Is God Present in your Suffering?

I don't know much about suffering. I've had a pretty easy life with most needs provided by parents who've remained married. I've never experienced long bouts of physical pain that kept me in a hospital bed eating hospital food, or spent months or years grieving the loss of a close relative.

Humans of every age have been tortured by the inevitability of death. Human suffering is a reminder that we do not have the control we thought we did. We don't have the certainty we wish we could have.

Some Christians subscribe to a tradition that has made allowance for the denial of death's inevitability.

One of the saddest phenomenons in the christian church right now is the Christian desire for certitude. Christians today have bought into the myth that they can answer every question and that nothing is beyond their knowledge.

"The saddest stories that I heard in my research ere when it was obvious that people would lost to whatever sickness they were facing.  Bu the church was not able to surround them with comfort and tell them that they weren't to blame or that therefore questions of uncertainties beyond our knowledge. They couldn't tell them that God was present in the suffering of his people, not just in the triumph of them."