesus is the Son of God and that He was crucified on the cross. Islam is simply the most successful Christian cult, and like all the major cults, it denies the deity of Christ.

The doctrines of Islam offer no comfort for those who suffer. Everything that happens is according to the will of Allah, and submission to His inscrutable will is the essence of Islam. Allah is utterly transcendent. He has never revealed himself. All we can know is his will. We cannot know him or have a personal and intimate relationship with him (though some later developments may have softened this conception). The Muslim answer to suffering is simply, “Allah has willed it.” We can neither question his decree, nor understand its purpose. Has a woman been gang raped? We must punish the evil-doers, of course, but she must submit to the inscrutable will of God without any comfort from the presence of God.

There is no meaning in materialism. As Friedrich Nietzsche clearly realized, the death of God entails the death of ultimate meaning and morality. Man without God must move on beyond good and evil. For the consistent materialist, suffering is simply a fact, a meaningless datum. Of course, materialists (by the grace of the God they deny) do become outraged at injustice. In their hearts, they know that the gang rape of a woman is different from a pack of dogs climbing one after the other on top of a bitch in heat. In their proper moral outrage, materialists improperly rage against God, who alone can give meaning to their sense of morality.

 Summary.

Ø      Hinduism. Learn to regard suffering as an illusion.

Ø      Buddhism. Train yourself to ignore your suffering. Extinguish your individual, self-centered desire.

Ø     Islam. Submit to suffering. It is the inscrutable will of a remote Allah.

Ø    Materialism. Suffering is a fact of evolution. No suffering is truly evil because good and evil are value judgments made by individuals or by their particular communities.

These are all of the viable alternatives to Christianity that there are in the world. My heart can rest in none of them because I know that good and evil are neither illusions of the mortal mind nor inventions of self-replicating mud. I know that generosity and kindness reflect ultimate Goodness and that cruelty is an aberration. I know that a rose is more beautiful than a pile of horse manure. I know that we were designed for love and for beauty and for the fulfillment of every holy desire. The extinction of desire (Buddhism), the dissolution of individuality in the great ocean of being (Hinduism), and the unreachable transcendence of Allah—all of these deny the fundamental fact of our humanity: we were made for relationship.

The Silence of God

Over thirty years ago, I sat with a woman who had lost her husband and her only daughter. Both of them were hospitalized for about four months before they died. She said, “I can pray for other people, but I can’t pray for myself. My prayers seem to go no higher than the ceiling.”

She felt as if God had deserted her. She could not sense His presence. God did not seem to be listening to her.

I assured her that her feelings were not abnormal. She was not a bad Christian. Some of God’s choicest servants have felt the same way, as we see in the Psalms.

David, a man after God’s own heart, cried out, “To You, O Lord, I call; my rock, do not be deaf to me, for if You are silent to me, I will become like those who go down to the pit” (Psalm 28:1). “I stretch out my hands to You; my soul longs for You, as a parched land. Answer me quickly, O Lord, my spirit fails; do not hide Your face from me, or I will become like those who go down to the pit” (Psalm 143:6-7). Another psalmist complained, “I will say to God my rock, ‘Why have You forgotten me?’” (Psalm 42:9).

Such feelings of abandonment come most often in times of great distress or sorrow. The suffering believer prays, but his circumstances do not change, and the medicine bottle of divine comfort seems empty.

The thing that surprises me about the ancient Hebrew poets is how often their psalms of lament close on a note of confidence, even before their situation improves. For example, “Why are you in despair, O my soul? And why have you become disturbed within me? Hope in God, for I shall yet praise Him, the help of my countenance and my God” (Psalm 42:11).

In the apparent silence of God, they discovered that the Lord was speaking more loudly than when life was sweet. He was calling out to them, “Trust Me when you can neither hear nor see Me,” and they answered, “Yes, I will.”

We see this trust pre-eminently in the Lord Jesus Christ. From the cross, He cried out, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” followed a short time later by, “Father, into Your hands I commit My spirit” (Mark 15:34; Luke 23:46). Jesus was truly forsaken by God for a time as He bore the wrath of God for our sins. As a result, no believer in Jesus will ever be truly forsaken. Jesus took our forsakenness on Himself that we might have the continual presence of God through the Holy Spirit.

The night before His crucifixion, Jesus said, "I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may be with you forever; that is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it does not see Him or know Him, but you know Him because He abides with you and will be in you” (John 14:16-17).

One of the ministries of the Spirit is to help us pray when we are so distressed that we cannot pray for ourselves. “In the same way the Spirit also helps our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we should, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words; and He who searches the hearts knows what the mind of the Spirit is, because He intercedes for the saints according to the will of God” (Romans 8:26-27).

To the dear lady I mentioned earlier I said, “I know you feel deserted, as many of God’s beloved children have felt, but the Holy Spirit is in you, and He is turning your groans into a more beautiful prayer than you have ever uttered with your lips.” And she was comforted.

(This essay first appeared in the Allentown Morning Call on June 22, 2013.)