Where is God when anything happens? He’s in the place he always is. God never changes (Jas. 1:17). Our alignment with him, however, does.

I received a request to write on this topic as part of a new book that’s coming out called Where Was God When…? This is the scenario I was given:

I don’t think she ran away. There would be no reason to run away now that finals are over. I may have thought that before she took her Calculus exam, but not now. I don’t know where my baby girl is now. Graduation is tomorrow and she disappeared yesterday. She was home alone for less than an hour, and now she’s gone.

I don’t think she ran away, but I really can’t imagine her being taken either. Not her, not in this town. This kind of thing just doesn’t happen in this town, especially not to my Anna. She is strong and brave and fearless like her mother.

No clothes missing, car still in the driveway, no signs of struggle. The police say they are doing everything they can. They came here, poked around, went through her stuff, asked a lot of questions, and then classified her as a “missing person.”

I only asked them one question: “Where is my little girl?” They couldn’t answer me.
Imagining only makes it worse. Some dirty basement? The back of a truck? Way up in the woods somewhere? At the bottom of the lake? She must be terrified—alone, in the dark.

What I know about God’s proximity to me during tough times comes from the experience of my brother’s death. From personal memories and from the stories of others, it’s clear people say well-meant, but harmful, comments when trying to bring comfort. As my mom said when talking about one of these remarks, “I was forgiving her even as the words were coming out of her mouth.” While people may or may not be helpful during times like this, what we really want to know is where God is.

Believers who feel distant from God during dark times of life have fallen out of alignment with him. What I found during my own loss is God was where he always is. My greatest source of comfort was feeling his presence and direction at key times during that ordeal.

We can know for certain:
- God is not set against us
- He has not taken a vacation
- God is not the source of the problem or our inability to connect with him

People who feel abandoned by God during their darkest times, don’t understand the nature of God:

Falling apart emotionally when tragedy happens is an understandable human response. Turning against the one who can help us through it, however, is irrational. Especially when we’re in pain, we need to remember that God is the source of what we need to find healing Ps. 18:6.

When I felt most at peace and most connected to God during the crisis of losing my brother was in the first worship service after his funeral. Singing praises to God from a position of extreme loss and pain was the purest form of worship and connection with God I’ve ever experienced. Not being aligned with God and thinking he’d turned against me would have robbed both God and me of that tender moment.

Crisis at the hand of others – a daughter who vanishes, death from a drunk driver, losing people who are precious to us for whatever reason – can be the cause of stupid decisions of selfish or evil people. People change and do idiotic things. God, however, is the one anchor we can confidently know will never change.

Through tragedy, or any time for that matter, as we align ourselves with God and wait patiently in faith, he aligns himself with us (Jas. 4:8).

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