Where is God in Our Suffering? – Healing 2026

Summary

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We might project our experience with our earthly fathers onto our view of God as our Father. God is compassionate toward us in suffering. He provides nourishment for us in the Eucharist and is always with us in times of suffering.

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Reflective Study Guide Questions

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“When you pass through waters, I will be with you; through rivers, you shall not be swept away,”

Is. 43:2.

1. Ryan shares difficulties he experienced in his relationship with his earthly father because of his father’s Alzheimer’s disease. He says that we often tend to project the experiences we have with our earthly fathers onto the image of what it means for God to be our Father. What qualities of your earthly father might influence your view of God as your Father?

2. When we say that God is compassionate, we mean that He is deeply moved to action in the midst of suffering. What actions has He taken toward you when you have suffered in the past? What actions might He be taking toward you in present sufferings?

3. As we journey through our suffering, God provides the most wonderful nourishment for our souls in the Eucharist. How can you rely on this nourishment more deeply in times of suffering?

4. When we are suffering, we might feel as if we are alone. But we can be assured that God is always right there with us when we are suffering. In what pain in your life right now might you most need to look for God?     

Text: Where is God in Our Suffering?

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Hi, friends. My name is Ryan O’Hara, and I’m a Catholic speaker from St. Paul, Minnesota, and I’m so excited to join you as we discover more of who God is and what His love means for us, particularly as we enter into some of life’s most pressing difficulties, the experience of pain and suffering. And so let’s begin with a prayer.

Opening Prayer

In the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. God, we give you thanks, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, that you have revealed your love to us. It’s been made visible in your son Jesus, and you have given us the gift of your scriptures to teach us about who you are. Help us now to pay close attention to you. Remind us of these truths that we’re going to discuss today, particularly as we proceed through difficulty in each of our lives. We love you, Lord, and we trust you. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

The Role of A Father

I grew up in a home where the father/son roles were reversed. My dad, Bill O’Hara, was a loving and good father, from what I knew, particularly from my older siblings, because when I was five years old, he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease, and because of that, our roles were reversed growing up. My brother and I, my younger brother and I, were more like caretakers for our dad than him taking care of us. You know, there were lots of funny things that, you know, ended up happening.

One day we showed up, and he had just come out of his bedroom, and he had my mom’s bra on outside of his shirt. Weird things would happen. One day we came home, and he had taken a shower with all of his clothes on. Scary things would happen too. One day he ran a red light and, thankfully, a neighbor friend was behind us, and she told my mom, and she quickly took away his keys.

This was a jarring experience growing up, and I’m sure, you know, for what I gained in maturity as a young man, I certainly lost in identity. I didn’t know who I was as a son of my dad, and I didn’t know who I was as a son of God the Father. I didn’t know what it was like to have a good and trusting father as a dad. I didn’t see him lead or console or really provide for us. My dad was more like a problem to manage than someone who provided great care, guidance, and direction in our lives.

So when the church or the scriptures talk about God as a loving father, it’s only natural that we would sort of compare our own experience of having a dad with this idea that God is a perfect and loving Father. Because maybe you were like me, my dad, I would say he was largely absent from my life growing up. That was certainly true. Perhaps that was true for you too, for whatever reason your dad may have been absent. Maybe it was because he worked a lot or he traveled a lot or through another reason he may not have been present to you. Perhaps your dad was present, but he was quite harsh and demanding, and it seemed like you could never do anything quite right, and it was kind of fearful around the house at times.

Perhaps your dad was the opposite of that and maybe a bit of a push over and that he didn’t have a real clear sense of taking leadership and providing direction or even correction, something that every young person needs as they’re growing up. Or maybe your dad is just doing the best that he could, and kind of a mixed bag, some good, some not so good. What every father experiences is this challenge to live up to the goodness of that name, the goodness that first comes to us from God, that God has been revealed to us as a loving and perfect Father.

And as much as our dads do their best to try and imitate God’s likeness as Father, so often they fall short. And as a result, we have kind of a tainted image, all of us, of what it means for God to be Father. And so these various images of Father set us up to wonder, particularly when life becomes difficult, we wonder about God’s reliability, and if He is near, we wonder about how trustworthy and kind He will be. Will He take care of us and will He be with us? And if He’s with us, is He going to be with us in such a way that it actually helps and doesn’t hurt?

God, Where Are You?

And as far as life’s difficulties go, I mentioned my experience of fatherlessness growing up. I’m going to be sharing more about my own experience of pain and suffering in the next couple of videos as well, but I’m not sure where you are today in that respect. Perhaps you’re in the middle of a great trial and difficulty. Perhaps you’re coming out of a season of real challenge and pain. Or perhaps you’re getting ready to enter more deeply into a season of difficulty as well. I’m not sure. I’m not sure where you’re at, but wherever you may be, these questions persist.

We have all experienced the profound pain of living on this side of the fall. Sin and our human experience causes great suffering to us, to our relationships with others, and the world isn’t quite right, and as we look around, we wonder, God, where are you? How can I trust you? You set up this world, and it seems like you’re no where to be found. I don’t know if these are questions that you’ve had. I certainly have myself. Well, God has given us first a great intellect. He’s given us the gift of reason, and the gift of reason alone can help us know that God exists. When we look at the world created as it is in its complexity, we discover that there is a designer behind all that we see, and our human reason can help us know this, that God exists. But our human reason can only get us so far.

It’s divine revelation that doesn’t just tell us that God exists, it certainly does, but it helps us to know what God is like, and I think that’s the deeper question. It’s one thing to know in our heart of hearts that God may exist, but what kind of God is it? And the scriptures, and in particular through the incarnation, we begin to get a much clearer picture.

Exodus 34:6

And one scripture in particular, that I want to focus on today as we’re asking this question, “Where is God in our suffering?” This scripture from Exodus can help us see what God is like. It gives us five moral attributes, and each of these attributes is what we can come to expect of God in each of our interactions with God. You see His attributes are different than ours. His attributes and His actions overlap perfectly, what God is like and what we can expect from God. For us, I may have an attribute of patience, but I’m not always patient, you can certainly ask my kids about that.

And so while someone might say, yeah, generally Ryan, speaking of, you know, is generally Ryan is a patient guy, but I’m not patient in every circumstance. The way that God’s attributes and His actions overlap is unique to God. And so when we hear about His attributes, it also points the way to what we can expect from God in terms of His actions towards us. So read with me here in Exodus 34, verse six.

“The Lord, the Lord, a God gracious and compassionate, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.”

When we hear each of these five attributes, we cannot only marvel at first that this is what God is like, it’s also what we can expect to experience when we’re in relationship with God. It’s what we can expect from Him in terms of how He will act towards us. He will be compassionate, gracious, He’ll be slow to anger. He will be full of steadfast love and faithfulness.

God’s Great Compassion

And there’s one of these attributes that I would like to focus on in particular, as it relates to this question of “Where is God in our suffering?” God described Himself to Moses as compassionate, and thanks to the good work from The Bible Project, they put together a word study on each of these moral attributes, and they looked at the Hebrew word that we translate into English as compassionate, and that Hebrew word is best translated as being deeply moved to action in the midst of suffering, that God is compassionate, and to say He’s compassionate is that in the midst of suffering, God is deeply moved to act, to care, to reach out, to provide, to console. And this, we’ve seen this all throughout the scriptures.

We see this first when the Israelites were trapped in slavery in Egypt, and He was deeply moved and acted to free them from their oppressors. Secondly when they didn’t have any food and they’re wandering around the desert for 40 years, He literally dropped bread from Heaven, Manna, for them to eat so that they could have their fill in the midst of their journey. And so this starts to show us that God, that God’s attributes and His actions begin to match up. But, of course, it gets even better. It gets even better because God wasn’t satisfied to stay distant from us, that the incarnation itself first tells us so much of what God is like, that He came towards us. And that He not just moved towards us in a closer sense in terms of how much He cares, but He came close to us quite literally in becoming one of us.

This shows God’s great compassion, that He was moved by the suffering that sin is in our lives, the pain that we experience in that separation from Him but also that slavery to the evil one that sin entraps us in. And so He came on a rescue mission to save us from the pain and suffering of our sin and everything that flows down stream from those choices for us as human beings. And so the incarnation in a macro sense shows us that God is deeply moved to action in the midst of our suffering.

But again, look at how Jesus interacted with people while He was here on earth. I suppose it would have been enough for Him just to set up shop as a king, and we could know that this is God here on earth, and we could honor Him and worship Him. But He took the form of a slave, as it says, in Philippians Two, and He offered His life for us on the cross. And all of the way, all of those footsteps of His public ministry on the way to the cross was a demonstration of His loving kindness, His compassion, that He would be with us in the midst of our suffering.

Compassio, with us, you know, compassio, meaning with us in our suffering. Com, with, passio, suffering. That God is compassionate, He’s with us in our suffering. We see that through all of His acts of healing, all of the ways in which He taught us to follow Him, all of the ways that was for our good, and we see this act of compassion, most beautifully, in the cross, and that in a sense He intercepted those wounds of death that were meant for us, and He took all of that pain and suffering onto Himself and could then redeem it, not only so that we could be back in relationship with God, but so that we could experience the redemption of the experience of suffering and pain because He took all of that with Him onto the cross.

And then He proved His love, or God proved His love for us in that Jesus as raised from the dead, and He really shows us that this way out of suffering into new life with Him forever in Heaven. And yet we know that our lives are not, you know, perfectly fit. We still experience this pain of suffering and sin in our lives. But God sent the Holy Spirit to be with us, to console us.

Do you see the theme? And even more, just like the Israelites experienced in their hunger for God, physically and spiritually, He provided Manna for them, He provides Manna for us. And this is the most remarkable gift that we get to receive every day if we want to. God here on earth, given to us as bread to eat, the most wonderful nourishment our souls could ever experience. And we get to know that we know that we do it. It’s not a spiritual communion. It’s an actual communion with the body and blood of Jesus.

Isaiah 43

I want to leave you with a beautiful passage from Isaiah. And in this passage, we see God’s tender, compassionate heart, and he describes to us where he is exactly in our suffering. It says here in Isaiah 43,

“But now, this is what the Lord says, “‘Do not fear for I have redeemed you. I have summoned you by name. You are mine.'”

God know you. God loves you, and from all eternity, He has promised to be with you. God knows you. God loves you from all eternity. He has called you by name, and it says that you belong to Him. This is an incredible statement that’s consistent again with what we know of God’s character. It continues. He says, Isaiah, “When you pass through the waters,” listen to this. “I will be with you, and when you pass through the rivers, they will not sweep over you. When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned. The flames will not set you ablaze.” That’s from Isaiah 43, verses one and two.

So where is God when the waters are raging and the waters are rising, and the temperature is rising in our lives? He says I’m right here. I’m right next to you. I’m with you. And this is that great mystery, and I don’t quite understand why it is this way, but it’s so beautiful to know that this is where God is. We’ll explore a little bit more of the meaning and maybe even some of the purposes of suffering in our next session, but if we want to answer that question, “Where is God in our suffering?” It says right here that He is with us. And so it’s not that we won’t experience difficulty, we won’t experience pain and suffering. It’s part of the human experience. But when we do, we can know for certain that God is with us.

He always keeps His promises. His actions perfectly align with His attributes. Let’s take a moment to pray and to turn our hearts again to God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Closing Prayer

In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, God, we give you this regular, normal, expected question, where are you when things are difficult? Where are you in the midst of pain and suffering? Well, your word tells us that you are compassionate. That you’re deeply moved in the face of suffering and that you proved it by becoming one of us, then healing and restoring to life everyone you encountered, and then you offered your life so that we could all experience that same gift these many thousands of years later.

And after it all, you left us with the most beautiful gift of the Holy Eucharist that every day, regardless of where we’re at in our experience of pain and suffering, you draw near. You draw us closer to you by giving us your very body and blood. Lord, we give you thanks, we give you praise for who you are as God. In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

About Ryan O’Hara

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