“When it comes to pain, God isn’t often in the business of taking it away. Instead, he adds to it. He is more of a giver than a taker. He doesn’t take away my darkness, he adds light. He doesn’t spare me of thirst, he brings water. He doesn’t cure my loneliness, he comes near. So why do we believe that when we are in pain, it must mean God is far?” (Jane Kristen Marczewski aka Nightbirde).

Sometimes, it’s easy to get lulled into a sort of false peace by thinking that this life is forever and this world is our paradise. Then someone we love gets sick and dies. We see some horrific tragedy on the news. We hear about so many evils that seem to go unpunished.

I remember what a pastor once said. This life at best is like a very clean bus station. Or you could say a very tidy airport terminal. It’s great for a while, but no one wants to live at a Greyhound bus station for the rest of their life. No one that I know of dreams of moving into the Nashville airport.

This life is temporary. It’s also messy. As another pastor always says, it’s a beautiful but broken world. We get glimpses of heavenly joy mingled with earthly sorrows that are sometimes too much to bear. If you and I focused on this world alone with all its sadness and loss, it would be very easy to give into despair and to see death as the only way out.

But we have a God who came near. Because we couldn’t get to Him, He came to us in the person of Jesus, not to merely tell us the way to heaven or even to show us but to take us there by being the way to get there.

In this life, God doesn’t take away the pain but adds comfort. He doesn’t take away the fear but adds peace. He doesn’t take away the storms and dark valleys but walks with us through them, sometimes carrying us.

The best part for me is that I will never travel down a path where Jesus hasn’t already gone before me. I won’t ever walk through anything where God is not with me. He is still Emmanuel, God with us.