When you are actually suffering — not contemplating suffering, but inside it — the questions change. From the outside, the puzzle is intellectual: how can a good and powerful God allow this? It is a real question and it deserves a real answer. But in the middle of grief, that is rarely the question that presses. The question that presses is quieter and more childlike. Is anyone there? Does anyone see this? Am I alone in it?
Scripture, interestingly, spends less energy than we might expect explaining the why of suffering, and a great deal of energy answering the second question. Its central comfort is not a theory. It is a presence.
Close to the brokenhearted
The Psalms do not flinch from pain. They are full of people crying out from the bottom of it, sometimes without resolution. And running through them is a particular promise:
The LORD is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit. (Ps. 34:18, NIV)
Read it slowly, because it cuts against an instinct most of us carry. We tend to assume that suffering is a sign of God’s distance — that if he were near, this would not be happening, and the fact that it is happening means he has withdrawn. The verse says the opposite. The brokenhearted are not the ones God is far from. They are precisely the ones he draws close to. Not close to the impressive, the successful, the spiritually together. Close to the broken. Near to the crushed.
This does not explain the pain. It does something the psalmist evidently found more useful: it tells you who is in the room with you. And it suggests that the very lowness you feel, the sense of being crushed, is not evidence of abandonment but the kind of condition God moves toward.
The God who weeps
There is a moment in John’s Gospel that I think every grieving person should know about.
Jesus arrives at the village of Bethany four days after his friend Lazarus has died. He is going to raise him — he says so, he knows the ending. By any logic he has no reason to grieve, because in a few minutes the tomb will be empty and the sisters’ tears will turn to astonishment. And yet, faced with Mary weeping and the crowd weeping and the sealed grave of his friend, the shortest verse in the Bible records what he does:
Jesus wept. (John 11:35, NIV)
Two words, and they are extraordinary. God in the flesh, standing at a graveside he is about to empty, weeps anyway. He does not bypass the sorrow on his way to the miracle. He enters it. He stands with the grieving and his own eyes fill.
I find that worth holding onto when comfort is hard to come by. Whatever else is true, the God of the Bible is not a distant, unmoved spectator of human pain. He weeps at a tomb. When you weep, you are not doing something alien to him. You are doing something he has done.
The man of sorrows
This goes deeper still, all the way to the centre of the faith. Centuries before Jesus, the prophet Isaiah described the servant God would send in language that the church has always read as a portrait of Christ:
He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain. (Isa. 53:3, NIV)
A man of suffering, and familiar with pain. This is who God came to be among us. Not a deity who studied human sorrow from a safe height, but one who took it on, who knew rejection and grief and physical agony from the inside. And the same passage says why:
Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering… he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities. (Isa. 53:4–5, NIV)
This is the heart of it. Christ did not only suffer alongside us, in sympathy. He suffered for us, in our place, taking onto himself the deepest wound of all. The cross means that when you cry out in the dark, you are not crying out to someone who cannot imagine what it is like. You are crying out to the one who has been further into the dark than you will ever go, and who went there for love of you.
A way in
If you are in sorrow now, I will not insult it with a tidy lesson. Some griefs do not have a lesson, at least not yet. But there is one thing worth doing, and it is small.
Tell God the truth about it. Out loud, or on paper, in whatever words you actually have — including the angry ones, the bewildered ones, the ones that sound like accusation. The Psalms are full of exactly this kind of prayer, and God has never recoiled from it. You will not be praying into an empty sky. By his own promise, he is already close to the brokenhearted; you are simply turning to face the One who is already there.
He has not explained everything. He has done something better. He has come near, and he has wept, and he has carried the worst of it himself. In the end the comfort of the gospel is not an argument that wins. It is a presence that stays.