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With God, NOTHING is beyond hope

When I first started studying on counseling psychology and when I first encountered people who needed a lot of help, my faith was challenged immensely. I was shaken in my faith: how can God allow this to happen? How can pain and suffering be any good? How can people ever know God if they have experienced so much pain?

I did look more introspectively into my own challenges. Studying on this topic involved to explore my heart, my past, my relationships, my all. Exploring is a scary journey, but during that exploring time, God was always holding my hand... In exploring my past, I could see that God was there even in the darkest times and it made sense to think that even the darkest times in my life were there for a reason, to teach me something valuable so when I looked back ( as I did ) I would say: yeah I wish I could change a few things, but I am actually glad it happened the way it did. This was some sort of healing journey, of being freed up of the past and feeling quite whole as a result, real and human. This reminds me of a Scripture from a beautiful Psalm from the Bible directed to God. Psalm 139 is a Psalm that celebrates life and describes how special we are created, knit together, so thoughtfully shaped and formed. It also describes that what we perceive as darkness, God thinks something completely opposite- he views it as light. What we consider as painful and bad, God sees it as a way to discipline us, or maybe show his mercy, or maybe reveal a greater glory about him. He uses situations to show spiritual ways I did not know before.
Psalm 139:11-13

New International Version (NIV)
If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me,” even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you. For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.


What helped me see beyond the present ,the past or the future was the event of Christ's death and resurrection. This 30 year old man who was the Son of God, was described to be pure, sinless and perfect. Picture this: He has known nothing else but kindness, purity, love, faithfulness, truthfulness, peace and he comes to us, to a people who are broken and simply human. And now this man who is set aside to be perfect for God, allows himself to bear the brokenness of human beings and to become like one of us, to experience what it means to have a heavy load on his shoulders, heavy of a mess. He agrees to do this even though he knows that God, his Father, will abandon him. All he has known is complete perfectness, yet he took a wild chance, risking his relationship with God for the very first time.
One moment he was God's son- the next moment he was pitiful, loathed, abandoned and alone.
This is a crucial moment during his death:
Matthew 27:45-49( NIV) From the sixth hour until the ninth hour darkness came over all the land. About the ninth hour Jesus cried out in a loud voice, ""Eloi, Eloi," "lama" "sabachthani?""--which means, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" When some of those standing there heard this, they said, "He's calling Elijah." Immediately one of them ran and got a sponge. He filled it with wine vinegar, put it on a stick, and offered it to Jesus to drink. The rest said, "Now leave him alone. Let's see if Elijah comes to save him."

I can picture his cry coming from a place he has never experienced before, his soul deeply crying because he is now separated from the Father God he has always known. God abandoned him as he carried the sins of others, because God in his holy nature does not want to do anything with sin. Yet Jesus knew this, he knew what he was getting into, he knew it was going to get ugly, and he was going to be left alone, abandoned, in pain, beaten up and treated as if he were a criminal.

In a book I read several years ago an interesting quote stuck with me: "One can never speak of hopeless cases, unless one has seen the cross of Christ." Truth is: his case was hopeless. Not only people did not believe him and wanted to kill him, not only one of his friends betrayed him for money (Judas) not only were his 3 best friends afraid to stand by him (Peter denied knowing him a couple of times and the rest just scattered from fear) but his own Father God, whom he had taught about all along, left him on that cross as if a stranger, bleeding until he died. He died of heart failure due to shock and constriction of the heart by fluid in the pericardium. His heart gave way last.

Medical account of the Cruxifiction






Everything became dark that day. His mother mourned. The temple was divided in two. The ground was shaking. Somehow, this dark hour ,the deepest pain that God experienced, was turned into joy the third day when they saw him again, with his hands wounded from the cross. And if God could do this for us all, nothing really is beyond hope. And if nothing is beyond hope, brokenness has a chance to be healed, suffering has not been in vain, light has been present in the darkness, tenderness comes from pain and through him it's amazing how we can love.......
It's only LOVE that gets you through