Soul Sister Time

              When I cry out my broken heart to God, I realize that He is listening to far worse situations, yet still giving full attention to what is happening to me.  Even the evening news does not contain the atrocities that men commit against one other every day.  Many question whether God can be good when He permits so much suffering in the world.  I cannot fathom the cries that reach God’s ears from our planet in one hour.  If we only knew a fraction of the evil in the world, I’m sure we would go insane.  How does God survive His broken heart for all the ways we sin and hurt each other and live so far from who He created us to be?               At Easter we get to see God’s broken heart in person.  No one describes it better than Max Lucado in “The Upper Room Disciplines 2010: It is a stark scene. Jesus praying in G...

              When I surrendered my vocation to God back when I was seventeen-years-old, He called me to a life of walking through the most broken realities that people face in a first-world country.  The verse that led me to this life was 2 Corinthians 1:3-4.  Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort,   who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God .  I began counseling others at the ripe age of 23.  I looked like I could have still been in high school, and the patients given to me rightly had their doubts.  I had my doubts too.  I knew that I didn’t have the wisdom to counseling people double my age.  I didn’t have a lot of experience of deep wounds either so I couldn’t talk to them from my own experiences of deep brokenness....

    It’s not that I haven’t faced my own degree of personal suffering. It isn’t that I am numb to the vast array of suffering that is taking place all over the world at this very moment in time. It is that I remain confident in the grandeur of God’s goodness even as the reality of the suffering in this world is too much for my heart to bear. I believe that no degree of suffering is ignored by the loving God who created a universe in which suffering was never intended to exist. If I could fully take all the suffering of this world, my heart and soul would never survive. The weight of suffering is too heavy for me. Yet, I know He knows every degree of suffering taking place even in this moment. God alone has the capacity to face the reality of the suffering of His entire creation. Beyond that, I know He is working to end the suffering of this world. So then, you may ask , Why ? My only answer is to tell you to look to God. See His response to suffering. He has tak...