God! Where are You?

The question we've all asked... Christians ask it when we can't see Him, unbelievers ask it when they see "bad" things happen, and I can not tell you how many times even I've asked it. In the blackest of blackness, we go through trials, we breathe in nothing but sorrow and anxiety, and we ask Where Is God?

My friend and GoFM Founder, Kevin, wrote a post fairly similar in nature to this called, "The Need for Sorrow." The following quote from this article does well to answer this question and, more importantly, how we view our trials.

"First off we have to realize we can't BLAME God for these things. Without free will, love cannot exist. Being that God gave us free will He cannot control our actions without revoking it and forcing us to love Him. This free will of ours also leads to free will of others... You make a decision to go to the store at late hours and a person in the same area makes a decision to rob you at gunpoint. You are not at fault, but neither is God."

And what if we stop... listen... look around for a bit... And what if we take into consideration everything we know about our Father in heaven. He is a soverign fortress. He will never leave us nor forsake us. He cared enough about us to send His Son to die for us. That's a lot of love. He sees your pain, He sees that trial or the trials you are going through, broken homes, broken bodies in need of healing, broken lives. The message is... God is able to bring you through this, not because He has to, but because He wants to. Where is God? Right where He always has been, looking at you no different than He did yesterday... as His beloved, His treasure, His child, His friend.

Depression...

Fear, hatred, anger, sadness, bitterness, distress, suicide? Yes... suicide! All or some of us have felt such things. We've felt like nobody cared, felt like God was just either a crutch people use to make themselves feel better, that He wasn't there, or that if He was, He hated you-- looking down at you and laughing because you were in a pit, a rut, a hole that you couldn't get out of. But at some time in our lives, for those of us that have gone through this depression, we choose to stay in it. We may not have chose to enter in, but we choose it as our comfort... but eventually, even the comfortable becomes dangerous, the sanctuary becomes dark, the mirror breaks and we are left laying at our lowest possible level, looking up, but we can't see a thing. But... there is Someone who can see you. There is Someone that knows who you are, and cared enough about you to send His only Son to die on a cross for you, for me, for all. For ALL!!! This is the focus of Out of the Ashes. To encourage the depressed but at the same time to make known the reality that depression can be a choice. This blog won't always be happy, it won't always be light, it will go to dark places when it needs to, but what are we as Christians called to do? Bring light into the darkness, bring light to the flame that has gone out. This is our call, to stand up out of ourselves, to live for something more than self-pleasure, more than fame, wealth, glory, financial security. But, before we can do that, we must accept the fact that God loves us, that there is a God. As Christians we have accepted this, but those who haven't, it's time to let God in. Let Him lift you out of the ashes of depression.