God Feels Our Mental and Emotional Pain and Suffering
Photo by Kristina Tripkovic on Unsplash
This devotion is taken from our 2025 Lent in a Box resource, Unbroken: A Living Faith created in partnership with The Lutheran Center at St. Olaf and grounded in the work of the Living Catechism Project. Each week's theme is based around one of the teachings of the Living Catechism. View the weekly videos and download the daily spiritual practices and reflections on this website.
Week 3 Theme: God Feels Our Pain and Suffering
God becoming human in Jesus means God is deeply familiar with the pain and suffering of body, mind, and spirit. Jesus’ experiences of loneliness, sorrow, and betrayal alongside the pain of physical violence and death reveal that God suffers with and for us and all of God’s beloved creation. And it is in resurrection that God declares that divine love seeks to transform all that threatens to destroy that which God created.
Day 2: God feels our mental and emotional pain and suffering
I have heard it said that there are no casseroles delivered when you get a mental health diagnosis. We are learning more and more about mental and emotional health, but as a society, we still have a lot of catching up to do when it comes to sitting with people in mental and emotional pain and suffering. Too often folks living with depression, anxiety, or other mental health pain feel isolated and forgotten. Too often folks navigating the stress and suffering of things like financial insecurity, job loss, divorce, or ambiguous loss feel deeply lonely and abandoned. Sometimes those folks are us. Too often our society centers and celebrates a certain kind of strength associated with productivity, efficiency, optimization, financial abundance, emotional positivity, material surplus, and professional thriving, making the rest of us feel invalid and sidelined. The pain is plenty, but the isolation that comes with the pain adds to the suffering.
In Jesus’ ministry, we see him using peripheral vision. He looks to the outskirts of society and gets closer to the people who have been shunned for being misunderstood. Instead of distancing himself from folks suffering from mental and emotional anguish, he gets closer to them and shows deep compassion. We also see Jesus experiencing his own mental and emotional pain and suffering. When his friend dies, he weeps. When he sees injustice, he flips tables. When he needs his friends, they fall asleep. When we are suffering and feeling alone, then we can know deeply that God understands and desires to be nearby.
Today, before you practice your loving kindness meditation, write down a few ways you are struggling mentally and emotionally. Reflect on who in your life is struggling mentally and emotionally and how they might be feeling alone. Ask God to sit with you and them in the pain and suffering, trusting that God can bring glimpses of resurrection with God’s compassionate and knowing presence.
