Although I spent over a year researching the Bible for the book Why God Lets People Suffer, I did not write the book as an academic exercise. The fact is, everyone suffers. Some of us suffer more than others, but all of us will suffer sometime. My suffering began very early. I felt separated from other people until I was well into my 40’s, when I learned who Jesus was. What glorious freedom there is in forgiveness.
High school means tumultuous years for everyone. My high school years were particularly hard. It was during those years that I learned what anti-Semitism meant. The same year a classmate talked about his parents who were Holocaust survivors, I learned that much of my father’s family had been killed in camps during the Holocaust too. A gentile boyfriend called every night, but wouldn’t ask me out because I was Jewish. My father was sentenced to prison on my 16th birthday and two years later my parents divorced. It was a lonely time that would have been very different if I had someone to talk to about God. He was with me all along, and I didn’t know it.
I sometimes thought I had a corner on suffering. I was not quite 21 when I nearly died in a car accident that left me with a permanent hearing loss. In my 30s my husband of 14 years left me and our two small children for a career woman. It was ugly and traumatic, but by then I knew God was with me. With God on my side, I was not afraid.
I next married a man who loved my children, but had a violent, unpredictable temper. I was 44 when my second husband died, leaving me with a baby barely three, a son going to college and my beautiful teenage daughter clinically depressed. During those years, God was my rock. It was shortly after that God brought my beloved husband into my life. He led me to a Messianic rabbi who showed me that Jesus was my God too and I was finally able to forgive myself and everyone else. I was free at last of the guilt and shame and anger of a lifetime.
Now that I am happily God’s servant, there is still suffering. Our children and greater family do not know God, so there is a gulf between us. I am alienated from most of my Jewish people, who do not believe one can believe in Jesus and be Jewish. We live in a town with no Messianic Jewish Synagogue, that is a Jewish Synagogue where Jesus is worshipped. The loneliness of being unable to worship with other Jewish believers at times seems overwhelming. Yet, with God at my side and in my soul, I am never alone and never without hope. Today most of our children have accepted that my love is part of my faith. Although the are still gulfs, the Lord is making bridges.
As I researched this book, I discovered how God had worked in me though the suffering He allowed in my life. It was exciting to learn that God had been in control all along and to see that He had, indeed, caused all things to work together for the good. Knowing there are reasons He lets us suffer helps us take joy in the suffering. The joy of the Lord is my strength.
Now I have been able to write yet another book Building Trust, God, our Father and Role Model, exploring what it means to trust God, view Him as a father and as a role model for raising our own children. God tells us to call Him Father and to trust Him and this book examines who our Father is, how we can be more like Him, and how we can parent our children as He parents us.
Nancy’s Biography