Mormon Church

Personal Response by Bethany

Does God feel our pain?

God really does feel and understand our pain!  Jesus Christ, through the Atonement, not only suffered for our sins but also suffered our pains, sicknesses, and sorrows. He understands perfectly everything we experience here on earth. Through his love and compassion, He will and does help us with our problems and challenges we face.

When I was sixteen years old I was in an automobile accident that would have been fatal, if not for the saving graces of a truly loving Heavenly Father.  I suffered many external and internal injuries that left me in and out of the hospital for quite some time.  During my quiet moments when I was alone, I thought “Why me?” I didn’t understand why this horrible thing had happened and I felt sad and depressed.  No one I knew could relate, and I felt very alone.  However, it was also in those quiet moments at a later time as I was reading the scriptures that I knew there was one person who did know what I was going through, because He had suffered all.  It was then that I knew I needed to stop feeling sorry for myself.  What happened did happen, and there was nothing I could do to take it back.  I then knew there were things that my Heavenly Father wanted me to learn from the whole experience.  He wanted to help me grow and progress, and the only way I could have was by first changing my attitude. (more…)

Mormons believe that God is all-powerful and has every capacity to intervene in our lives. He gives us, and accounts for, however, the agency of man, a gift which is above price. As a result, while He can and does intervene consistently in our lives under many circumstances, He sometimes allows us to undergo the results of our own choices, others’ choices, or natural occurrences. He feels with us as we struggle and promises to work all of experiences for our ultimate good. The Savior Himself has personally endured each of our pain, illnesses, and suffering and knows how to succor us in those infirmities. His perfect plan for our growth includes learning from opposition–sickness, well-being; right and wrong; light and darkness. It is through grappling with the vicissitudes of life, relying on the atonement of Jesus Christ, that we are able to grow spiritually and reach our divine potential.

Personal Response by James Faulconer

Confronted with the problem of suffering, it is as tempting for Mormons to wax philosophical as it is for anyone else. The question makes our otherwise quiet philosophical engines rev, anxious to decide which of the three legs of the traditional problem to knock down, or to find a way to reconcile them with the existence of suffering. Is it that God is not really all powerful—or perhaps that we misunderstand what “all-powerful” means? Is it that he is not all-loving or, that perhaps we do not fully understand his love and what it entails? Is it that he is both all-powerful and all-loving,

but does not know how to stop or at least lessen our pain? The existence of suffering seems to demand that we deny at least one of God’s attributes.

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