Transcript
You know, when you're suffering, you reach for comfort. You reach for hope. You reach for some reason to get up in the morning and fight again. You reach for something that won't make your suffering the dominant experience of that moment or that day, the thing that controls you and beats up your heart.
I Will Never Leave You or Forsake You
And so, I can't think of anything that is more powerfully comforting than these words. "I will never leave you or forsake you." The reality for me that the God of the universe, the God who created and controls everything was with me in this experience and He wouldn't leave.
In my moment of greatest pain, all I could pray was, "God, help me. God, help me. God, help me." No other words would come out of my mouth and the thing that was a comfort to me was that One I was praying to wasn't distant. He was near and He wasn't disgusted by my weakness, and He would never turn His back on me, and He would never leave. He would never get overwhelmed and He would never get impatient, and He would never be unfaithful. I mean, what could be more comforting than that?
And there is nothing that has the power to defeat Him. Suffering defeated me, but not Him. And to know that it's impossible for me to be in any human experience, no matter how foundationally dark and seemingly impossible, to be in no experience by myself is comfort as ultimate as you could ever get.
I think one of the dangers of suffering is fall into God-amnesia, where your suffering sort of overwhelms your knowledge or your remembrance of His presence. And the one thing Luella, my wife, did to me in those hospital rooms in moments of huge suffering is you say, "Your Lord is near."
