Echoing HopeSample

When God Is Not Where You Are Looking

There are few things more frustrating than submitting your life to a God who doesn’t seem to be present.

Perhaps that’s how Mary felt when she went to the tomb after Jesus’s execution and found it empty (John 20:1). Mary was already mourning the loss of Jesus; now he was literally lost! 

Mary wept, believing that her world was broken and hopeless. To add insult to injury, a random gardener showed up and asked her why she was weeping. She said, “They have taken away my Lord, and I don’t know where they’ve put him” (verse 13). 

Later in the same chapter, we encounter another disciple of Jesus, Thomas. After being told by the other disciples, “We’ve seen the Lord!” Thomas wouldn’t have it. He told them he’d believe only if he saw “the nail marks in his hands” and put his “finger in the wounds left by the nails” (John 20:25). 

Thomas needed to see Jesus’s scars. If he could see them—if we can see them—then a great hope might actually be true: even our pain is redeemable by God. Thomas wanted to know whether the pain that thrusts itself at us is redeemable by the God he’d come to know in the face of Jesus. 

Look at your own story. What does the image of the empty tomb bring up for you? Perhaps you’ve looked for Jesus and have yet to find him. Or maybe Jesus is present to you, but when it comes to your deepest hurts, you haven’t been able to pinpoint where he fits.

Maybe like Mary, you are truly seeking Jesus but are surprised when he is not where you expected him to be. Maybe like Thomas, you need something experiential to break through the pain, to remind you that God is still on the move to bring healing and hope. Don’t try to fix your thinking or reframe it. Simply be honest. See it.

Consider this exercise to engage your pain with open eyes: When has God seemed absent in your life? Read Psalm 22. How did David express his dissatisfaction with God’s seeming distance? How does this psalm relate to your experience of God’s absence?