They say that more people are turning to God since the world began to ramp up its uncertainty. I hope that’s true. He is certainly talked about more on social media platforms now than at any time I can remember. Of course, though, that also means placing his name where some people can throw rocks at it – and they do.

I can completely understand why an unbeliever would say that they cannot reconcile belief in God with the maelstrom that seems to be breaking loose around us every day. Many live in perpetual war zones, their homes torn apart by conflict not of their making. There are countless displaced people, just existing as best they can. And, even besides the theatre of warfare, there are quietly terrifying dramas played out in every corner of the Earth. Families sit by the hospital beds of sick children; unwanted diagnoses are issued to men and women who still have life they want to go on living; and healthy people face the torture of watching those they love suffer.

I fully understand that this seems contrary to the idea of a benign power who loves us, regardless of what we are. And I don’t have the words to tell anyone that they are wrong. Who am I, who is any Christian, to take that task on? 

All I would say is this: get to know him yourself. Don’t take anyone else’s word for who God is; but please don’t dismiss him because you’re in pain. If you want to confront him with the reality of your suffering and ask him where his love is in that . . . do it.

I have done it. In the searing, raw moments of my grief at losing a beloved husband so young, I cried to God. It seemed hollow to me to sit in church and hear that I am the apple of his eye, that my name is written upon his palms, only to return home to a house empty of the man I always believed that same God had joined me to. In these hard, lonely hours, I was like Naomi, asking to be called Mara in my self-pity.

These comfortless seasons sometimes lasted for days, but not days and days. I can’t give anyone the formula for restoration to trusting God, because I don’t think there is one in these circumstances. You have to simply sit with him, and show him your heart – but, in return, you have to listen while he reveals his. Every time I have accused him in my bitterness, he answers me as soon as I open my ears to what I already know.

God is love. We think we invented it, but we only claimed it as our own, remaking an inferior version as best we could in our own image. And human love can be beautiful, whether it is between parent and child, between a man and a woman, between siblings or friends – even the love we can have for our pets. It has inspired countless poems, songs, novels, films, paintings, opera . . . and yet that kind of love, however attractive, is a pale imitation of the original.

God loves us because God is love. We question this because we really only know the fickle, human brand of love, which is rarely as unconditional as we would like. In our blinkered state, we judge the quality of God’s love by what we think we are due, and what we want.

His perfect love doesn’t always give us what we want. I didn’t want my husband to die, but he did. That wasn’t cruelty on the part of God because he is incapable of cruelty. It is sometimes a difficult pill to swallow for me, but in an enduring way, I know that this is part of a greater plan. Hard though this can be, it is made possible because I know God, and to know him is to trust him implicitly. Even if that trust sometimes falters into recrimination when I feel a stab of pain at my loss, in the end I always remember who God is.

God is love. We cannot understand that through any means but being with him. I cannot make you feel it, and vice-versa, no matter how many words we waste. No minister or priest can convince you of God’s love; no lecturer or textbook can QED you into believing it in your heart.

Only God’s heart can do that through a direct connection with yours. I can tell you so much about the reason for the hope that is in me, but why take my word for it?

We love only because he first loved us. That still wasn’t enough for mankind, but then God so loved the world that he gave his only son that we would not die, but have everlasting life.

He so loved the world, so loves you, that he inflicted terrible suffering, even death, upon himself. 

Our names are not merely written on his palms, but carved into them. He endured hell for our sakes, out of love. When we know this, our own sorrows are a little easier to bear.