When we experience so much trouble in life, we can feel alone in the world and cut off from God. It may seem like God has abandoned us and does not care what we are experiencing. The apostle Paul reminds us in the book of Hebrews what God says to His people: “I will never leave you nor forsake you” (Hebrews 13:5). Jesus Christ Himself said to His disciples, “I am with you always, even to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20).

God may appear distant; we may feel He has forgotten us. These are human emotions that even Christ Himself felt when He cried out moments before death.

God does not turn His back on His people. Though it may seem He has forgotten us, God allows us to be tested for our perfection.

Job cried out to God saying, “You have become cruel to me” (Job 30:21). He was being tested and came to see he had wrongly judged God and had uttered “words without knowledge” (Job 38:2). We might identify with Job. We might cry out to God in our affliction when it seems He does nothing but watch us suffer. But, when we say, “How can I forgive God?” we have come to where Job was before God brought him to his senses.

We can glimpse only a little of God’s workings. He operates in ways far above our ability to understand. He says, “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:9). We cannot now see all the reason for our troubles. Yet “our light affliction . . . is working for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory” than we can realize (2 Corinthians 4:17).

God may appear distant; we may feel He has forgotten us. These are human emotions that even Christ Himself felt when He cried out moments before death: “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46).

God did not forget Christ who quoted this directly from Psalm 22. This psalm of David starts out with these words cried out in torment. It then becomes a psalm of great praise to God as David writes of God’s deliverance: “He has not despised nor abhorred the affliction of the afflicted; nor has He hidden His face from Him; but when He cried to Him, He heard” (Psalm 22:24).

Find the scriptures like this one in Psalm 27, which give hope and help explain the reason for our troubles: “I would have lost heart, unless I had believed that I would see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. Wait on the Lord; be of good courage, and he shall strengthen your heart; wait, I say, on the Lord” (Psalms 27:13-14).

When we come to the point of thinking God has turned away from us, remember His promises. We may think God does not see our suffering, but He promises never to turn His back on us.