The Consolation of God

'Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.' Jesus, The Bible.

There is a special place in the will and heart of God for those who have suffered.
In a world that is full of injustice and atrocities of the worst imaginable kind, it is easy to doubt in the goodness of a God who claims to be all powerful, all loving and completely just. Sometimes we just can't get past the Why question and it has been responsible for a huge number of people rejecting the God of the Bible. And it is completely warranted.

Why has God chosen not to interfere on a grand scale with the happenings of a world that are unjust at best, sadistic and brutal at worst? Why the holocaust, the starving children, the abused and the molested? Where is God when the world most needs Him? Like a veil or a curtain, He seems to have pulled the clouds over Himself and taken into hiding in the heavens above and beyond the accusations of His confused, hurting and angry creation.

Or has He?

Many wise and brilliant men, intellectuals and theologians alike have posed answers to The Big Question of Suffering and I am not seeking to add any great insight that they have not already revealed at a higher, more eloquent and thoroughly researched level than I am capable. I do however have my own thoughts on the issue. Thoughts birthed out of my own experiences of injustice and suffering. And this is what I have found: Nothing that I have turned over to Him has ever come back to me empty.While He didn't stop certain pains and injustices in my own life, He has removed the sting of many traumatic experiences by offering one of the things that our God seems to do best:
Consolation.

There is a strange thing that takes place when we use the pain to turn to God rather than from Him. We find a bittersweet place of abiding in the comfort of God amidst the hurt of the circumstance, the event or the memory. I thoroughly believe that this is why Jesus actually went as far as to say 'blessed' are those who mourn. Not just 'ok' or 'comforted' are those who mourn, but blessed. Those who have drunk deeply of the tender consolation of God can only agree. There is a battle in this life, but I am beginning to believe that is not about justice versus injustice but is a war for the mind. A fight to trust in a God whose ways, at times, confuse us. As autonomous humans, we tend to say to God, 'show me your proof and then I will trust you.' Both wise and frustrating is Father God's response; 'trust me and then I will show you.'