I have neither an easy life nor a profound spiritual life. So I can’t relate to their sufferings nor do I take comfort in them.
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Bob, I also haven’t had an easy life and in many ways very hard, some of the worst of traumas and ordeals for loved ones and myself…and one
can’t find comfort in others’ sufferings anyway.
God doesn’t take zero responsibility, though it seems like that sometimes.
We are responsible for our choices and their consequences of course, but I have found that eventually some problems are alleviated. Prayers for our needs can be answered, but not always as soon as we’d like and in the way we’d like…but there have been some amazing last-moment answers, eventually, after a lot of struggle and other unhappiness…but also with trying very hard to resolve things.
I share something I wrote at some stage, not because I think it will comfort you or speak to you, but so maybe you’ll feel less isolated?
Faith under siege
Eternal God, when my spirit has burned to ashes, ground to dust with a boulder of mute and heavy sorrow, please give me trust in Your personal love for me.
When mine, or others’ mistakes or uncaring have wounded and savaged my heart, where are You to restore what is injured even when I plead for Your intervention and strive to heal the damage? And yet, though You seem absent, I still humbly cry out for Your mercy and healing.
When my efforts leave me helpless with no path left to try, please comfort me and show me a new path.
When others undermine with repeated assaults and short-circuit my resolve, send wise friends to comfort and support me. For no sooner has one problem and heartache eased or resolved than another, equally painful, arises for another or myself.
When I seek You but sometimes feel You are heartlessly steeled against me and my life becomes a flat salt desert. Please help me to trust in You even then, when trust no longer seems possible.
When my heart cries out repeatedly, groping in the helplessness of fears, disappointments and grief that words cannot convey; screaming in the silence of my brain. Is my only comfort, some day, death?
Yet still I call on You and place my tatters of faith in You.
and another
O Silent God
Our God, we pray to You for others and ourselves, and sometimes it seems, if only for a time, a protracted time of awful pain and loneliness, that no one is listening, that You are not there.
Many have turned away, disappointed and bitter, that You have not answered their urgent prayer, their painful need for self and for others. There is no satisfactory human answer to their challenge, whatever one might say of Your ways, Your time, because their anguish or their anger is the reality they experience.
Dear God, You need no reminder, but my humanness leads me to remind You that we are human in our minds and hearts and bodies. We have little or no actual sense or knowledge of ourselves as spirit. If You do not touch us as human beings living in a physical world that we acutely experience, then who can blame anyone for losing faith and hope in You. I cannot blame those who do…but I pray for them with all my heart and life.
O silent God let us hear Your voice in the words of others, and let us be Your love spoken to them. Yet may I ask that You also speak directly to their hearts and minds with unmistakeable Love even where we cannot detect the action of Your Spirit in ourselves or in others. Speak to them in their last moments, if not before.
Please be mindful of our needs, and nurture us as we pray and seek Your healing and care. Embrace all who have lost their hope in God and prayer.
