Presence - Pastor's Pen for 7th June 2026

Medlands Beach south end

Sometimes, maybe often, in our human experience we feel that God is absent. We are not wafting along, feeling joyously buoyed by the Spirit. We are struggling. When Jesus was on the cross in his agony, having studied the scripture and memorised lots of it, he quoted Psalm 22; "My God, my God, why have you deserted me?"

In my pastoral visiting, I sit with people and together we experience a sense of helplessness and even desolation before the diseases and afflictions the world throws at us as human families. Where is God? I was just commenting to someone on Thursday morning, it's hard to preach through, for example, John's gospel, where Jesus heals the blind man then raises Lazarus from the dead, as if it were no problem. Then I'm preaching to people who have bereavement, frailty and illness in their households right now. Not that I would avoid a particular passage, but you carry the weight of it and still try to faithfully speak.

This is the tension into which we live and pray. Henri Nouwen writes of Jesus; "When God himself in his humanity became part of our most painful experiences of God's absence, he became most present to us. It is in this mystery that we enter when we pray." Whatever our human feelings of pain, anxiety, loss or abandonment, remember that God is present. Sometimes we cannot pray - then the Spirit intercedes. We belong to Him, and will not be abandoned, just as God was present in the horror of the cross. Don't misunderstand me, I believe firmly in God's healing interventions for us. But even when I don't see it, I will keep praying, dwelling by faith in the mystery of His presence. Shalom