HE ENVELOPE BORE STAMPS FROM AFRICA, BUT THE NAME of the sender meant nothing to me at all. Inside I found a handwritten letter and a photograph of a rather beautiful West African young woman whom I’d never met, but whom I shall never forget. We’ll call her Mary. Her story brought tears to my eyes and a prayer to my lips.

Mary was one of five children of a Seventh-day Adventist pastor who had been invited north from his own country to work in Liberia. The family naturally went with him. It was not long after her fifteenth birthday that civil war had broken out and the nation found itself in blood-soaked turmoil. One day as hundreds sought refuge in the church, the army arrived and slaughtered mercilessly, with no regard for their innocence or respect for the sanctuary. Mary watched her father and her brothers being hacked to death, her mother raped and then shot.

He Disfigured Her
A young soldier brusquely yanked Mary from a huddle of children, threw her to the ground, and threatened her with death if she refused him intercourse. Mary chose to uphold her dignity and told him she would not consent. Although he lost his temper, her cool nerve apparently disoriented him. Abandoning his original intention, he slashed at her with a machete, severing each arm midway between shoulder and elbow, before fleeing in disarray.

Somehow Mary survived. An old beggar woman, realizing that Mary could now do nothing for herself, took her as a daughter, fed her, clothed her, washed her, saw to her ablutions. She also became Mary’s pen in soliciting a relatively small amount of money to pay for a hospital to fit artificial limbs. Hence the letter.

A friend visited me yesterday who had worked in Zaire, where he had witnessed a similar slaughter of hundreds of Christians simply because they belonged to a particular denomination. And you and I have been traumatized by the tragedy in Rwanda, where there has been the massacre of hundreds of thousands, motivated by ethnic suspicion. We were also shaken from complacency by recent reports of the devastation of famine in East Africa.

Other Tragedies
Perhaps we have asked, in the face of horror and pain of such magnitude, “Where is God when we’re hurting?”—by which we have implied, “If He is there, why doesn’t He stop this? Human beings (at least some of them) cannot stand aside and do nothing, so how can God?”

In comparison to such extensive pain and deprivation, our own suffering may look rather mild and subjective. But even though processed on a scale with very different calibrations, it is nonetheless real.

Jodie, married less than two years and carrying their first baby, walks out without warning on Tim, depriving him of the parental joy of the birth and nurture of their little child. Beside himself with grief, he wonders, How can God do this to me?

Cycling home from youth club, David, barely 12, is pulped by a drunken car-driver, surviving only a few years as little more than a vegetable. His parents never come to terms with their loss. There’s little grief that can compare with the violent or premature loss of one’s offspring. As one child dies because of human selfishness, another dies after a heroic struggle with cancer, while another infant dies inexplicably in her cot asleep.

Where is God when we’re hurting?

I myself am no stranger to personal affliction. For the past 17 months I’ve struggled with cancer of the intestine. The pain, at times intense, is accompanied by the expectation of death hovering over my family and me. As I’ve endured countless hypodermic chemotherapy needles, CAT scans, and physical surgery, my brother-in-law has died from leukemia, leaving my youngest sister and her children to cope alone, and my extended family bereft. In comparison to the massive global tragedies caused by human violence or by so-called “acts of God,” our domestic pain is relatively small and subjective. But believe me, it’s real. And in the face of that pain I can say with humility and appreciation, “God is still there, and He still cares.”

Allow me to explain why I feel that way.

How I Came to Terms With Pain
As a Christian, I accept the Bible as being a deliberate declaration by God, through human instruments, of His will and purposes for humankind. It provides, I believe, both explanation for our present predicament and promise of its resolution. As I perceive our world in “macro,” I agree that “the heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands” (Psalm 19:1, NIV), and I accept God as the creator and sustainer of the universe.

But when I look at our world in “micro” I find neither explanation nor resolution within the world itself for our pain and suffering. I only find that clarification within the Scripture. God created perfectly, with no place for pain, suffering, or death. With no logical reason, humanity was seduced by Lucifer to accept his explanation of things and to question God and God’s authority to expect submission.

AN UPDATE From Mike Stickland Just before we went to press, Mike Stickland (at our request) sent us the following letter on his present situation.—Editors As things worked out, I never actually started temporary retirement, but persuaded the brethren to let me resume work at the local pastoral level. The Lord has blessed, and here I am, more than six years from when the medical consultants were advising me to “count your life in weeks, not months.” The Lord had other plans, and as He has invited me to push open new doors, so He has also given strength to fulfill new responsibilities. In July 1997 I was invited to become director of the Voice of Prophecy correspondence school in the British Union, and this is the post from which I now write. My health is generally good, though I take each day one at a time. Every day is a gift from God. I have to nurse myself along on a very limited diet, one that does not sound remotely like a normal healthy Adventist diet. But it works for me, and I have found that if I stay within it, I have no problems. The medical personnel (none of whom have declared faith one way or another) are absolutely astonished, and last summer they confirmed by scans and internal investigation that there is no longer any active lymphoma present. One of them asked me, “How do you explain that? How can you come from being beyond treatment in 1995 to having nothing to treat in 1999!” This gave me another chance to refer to faith and the power of prayer. So much has happened in my life by the grace of God since I wrote the main article!* *Stickland details some of his experiences in his book, Coping With Cancer and Chemotherapy, published by Stanborough Press in England and distributed by the Review and Herald Publishing Association.

A reading of the early chapters of Genesis, of the book of Job, and of Revelation (from chapter 12 onward) gives us clear descriptions of the origin, progress, and destiny of pain and suffering, the blame for which resides permanently with Lucifer. The resolution lies solely with God. Because we humans are “in the thick of it,” we feel like challenging God: “Enough already!” We are inclined to conjecture: “‘If God were good, He would wish to make His creatures perfectly happy, and if God were almighty He would be able to do what He wished. But the creatures are not happy. Therefore God lacks either goodness, or power, or both.’ This is the problem of pain, in its simplest form.”*

Through my own suffering I find it possible to accept the view that God allows the pain in human life to continue only so that ultimately He may remove it forever without risk that it will recur during eternity. It’s not that God delights in our distress, nor that He is incapable of or indifferent to resolving it, but that He knows best the precise moment to annihilate it from His universe.

The resolution of human suffering that the Bible promises is “a new heaven and a new earth” in which “there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away” (Rev. 21:1, 4, NIV). “Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all” (2 Cor. 4:16, 17, NIV).

I also find within Scripture a description of Lucifer’s purposes in inflicting pain and death, and God’s purposes in permitting it. Lucifer’s purpose is to drive a wedge between humanity and God. He began it in those early days after Creation recorded in Genesis, and he sustains it with full spite until he is cast into the eternal oblivion predicted in Revelation 20. His purpose is to malign God and to destroy human faith in Him. He pursues humanity with the intention of taking them with him into oblivion (Rev. 12).

God salvages good even from the face of evil. The apostle went to some lengths to argue that just as a human father who loves his child disciplines and permits difficulties as a means of maturing and developing the child, so God sometimes takes His people through “the valley of the shadow” in order that they may be spiritually enriched, even though physically impoverished (Heb. 12).

Someday
There is no possibility, nor does God make the offer, of immunity to suffering while we still exist in this present life. The Psalmist’s promise, “It will not come near you” (Ps. 91:7, NIV), is not for here and now, but predicts the passage of God’s people, unscathed by the destruction of Lucifer and the wicked, into God’s New Jerusalem as “the old order of things” is extinguished. Meanwhile God necessarily “causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous” (Matt. 5:45, NIV).

I wish Mary had never been savaged by that soldier. I wish her family had not been brutally murdered. I wish those in the Sudan and Ethiopia had food and water aplenty; that those engulfed by earthquake or flood had never been in jeopardy; that no one had ever perished as a consequence of the pain and disfigurement of disease. I wish humanity had given Lucifer an unequivocal “No!” But I cannot change any of that.

However, I can accept God’s explanation for its presence, and His promise of a total resolution in His new earth. Meanwhile I praise Him; yes, I praise Him, for the grace that He has extended into my life and the patience and trust that He has instilled within me via the experience of personal pain and suffering and by the observation of devastation this world has suffered at the hands of the enemy.

*C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (London: Fontana Books, 1957), p. 14.

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Mike Stickland wrote this article when he was recovering from intestinal cancer. He is now the director of the Seventh-day Adventist Discover Centre in Watford, Hertfordshire, England.