Lord, where are you?

My faith, after my wife’s death, has deteriorated somewhat. During the three months of her painful illness I prayed night and day, but there was nothing to do. I still lost her, throwing me and my children into the most terrible despair. I’m so sad. The Lord should not allow such painful mourning. My wife still had to reap the joy and fruits of so many sacrifices. She was a woman who lived in faith and for the family. In the evening, in the dark, she prayed the Holy Rosary on the balcony. When I think that there are so many people who live in dishonesty and exaggerated abundance, I find it hard that the Lord took the life of such a godly creature! I continue to pray, I appeal to Our Lady, to the Saint, but I wonder why all this happened? Why did God want this?

g.s.

Dear friend, your bitterness and your suffering for this forced detachment suggest a veiled disappointment: God seems to have been unjust and deaf. Often in life we ask ourselves: where is God when we suffer, where is He while we struggle for life, where is He when the silence of death seems to envelop in emptiness the very people we loved and who are good? The believer is not a privileged person, who is spared from these tragic experiences. However, he is not alone in these moments. God, in fact, to whom we entrust ourselves, knows well the tragedy of pain, the anguish and loneliness of death: Jesus Christ knew the humiliation of the cross and the silence of death, but he did not remain a prisoner of the tomb. He rose again. Now he lives forever. He assures us that the seeds of goodness, generosity, truth and forgiveness are eternal and cross the threshold of death. Perhaps now you will find it hard to understand these words of mine, yet, I am sure, the example of goodness and light that your wife sowed in your family is still alive. This is eternity. This is the mystery of faith. Do not be afraid to cry out your pain to God again, do not be ashamed of the tears on your face: the God of Life listens, is not deaf; the Source of Love sees, is not blind; the Risen One is near. There is no pain or death that can annihilate us: the believer is tested, but he is not defeated; he/she is a man or a woman who can be harshly measured by pain, but who keeps in his/her heart and eyes the certainty that the stone of the tomb is not the last word. Live with your children the beautiful things and values that have characterized your wife’s life: detachment and distance will become less heavy and shorter.