that's our first thought so easily. Everything is awful. I've said that to friends and family so many times when prepping for a big change. It's so easy, when you look at the road ahead, to draw in a breath and then say: Everything is awful. I don't want to be here. I don't want to walk this path, for it is dark and there are few lights ahead. Nothing can ever go right again, and my heart cannot take much more.

And yet. We do not serve a God who has not felt it all with us.

He doesn't say "go suffer to find yourself worthy of me." 

He says, "This world is a dark place, and that is how it will be until I make all things new. But you will not be tempted in a way that I have not been."

He feels our sufferings.

He has carried our hurts.

The Lord is with us, and that should be a comforting thought. 

Sometimes when I'm in pain, physical or emotional, I lie in bed and close my eyes and try so hard to make it go away. There is always that little ornery feeling, though--that feeling of loneliness.

Perhaps no one else has ever felt this exact pain that I am in now.

It's strange, how that feels. That feeling of wondering: has anyone else hurt in that place? Has anyone else felt these things? Dealt with this situation?

And they have, but the fact that no one you know immediately, no one physically right beside you, can say, "Yes, I feel it too," breaks you.

But God has.

He was the word made flesh. He was the Suffering Servant. Jesus came to us not as a king upon a throne, not as a deity or vision like the Greeks would have envisioned, not as the great I Am upon the heavenly throne--but as a baby.

He cried.

He spit up.

He was lonely.

He scraped his knees.

He lost people close to him.

He was rejected. 

He was nailed to a cross and left there to die.

God has not told us that this life will be easy--but he is not a distant, tyrannical God. He is a God who hears. Who cares. Who listens.

He walks this path beside us, and it is he who holds us fast. 

He does not ask us to endure what he has not already. 

And we are never, EVER alone.