Faith in a time of suffering

SIMON SMART: You spoke about the realities of life, and you’ve experienced some pretty harsh realities yourself. I wonder if you could comment on the way in which your faith has spoken into a time of great suffering? 

RUTH PADILLA DE BORST: Several years ago, when my husband and I and two of my little children were filming a bushfire in Ecuador where we lived, some men came up and they – it was a carjacking – but in the process, they actually shot my husband to death in front of us. And many people as they walked with me through my grieving process said, “How can you still believe that God is good, and God is there?” And actually, for me the experience was such that I didn’t only experience God giving me strength to endure, being compassionate towards me, but I experienced God suffering in this unjust and unnecessary death. I got a whole new understanding of what it meant that Jesus died and took on human suffering and took on the consequences of our violent society, of our greed, of things that distort our perspective so much that for these men a car was more valuable than a life. And since then, I’ve become so much more sensitive to God’s presence in the midst of the suffering of others. And often I think people that suffer can actually be even more aware of God’s presence sometimes than when we have it all put together, or we pretend we have it all put together.