by Barbara Magnuson
Where is God? Is He here? Does He care? We look all around us and we see pain, fear, disappointment and we wonder “Where is God?”
Recently I watched a video on CNN. The video was about Antarctica – a place that is as extreme as anywhere on our planet. Snow, wicked winds, extreme cold temperatures. A desolate place where life seems painful and even impossible. But underneath the ice and snow is something totally unexpected. A beauty that almost takes one’s breath away. If you can take less than a minute to watch this video, I think it will capture you as it did me.
Could it be, that in the most difficult and painful and lonely times of life, God is there and is at work in ways that we do not see and cannot even imagine?
We just finished celebrating Christmas – the story of a barn where a miracle happened. Only shepherds, who themselves were outcasts, and a young couple saw the miracle. Everyone else saw just a barn.
Maybe we need to look a little harder in our life circumstances, because God is always present, always at work – always. If God can produce a miracle in an ancient ugly barn and can produce a miracle under the ice and waste land of Antarctica, He can certainly take the pain of our lives and do something of extraordinary beauty. But we have to look and believe and sometimes wait.
Remember the children’s book “Where’s Waldo?” Remember how hard you had to look to find Waldo amid all that was happening on each page? It took concentrated effort, but then suddenly you saw him! Waldo had actually been there all the time. The same is true of our God!
Remember the most frequent promise in Scripture is “I will be with you.” And He is.