“Is suffering the price we pay for loving?” It’s a question author Amy Orr-Ewing explored from personal grief, as she tried to understand, “Why, if there’s a loving God, would we experience misery and misfortune? Are love and pain forever woven together in an eternal fabric?” Ewing says, that when believers in God go through pain and suffering it causes them to doubt that God really loves them, that God cares. The question is, “How could God let this happen?” Many people are asking that question today in the midst of a pandemic that has taken millions of lives. Ewing is the President of Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics, and is the author of, “Where is God in all the suffering?” She wrote the book after a close friend, a young mother of three, died of the coronavirus. On this episode of Lighthouse Faith podcast, Ewing explains that hardship is not an interruption, but a reality in life; and that we only have two choices in how to react to it; we can either run away from God, or towards God. She contends that only a loving God can make sense of the suffering and the brokenness in this world. She says, “It’s only with love as part of our mindset that we actually even really ask the question at all, ‘how can this be happening?’ The question itself actually points us towards God, not away from him.”
