I love motorcycles.  The bike growls, beneath me the wheels churn the pavement into a blur, and it begins.  Out of the city, up into the mountains, and down the road past another sweeping curve, I'm in the wind and free!

I rode for over thirty years and more than 200,000 miles without ever putting one down.

Until I did.

My injuries were not just severe, but life-threatening.  While I lay waiting for help on the side of that Colorado mountain road, the pain was so severe that it blocked out everything else; there was nothing but pain.

And God.

The good news is, I'm well on my way to recovery, the pain is nearly gone, and I have rejoined my life much as it was before.  The bad news is that "real life" dilutes that closeness I knew then with God.  As that divine intimacy, fades I ask myself, "What now?"

At one of his lectures, Dr. Steven Garber, a professor at Regent College, asked this question: "now that you know what you know, what are you going to do with it?"  Chuck Colson, founder of the largest prison ministry in the world, titled a book with a similar question: How Now Shall We Live?

Both question the truths of how we live our lives.  Since the wreck, what I know now more than ever is that God is with us when we need him most.  Many do not agree.  And while that knowledge informs every choice I make, again, many doubt that God even exists.

But there is one truth with which we all agree: there is pain across all the world, suffering without measure.  That truth raises another question: why?

It's one of the toughest stumbling blocks for non-believers and one of the thorniest questions for those who do believe.  What about pain?  Why is there evil?

Colson's book suggests that Christianity is not just the teachings of a man, albeit a great man, or even a philosophical school of thought.  His book professes much more – that despite all the suffering, Christianity is the truth about everything that is.

The claim is that God is not merely an abstraction created by man in his own image, not just a belief, but reality, The Reality...the Creator of all that is.  That again prompts the question: "why?"

Especially problematic is the assertion by those who believe that God not only is Creator of all that is, but remains – despite all the pain – a loving God.

We use the word "love" a lot.  At its most profound, love is not about things, but rather about relationship.  Love can't be imposed and still be love, and free will doesn't truly exist unless there are choices desirable enough to threaten that love.  

What, then, are those choices that seek to tempt us away from that relationship?

The first is when we are drawn away by something too appealing to resist.  The Judeo-Christian story says that began in the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve seduced by the serpent's promise of becoming like God.  The serpent said it would be so.  He lied.

The second is when we want to leave because it hurts to stay – the problem of pain.  This second roadblock to our relationship with God is the basis for the story of Job.  Job's love of God faces the challenge that were it not for the perfect life that the favor of God had bestowed upon Job, he would reject God.  So God permits huge pain and suffering into the life of Job.  The suffering is immense, the pain real.

Job stays.  Satan loses.  God – and Job – wins.

It's a complicated, difficult issue that necessarily includes a discussion of love.  Today we define love as being about what I feel, I want, I need, I deserve; it's all about me.  Biblical love is "[f]or God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life." (John 3:16) and "[g]reater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends" (John 15:13).  In a universe built on love, pain, willingly born for another, is a thing of beauty.

Consider this: when love is "all about me," it's not love at all, but narcissism.  In such a world, there is only the prison of self-absorbed solitary confinement.  Love isn't about what you get; it's about what you are willing to give.  It comes down to this: love is the all-encompassing desire to be all and do all…for someone else. 

Given that, perhaps the question ought not be if God loves us, but do we love God?

Do I miss riding?  Yes.  Will I ever get on another bike?  No.

But can I endure anything, even divine loneliness, until the blink of an eye that is this life is done, that I might one day kneel at the edge of eternity?

With the love of God, yes.

Mike Kirkwood authored What if..., a collection of short works, and Fathers, a novel about how we got where we are today in America.  Both are available at Amazon.com.