God, Where Are You?

Struggling to Believe in a God Who Delivers

I haven’t been willing to give up on the idea of a God who will save us. I just haven’t.
Every day, I click on the news and scroll through my feed, hoping for some unbelievable turn of events—some knock-out punch from heaven that signals the tide is turning. That justice is finally breaking through. That the arc is bending, not gently, but with force. That God is still in the business of blowing trumpets and bringing down walls.

While worshipping with Episcopal clergywomen recently, a line from the Book of Common Prayer caught me by the throat:
"That he would save us from our enemies, from the hands of all who hate us."
Such a simple prayer. Honest. Transparent. Aching.

The Bible is filled with laments repeating the same desperate plea. God, where are you? How long must we wait? Deliver us. Do something.

But do I still believe in a God who does that? Who saves? Who delivers? More deliciously, one who punishes my enemies?

I enrolled in seminary in the 1980s convinced there was such a God. One who acts. The God who had led me there. I still remember the day I heard a lecturer speak of the God of the Old Testament as one who leads the Hebrew people “from a struggle, through a struggle, to a struggle.” I relaxed. That was the God I knew from my Southern Black Protestant church—the God of our weary years and silent tears. A God who doesn’t just exist but shows up.

The God of Exodus 3:7:
"I have seen... I have heard... I know... and I have come down to deliver."

This was the crown jewel of liberation theology—Gustavo Gutiérrez, James Cone, and others. A God who doesn’t just observe but acts. Who sides with the oppressed. Who shows up and does something. Dammit.

Later in seminary, I sat in on a seminar where we read Holocaust theologians—probably Wiesel, Rubenstein, certainly Heschel. I was shaken by the raw descriptions of suffering. Skeletal bodies stacked like firewood. The methodical cruelty of Nazism. But most of all, by the silence. The unanswered prayers. The absence of divine intervention. Where was God?

I tucked away those questions—until the 1990s.

We were living through the AIDS epidemic. The crack epidemic. Mass incarceration. The rise of the Religious Right. Oklahoma City. Rwanda. Civil rights rolled back. Christian conservatives seizing moral authority while ignoring human suffering.

God, where are you?

Photo by Thirdman on Pexels

This time, I was ready. I had matured. I had lived enough. I had the theological scaffolding—and the scars—to wrestle with theodicy. I no longer needed easy answers. I needed honest ones.

I was teaching a course on theodicy called Sin, Suffering and Evil in the Bible. We read some of the same theologians, and hard scriptures—Habakkuk, Jeremiah, Psalm 22. We talked about Anne Frank hiding in a secret annex, waiting on God. About enslaved people in quarters, praying that Abraham Lincoln wouldn’t forget them after the war. Lord, do it.

We faced the hard questions about an all-powerful, impassible God.
How could a good God allow such suffering? What kind of God remains silent in the face of genocide?

We discussed how suffering-as-punishment theology serves empires—keeping the oppressed docile, the powerful justified. We weighed whether belief in a God who suffers with us, who is limited in power or acts only in partnership, is more faithful to experience—or just more bearable.

And for those unable to give up on a punishing God, then faith must also reckon with a God who might act in ways so cruel, so indifferent, they verge on abusive.

Decades later: Gaza. Ukraine. Deportations. Executive orders like guillotines.

"Lord, save us from the hands of our enemies, those who hate us."

I’m a Bible scholar. I know scripture is testimony, not proof. Human longing, not divine endorsement. Even the good stuff isn’t meant to be taken literally.

But what if I want to believe it? Even the impossible parts?

Thoughtful white Christian writers—people I admire—stop just short of mocking belief in a God who intervenes. I have been trained at their schools.
What a privilege—to not have to believe in God.
Or at least not in a God who does more than wipe your tears.
To not need a God who parts seas or topples empires.
To not need a God who saves not just you, but your whole people.
To settle for comfort, when what you really need is deliverance.

But Black preachers do not preach to the comfortable.
We preach to the weary.
To the wrongfully convicted. The underpaid. The sick without insurance. Those facing deportation.
We preach to the afflicted.

Some days, we need a superhero God.
A Red-Sea-parting, Jericho-wall-falling, Resurrection-raising, butt-kicking God.

And other days, I’m content with a God who simply sits with me in the dark.
No miracles. No thunder. Just presence.
A God who doesn’t fix it, but doesn’t flinch either.

Photo by Jeremy Yap on Unsplash

The Bible tells us the impossible is possible. That walls fall. Seas split. Death is not the end.

Even if what really happened was smaller than the stories we tell, the poets and prophets still told them with awe. Because that’s what memory does—embellishes, magnifies, turns ordinary deliverance into divine drama. But somewhere in the telling, there’s a kernel of truth. Faith sees it. Faith clings to it. Sometimes, the telling itself is the miracle.

Every day, I remind myself to look past headlines and see glimmers of resistance.
God in glitter tossed at ICE workers. In the protesters standing in the rain. In the judge who sneaks out an immigrant family. In church marquees calling out cruelty.

Still—I’m holding out for the supernatural.
For a knock-out punch. A decisive blow to evil.
One that leaves no room for spin.

Such simple prayer. Honest. Transparent. Aching.
Where are you? Save us from our enemies.

Until then, I take comfort in the way scripture argues with scripture—how one voice laments and another replies:

2 Chronicles 20:12
“We do not know what to do, but our eyes are on you.”