Where is God in all of this?
It is the question rising in my heart, our hearts, right now—as families are torn apart by immigration policies, as fear stalks our neighbors, and as the language and machinery of authoritarian power creep closer to home. We long for an answer that would make sense of it all, something solid and rational that could explain how such cruelty and instability can exist alongside a God of justice and mercy. We want a voice from the whirlwind, a clear reason, a guarantee that things will turn out all right.
Scripture knows this longing well. In the stories of Job and Abraham, what captures our imagination is not just suffering, but restoration: Isaac returned alive, Job’s world somehow given back. We want to believe that if we endure faithfully enough, if we ask the right questions, God will explain the pain and restore what has been lost.
Scripture is however brutally honest with us: Job never receives an explanation. He gets no “why.” What he receives instead is the staggering, undeserved gift of life restored—and the voice from the whirlwind that refuses to be reduced to an answer.
That distinction matters right now. We are living in a time when metaphysical, meta theological certainty, that is clean explanations, theological formulas, political assurances—keeps failing us. Our temptation is to keep asking why in a way that paralyzes us, or worse, numbs us to the suffering around us. But faith, in moments like this, is not about solving the mystery of evil. It is about refusing to let mystery harden us into despair or compliance.
God’s presence in this moment does not arrive as a tidy explanation for suffering or a promise that history will automatically bend toward justice. God arrives instead in the fierce, fragile work of restoration—whenever dignity is defended, whenever the stranger is welcomed, whenever courage interrupts fear. Like Job, we may not understand why the world is being stripped away. But we are called to trust that life is not finished, that cruelty does not get the final word, and that our participation matters.
So where is God?
God is not hovering above us, offering a theory. Jesus is at the margins. God is with those who are losing their world—and with those who refuse to let that loss be normalized. God is found not in certainty, but in the costly, hopeful insistence on restoration: restoring families, restoring truth, restoring the moral spine of a nation tempted by fear and control.
In this work, we are also called to practice Sabbath resistance in whatever ways are possible refusing the tyranny of fear, exhaustion, and dehumanization, and reclaiming rest, dignity, and holy limits as acts of faith.
In a time when explanations collapse, wonder and trust remain. And wonder, when joined to mercy, courage, action and love, becomes resistance.
Shalom
Rex
