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How africa saved my love for God

by Louisa Hall  
8/14/2009 / Missions

I teach religion classes and there is one question that I continually get asked about God. That is: how can God be real when there are billions of poor starving people all over the world? Or how can God be a truly be love if He allows this to happen? How indeed? It is a very difficult question.

It is a significant question to answer because this question poses such a massive barrier for so many people to believing in and loving God with all of their hearts. It is the mother of all reasons that people choose to deny God.

I don't propose to have an answer. What I do have, however, is the story of my own battle over this question and encounter with God, where I discovered that He truly did love and care for orphans, widows, the suffering and the brokenhearted more than what I could comprehend.

By the time I started seriously asking this question of God it was too late to deny Him. I was already 100% convinced that He was real. I had reached a point where I had seen too much: too much beauty, too much love, too many answers to prayer and too many direct miracles to ever deny His existence.

However, I was left with a problem. I had experienced something of suffering in my own life by the time I was fifteen and felt nothing short of disappointed with God. I expected Him to protect me and He didn't. To keep me safe and He hadn't. However the thought that bothered me more even than my own struggles were the thought that there were little, innocent children suffering in third world countries. They were abandoned by parents and God, left to starve and die on the streets. They were made prostitutes, soldiers and thiefs by no choice of their own.

My faith was at a crossroads, my love for God was waning and my trust in Him was failing. So I decided to take up the battle with God. I cried out to Him: how can I love or trust a God who sits there and does nothing whilst His children are hurting? How can God be the God of the Bible: Love, all present, all powerful; when there is so much suffering?

To my surprise, God took me on. His reply to my question came in the form of a mission trip to Africa. When they announced the trip I immediately felt that it was Gods desire for me to go. I only had about a third of the money I needed to go on the trip. But I trusted that God would provide and sure enough, without asking anyone for money I received money from different people often on the very day that the money was due each month.

There is no doubt something is God's plan when He provides the money to do it!

He prepared me for the trip by leading me to the most amazing scriptures. Particularly in the Old Testament, through chapters like Isaiah 58, God revealed Himself as a God who was passionate about social justice, the rights of the poor and specifically widows and orphans. Over and over I met a God in scripture whose heart belonged to the poor and brokenhearted. He was the God who preferred to sit in the dirty mud holding a sick child than being lavished with riches on His throne in Heaven, although I'm pretty sure He is allowed to do both. (Just a little tongue in cheek.)

It wasn't enough for me just to read about this God though, I wanted to see Him with my own eyes and know for myself just how He loved poor and suffering people.

He showed me.

When I arrived in Africa I firstly recognized Gods love for the poor in how liberally He had poured out salvation on these people. There were signs of God everywhere. Every bus and building, car and street sign read something like, "Jesus loves you," "God is love," or "Jesus is Lord." Nearly every person you met declared that they knew Jesus, even though their knowledge of the Bible was sometimes limited.

God had made sure that the poor knew Him. In fact they were just poor and needy and abandoned enough to actually need God and make room for Him in their lives.

Secondly I saw His work in Africa. There were children's home and orphanages and aid organizations everywhere. The children that I met were safe; they had food and clean and water people to love them. His love was shared and poured out in that place. It was tangible.

Thirdly I felt His love for these children burn like a fire in my own heart. Feeling His love for the children convinced me that He truly loved and cared for the poor. Then I felt a call. I was meant to be a part of the answer to the question of suffering! God's Church, His Bride, we are called to be Gods Hands and feet and heal the suffering of the broken and poor. You and me, together with God.

Lastly and most beautifully, I saw Him in the eyes of the little orphans I met. Our Lord loves and values these little orphans so much and so tenderly, He defends them so powerfully that He would even say: "whatever you do to them, or don't do for them, you are doing it to Me." (Matthew 25:40 paraphrased) I am so melted by this scripture. No one could identify themselves so fully or so humbly with the poor and suffering as Jesus did in that statement. In some mysterious and inexplicable way, God dwells in the poor, suffering with them, just as He does with each of us when we are suffering.

God was there. He was there in the mud and the dirt and brokenness of Africa. That thought gives me comfort, because wherever God is, soon enough the sick are healed, the lost are found and the captives are set free. That is just the kind of God He is.

Finally I remember God's promise. That in a blink, the world will come to an end and everything will be transformed. That our time on Earth is a brief sojourn and that there is no doubt that the heaven of the age to come will more than make up for a brief time of difficulty and pain on Earth.

However in the meantime, we can be comforted in knowing that He is there with us in our suffering, and in the suffering of all of his children, working in hidden ways to bring good into our lives.

"In all their distress he too was distressed, and the angel of his presence saved them. In his love and mercy he redeemed them; he lifted them up and carried them all the days of old." Isaiah 63:9

I am a bible college student in Brisbane Australia.

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