More From Mary Foulger

When I was teaching religion in high school, one of the things I often heard from my students was that they had rejected God because he didn’t answer their prayers. Often those prayers were for a relative who was very sick, and despite the child praying, the relative died. That may well have happened to a lot of us too. My young students connected the dots, albeit incorrectly: they prayed, God didn’t give them the answer they wanted, so either God didn’t exist or didn’t care.

Today’s meditation is about receiving God’s love. Our understanding of what it means to be loved is not always the same as God’s understanding. If my husband is sick, I pray for him to recover quickly. If God loves my husband more than I do, surely God would reach down and heal him. I love my husband a lot, but God does love him more. And yet God doesn’t always heal him as quickly as I would like. So how do I know that God loves him?

I regularly revisit this question, and always come back with the same response. A God who would send his only son to die in our place is a God who really loves us. A God who would willingly allow his son to suffer such agony, and a Savior who would not hesitate to go through with the crucifixion—an agonizing way to die—that is a God who loves us.

Being loved by God does not mean that I don’t have to suffer in any way. Being loved by God doesn’t necessarily mean that I get the job that I want, that I win the lottery, or that I am always healthy. But it does mean that I can come into God’s presence and that I can feel God’s love even when things around me may be far from ideal.

My first book is about coming to recognize that even though I lost my son in a drowning accident, I can still know that I am loved by God. This is so important for us all to learn. Our situation does not always tell us the truth about God.

Loosing Nathan is not the whole story though. My daughter Hannah had a medical emergency whilst she was at a Christian camp in Manitoba that should probably have resulted in her death. But miraculously the right people were available to help her and the right surgeon was available to operate on her, and she survived. I do not have the answer as to why Hannah miraculously survived, and Nathan did not.  But I am grateful for the years that I had with Nathan; and am exceedingly happy that we still have Hannah in our lives today. As I have already stated: our situation does not always tell us the truth about God. The Bible does. Hold on to the truth that is in the Bible and take time to sit in God’s presence and receive God’s love.