Where is your God now?

When my friend and fellow pastor's mother in law passed away suddenly, he told me how his son, with much anger, growled: "Where is your God now?"

In the midst of heartbreak our soul could gesture to God with inquiring palms upraised. Anyone serious about building a relationship with God needs to think through two great obstacles: the problem of pain and the problem of pleasure.

In extremes of both there is an apparent but unreal perception of the absence of God.

For my birthday my son gave me the book: "Speeches that changed the world." Not all of them did that, but some were moments that made history. Near the end of the book are the words Elie Wiesel spoke at the White House in 1999. His subject was "the Perils of Indifference."

Elie is a Holocaust survivor. He's a famous author. In his book "Night", he tells how, at 14, he was taken to the death camps in the spring of 1944. They traveled by train for 3 days, eighty people in each cattle truck. Arriving at Auschwitz, men and women were segregated. Elie never saw his mother or sister again.

He wrote: "Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith for ever. Never shall I forget those flames which murdered my God and my soul, and turned my dreams to dust."

One day the guards made them watch as they hanged a boy among some men. Wiesel recalled just before the hanging someone behind him whispered: "Where is God? Where is he?" It took the boy half an hour to die.

Behind Elie the same voice asked: "Where is God now?" and a voice inside Elie said: "Where is he? Here - hanging on this gallows."

Wiesel was saying that God was dead, powerless to help. The Holocaust made him rebel against God for allowing people to be starved, tortured, butchered, gassed, burned.

Something changed the Professor of Humanities at Boston University for Wiesel's speech included: "Rooted in our tradition, some of us (at Auschwitz) felt that to be abandoned by humanity was not the ultimate. We felt that to be abandoned by God was worse than to be punished by Him. Better an unjust God than an indifferent one.. man can live far from God, but not outside God. God is wherever we are."

The room filled with emotion. Elie then asked: "Even in suffering?" and quietly added "even in suffering."

Mr. Wiesel has wrestled with the problem of pain. In May 06, during a lecture in Utah, he spoke of his return to belief in God. He used the word "impudent" to describe his belief in God. "God is our judge, but we also judge God." He said God wants us to argue with him. He said we should pray to God and pray for God and said God needs our compassion. God is the most tragic and alone figure in the Bible.

Elie said he may be a victim of God, but he doesn't want to be an orphan of God. Some readers may think him a long way from a healthy concept of God, but I remind them whence he has come.

Worse than the dilemma that we don't feel God to be near in our times of pain is the soul-seducing power hidden in the problem of pleasure. Taking those words as the title of his book, the late Dr. John H. Gerstner claims the real question is "Why do good things happen to sinful humanity?"

Don't treat pleasure as your friend and pain as your enemy. You are not born with a right to the former and immunity to the latter.

These two problems are behind the Jewish prayer: "Give me only my daily bread otherwise I may have too much, disown You and say, 'Who is the Lord?' or I may become poor and steal, and so dishonor the name of my God.