The above question is asked in many situations of life by all sorts of people. It is a question raised against religion to give credence to the idea that there is no God. Atheists do not ask such questions directly because they are certain of their absolute certainty that there is no God. But believers often get crushed by the insults thrown at them, as non-believers go on asking, “Where is your God?”(Psalm 42: 10). Atheists think that belief in God is the result of a conditioned mind and a mind which has lost its reason and freedom, through various conditioning activities, to think and act. They think that they have freedom from such conditioning and enslavement to religious ideas through their superior intellect, logic, reason and search for evidence-based understanding. They also have very prominent and colourful personalities who could write best sellers and articulate their stand against religion and religious concepts. Richard Dawkins is one of the most popular writers for creating a Godless world. His books such as ‘The Blind Watch Maker,’ ‘The Selfish Gene,’ ‘The Extended Phenotype’ and ‘The God Delusion’ are best sellers and helpful aids for propagating his version of truth. Atheism has become a religion for such people.

Fortunately against this trend, there are a few luminaries of John Polkinghorne’s calibre to argue the case for believing in God in an age of Science. His book ‘Belief in God in an Age of Science’ is a helpful book where he writes that “The unity of knowledge is underwritten by the unity of one true God; the veracity of well-motivated belief is underwritten by the reliability of God.” It should be our mission in life to reveal the reliability of God, in this process under God’s grace we should become the answer to the question I posed in the beginning. The evidence is in everyday realities of life. Since most of us only look for problems in everyday living, we do not look to meet God there. Jesus Christ is the ultimate affirmation of the presence of God being with us, Immanuel, as a real person not as a thunder, lightening, wind, or burning bush but as a person you might walk by on the road and never notice.

Recent surveys in western societies show that there is a steady decline in people who believe in God, pray privately or regularly in places of worship. One of the answers for this decline in faith is thought to be that God cannot be seen anywhere when there is a need for Him to intervene. How could He allow suffering? If God is love, if love and mercy are His signatures, then the question is how and why a loving God should create such a brutal world and how could He allow such violence and merciless acts in His name by religion and its fanatics?

There are many stock answers for these types of questions, but none of them are satisfactory. Therefore, people have become deaf to Church bells and got more and more attuned to ring out calls of tills at paying booths of supermarkets on Sunday mornings. A secular man of the twenty-first century may be compelled to rewrite the psalm 84: “One day spend in your temple is better than thousand days anywhere else; I would rather stand at the gate of the house of my God than live in the homes of the wicked.” He probably has rewritten it already and replaced ‘temple of God’ with some other temple and walked out or he is just about comfortable standing at the gate so that he can run away at the slightest of provocation. But for the majority, there is no ultimate escape route and there is no place to run to. They throw up their hands and ask questions, in the process they find some solace by blaming others including God. Billy Connolly’s film ,’The man who sued God’ depicts a thought provoking incidence in which a fisherman who challenges the institutions of the church and corporations after the insurance loss adjustors declare the destruction of his fishing boat, his livelihood, was an act of God. We have learnt to use the name of God in all seasons and situations for our advantage. The God that I begin to know, entirely through His grace, is used to taking punches thrown at Him from all directions and He is our comforter, our punch bag to vent our frustrations. That is what He is there for to teach us and guide us.

I often tune into the recorded conversations of the fictional catholic priest, Don Camillo of Po Valley in Italy, with God; it is so refreshing to hear Don Camillo asking God to close His eyes so that he can kick the backside of his adversary, Peppone-the Communist Mayor, or incapacitate him some other way. There are many people who may take the view of the French philosopher, Pascal, who suggested that however long the odds against God’s existence might be, there is even a bigger tragedy in guessing it wrong. Therefore, he suggested that it would be better to believe in a God because if you are right you are certain to get a passport to heaven and if you are wrong it would not make any difference anyway. On the other hand, if you don’t believe in God and you turn out to be wrong you get eternal curse and damnation. Therefore, Pascal’s argument is that it is a better strategy to believe in God; it seems a good insurance policy. A large majority of people may place such a bet, Pascal’s wager, without conviction and commitment on the side of believing in God whatever the odds may be. Most of our religious convictions are based on such a chance, but it is foolish to think that God is not aware of our intentions.

Some are born into or trapped in a religious environment and go from birth to death under that influence, but others may go through an up and down experience of God. But there is no way for getting away from God because God that I know is in search of man/woman and his/her place in God’s scheme of things. But we often look for a god to be the patron saint of our schemes; we often travel in parallel routes. Therefore, everyone may go through various stages of religious awareness and experiences such as theism, deism, pantheism, agnosticism and atheism. We may switch in and out of these modes, but a loving God is in pursuit of us in every step. Our individual position in the spectrum of this religious awareness may vary, depending upon our familial, traditional, cultural, societal influences and our ultimate relationship with God. It is in our nothingness, in our humility, in our silence, we know this God. Parallel tracks may take a sudden turn and fuse into a mono rail mode. God’s grace will allow us to develop insights and sensitivities to see divinity in others to develop an ‘I-Thou’ relationship. In this relationship there is freedom and this freedom endows us with responsibilities to fulfil demands placed on us to build the Kingdom of God in partnership with Him. In this process we should become the answer to the question, “Where is God when we need Him?” We should not allow such a question to arise when we are around to share His love and hospitality.

It may just be possible through God’s grace that the need to raise such a question becomes void due to our God-centred lifestyles. We should not be the reason for the question, but we should become an answer to the above question. God is asking us the age old question, which He put to Adam, “Where are you?” What is our answer? Do we hide behind excuses? Do we go in search of people and causes to blame? Do we go in search for scapegoats? Instead, do we hear the question clearly in humility to respond: “Here I am; empower me and use me” Today many people struggle with raising a family, finding a satisfying job, and each of us must be deeply sympathetic with their struggles. We need not blame God when things go wrong but should assist people in need in as many ways as possible. In fact, it does take a village and more to raise a child; it takes a community that is closer to God. It is too important to leave the education of a child in the hands of teachers and government watchdogs. Value-added education, citizenship, freedom, responsibility, ethics and morality are as important as reading, writing, science and IT. All of us have a responsibility of educating the next generation and to build on the values, which sustained us so far. It takes a believing community that has faith that the people being raised will grow in faith and hope and love. In this kind of communities everyone feels responsible for everyone else and learns to curtail personal freedoms for the benefit of others, this includes an awareness and responsibility for nature and environmental issues as well. In doing this we are honouring the faith of God in us as well. We always talk about our faith in God, but we should begin to think about the damage we do to God’s faith in us.

The Old Testament story of Job is an example of God’s faith in us. It is our mission to honour God’s faith in us through our lifestyles. The question we need to answer is simply this: have we reciprocated God’s trust in us? Have we reciprocated to His generosity, glorified His name, and obeyed His commandments? We know that Job was not punished for his sins, it was the every opposite. It was his purity of life that singled him out in the first place when Satan challenged God to show a single person capable of loving Him unconditionally. God identifies Job as the one person who has such an unquestionable loyalty and faith. But the Satan stretches the arguments to the very limit by describing the reasons why Job is so faithful in God’s sight: “Have you not made a hedge around him, around his household and around all that he has on every side? You have blessed the work of his hands, and his possessions have increased in the land” (Job 1: 10). According to Satan’s logic Job has every reason to be good because God has been good to him in every way; he was living under God’s protection all the days of his life and God has given him every reason to be good. Satan’s next strategy is to challenge God in a very forceful way: “But now, stretch out your hand and touch all that he has, and he will surely curse you to your face” (Job 1: 10-11). When disaster eventually struck at the very heart of Job’s existence his humble response was “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, naked I shall return there. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord” (Job 1: 21). According Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi of England, it is God who is on trail in the narrative of Job because of God’s faith in Job and his virtues. He wrote: “The way to understand Job is to invert the way it has been understood. What if the truth at the heart of faith were the opposite of what we take it to be? What if, more significant than our faith in God, is God’s faith in us?” Therefore, in utter humility we must stretch before His majesty and power for loving us and giving us faith as a gift through His amazing grace and unending mercy.

Job shows a robust God-given faith, but even in matters of faith most of us try to claim ownership and boast about our scarifies for holding on to a faith in God; more often than not we join the folk culture of asking the question, “Where is God when we need Him?” But the real question should be: is there any time in our lives that we don’t need God? Job’s friends had unending debates and discussions about God, but Job maintained his simple down to earth conversation with God through out his trails and tribulations and justified God’s faith in Him. May God’s grace help us at all times to offer a central place for God in our lives and continue our conversations with Him. Each of us walks the road to Emmaus after each Calvary events in our lives, but we are unable to recognise that Jesus is at our side, as we walk along blinded by self-pity and personal concerns. The Emmaus disciples in similar circumstance teach us the importance of listening and providing hospitality to strangers.