Is God real?

"Is God real?"

"Can we really know?" 

"If he is real and is at work in the world, why is there such suffering and anguish in the world?" 

"Surely God, who is all powerful, can put a stop to this?"

These are the real questions that those who doubt God ask of Christians all the time. They are hard questions – one that requires more than a glib answer that doesn’t directly address the question directly, or a circular answer that uses the Bible as the primary source for a discussion, when the people who have asked the question doubt the Bibles authenticity. It is hard for Christians to avoid referencing the Bible, as Christians use the Bible as the primary source for referencing God’s story and his plan for us, his wisdom, his poetry, his philosophy, his law, and the culture of God’s people in history.

In fact, Christians believe we are part of God’s continuing narrative in the world, with his church being an extension to the words contained in the Bible. The Bible is where those seeking God can find him. The church unfortunately, has not been the best lens in which to see God at times, but people are what they are, mistakes are always made when people are around, hence our need of God.

We can look to answers for our existence through science, believing in the probability that the world as we know it came from nothing, or we could adopt a Christian perspective, where we also use science to help us understand the universe in order to better understand God’s sovereignty and his relationship he has with his people us on the earth. For many Christians, science can explain the mechanism by which life functions, but it cannot explain the purpose of life as we know it.

Scientists, in order to make sense of the logic of their arguments, often refer to philosophy in order to explain the conclusion to the models that they construct. This pseudo philosophy helps to explain the uncertainty of the modelling they have employed to explain life, in order to help us understand how humans came into existence without any reference to God. Similarly, Christians also use philosophical arguments to discuss the nature of humanity and the metaphysical aspects to the universe in defence of God. Science does not in and of itself, lead to atheism. Atheism is the outright rejection of a deity or deities.

It is important too, to recognise that theism, having a belief in God, is not a God of the gaps faith. God is bigger than simply being the mechanism for life. God is the causation or agent for perpetuating life. Scientists cannot create life from nothing, even though they may declare the ‘Higgs Boson’ identified in 2012, as the ‘God Particle.’ 



The Higgs is a particle that is seen to bond protons and neutrons together to create matter, hence the God Particle reference, through the energy of the particles colliding as theorised in the standard model of particle physics. The boson is the energy or force that glues the particles together, seemingly out of the nothing, but acting like a rubber band, holding the particles together, giving it mass, and thereby creating matter that bonds itself together to become life as we know it?

Just because the Higgs Boson can do this, doesn’t mean that we have the building blocks for life. We do have a more complete picture of how matter is formed within the standard theoretical model because we have found nearly all of the parts… but this isn’t life. It is only the mechanism by which created life seems to exist. In the Bible story of creation, the spirit of God hovered over the waters and God said, ‘Let there be light.’ At that moment, all of the creative energy of God, with the Higgs Boson included if you will, set about to create the universe. God is the source – he is the agent from which all life came. He is not a God of the gaps… he is the creator. It is science that helps us to fill in the gaps, not the other way round, as some would have you believe.

Science would argue that as we unravel the physics of the universe, our understanding of origin would become incidental, in that we have sentience. We are self-aware, so we can reason; we can make positive decisions to affect our environment for our own survival. Our primitive lack of understanding of how things came to be, created superstition about the world we didn’t understand allowing concepts of great deities to make sense of the unknown. The humanist perspective would simply say that civilisation was misguided at best, superstitious at the worst.

The elaborate imaginations of those involved in the worship of the earth, helped to evolve our superstition into religious idealism and notions of morality, laws and order. Our more enlightened age is helping us to remove the barriers to our social evolution, put upon us by the misguided, ill-informed minds of the past, so that humanity is at last free to embrace life without the ghastly spectre of religion.

So the question still remains – “How can a just, all powerful and all-knowing God allow the injustice and suffering in the world to go on… not only in the one-off event that befalls many people, but in the continuing degradation of human misery of whole people groups. Surely his silence proves he doesn’t exist?”

The Christian believer battles with this question just as much as those who profess to have no faith. This question, and others like it, are the trigger’s which cause some to fall from faith. When ones sense of hopelessness, overwhelms our ability to reconcile the nature of God to the situation we face, it is not easy to accept that God is indeed working in all circumstance.

I do not have the answers as to why one person is healed of an injury or an illness, and the other is not. It may lead us to conclude, ‘How can there be justice here?’ Is there however, more to God than simply a lucky supernatural force that saves us from ourselves? I would hope so, or else I would have to agree with the scientists taunt that God is merely superstition.

So from science we can find answers. Our human DNA is made up of an ancestral lineage going back millennia. Each new life born to that chromosomal pair, mix the genome, creating anomalies. We do not have pure breeding is what I am saying. And so our bodies can only be as healthy as the genetic material it is birthed with. 



As babies, infants, children and adults, we are exposed to environmental and diet related toxins that affect our body chemistry, causing abnormal genes. These are also passed along the family line. When we look at our children, we can see the family resemblance and know we belong. Yet with all this knowledge about biology and chemistry, we tend to forget it in the heat of our emotions, when someone we love has been struck down with bad health. We blame God.

Why do some suffer heart disease, rare illness or calamities such as freak accidents and death? Well it’s because we live out our lives in the now, with all of the problems that life brings with it… it is not God’s doing that we suffer rather, it is the knowledge that God as a Father has also suffered, that helps us glean any sense from the situation we face. We can approach God with humility, trusting in his favour, however bad it gets, even unto death because of what he has endured.

I heard it said recently that life is about suffering-its how we deal with suffering that matters. Or as Jean Luc Picard, Captain of the Enterprise once recalled:

“Someone once told me that time is a predator that stalks us all our lives. But maybe time is also a companion who goes with us on our journey, and reminds us to cherish the moments of our lives because they will never come again. We are after all, only mortal.”

There are other situations that we all face, where we stem similar discontent with the life experiences we have. I celebrate today (12^th August, 2014), 19 years of marriage, yet I can still feel insecure and terribly lonely. Even when my own contribution to living my life well seems to flatter the lives of others and there is a real sense of synergy and emotion to the shared experience of life, I can still feel joyless or even miserable, for no apparent reason.

Psychologists and life coaches call this perspective an ‘automatic negative thought’. These ideas about my sense of self can ‘pop’ into my head uninvited, like a robber who comes to steal that which is good and wholesome. It keeps me in that rather dull place of self-loathing and feelings of worthlessness, which makes me appear to be as conflicted by the same fears that I have been saddled with since childhood. 



My inner voice is always telling me that ‘I am not good enough, or no-one is listening to you; you will never be successful…’ it is emotionally painful.

My heart resonated with a story today in the life section of the Guardian on-line, that according to the relationship charity Relate, one in ten adults do not feel that they have a close friend or they simply feel unloved. While many (85%) felt that they had good relationships, 19% felt that in the two weeks leading up to their participation in the survey, that they felt unloved in those relationships. Only this week, I experienced these emotions when my wife returned from a four day trip with some girlfriends.

We parted on the Thursday with some unresolved issues in how our relationship had become a bit routine and functional since our Venice trip. On my wife’s return, she was tired and had a stomach upset. Observing that we were in the process of doing dinner after church, she felt that she didn’t want to interrupt us, so set about unpacking. I interpreted this as showing a lack of emotion or joy at returning home. Bottom line was, I wanted a hug and ‘I missed you.’

Now my psychological perspective could easily go two ways. Either I could see this as rejection and a continuation of how things were before she left for her trip, or I could speak to her and find out what was going on; express my feelings before I dwelt on them for too long, and reconcile the differences. It is important that I make the choice to do this and work on why I felt the way I did. So you can see how the story in the Guardian resonated with me because it could fuel the fire of my emotions without me knowing the truth of what was actually going on.

It would be easy for me to dwell on how I feel, and internalise this as a form of rejection… One stat which did catch my eye, pandering immediately to my automatic negative reaction, was that 9% of UK adults do not have a single close friend – the voice again in my head stating, “That’s you, that is… Didn’t God promise to heal you of this emotional baggage? He hasn’t yet? Must be something you’ve done then.”

Of course, as a Christian, I believe that this isn’t true – God heals completely. So why the delay in my emotions and my thinking when responding to the negativity of my thoughts and what I know is true of God. Does the way that I ‘still am’ reflect God’s apparent inaction? Automatic negative emotions provide many of us with enough ammunition to arm our mental health with a sense of guilt, shame, remorse, and sorrow. 

These are all powerful emotions that energise our responses to the situations we face, as much as the more positive emotions of love and grace which we tend to overlook. “I will not allow that person to hurt me again… I would be better off working on my own… I’m not prepared to be lectured on how I want to live my life… no one has the authority to tell me how I should live my life or what I should do…”

When we try to control our environment, emotionally or otherwise, we seek reward for the success that our endeavours bring to our lives, our careers, our families and our circle of influence, our authority or the status we have attained, or the respect we command in our respective fields. When we fail to control our circumstances, our psychology is always at odds with how we deal with the emotion. 


As DATA, the android from STAR STREK reflected when speaking to Counsellor Troi:

DATA: At first I was unprepared for the unpredictable nature of the emotions. However having experienced two hundred and sixty-one distinct emotional states, I believe I have learned to control my feelings. They will no longer control me.

TROI:   Well, I hope you're successful, Data.            

            ...Data, over here, I've found something.            

            ...One life sign, very faint.

DATA: Spot! ...I'm very happy to see you, Spot.

TROI:  Another family reunited.           

          ...Data, ...are you all right?

DATA: I am uncertain, Counsellor. I am happy to see Spot, and yet I am crying. Perhaps the chip is malfunctioning? 

TROI:  I think it's working perfectly.

(STAR TREK: Generations, 1994)

It is more often the case, as in the quote from DATA, that when we feel we are in control and have full command of our lives, something erroneous comes along to shake us to our core. Many can become attuned to these circumstances, trying to deal with them without calling on a Devine agent to intervene. Whilst others who have no notion of a God, demand that God does something. Our emotional pain calls out, grasping out at the cruelty of the world, the injustice, the suffering, blaming anything else for the pain we feel, except for the obvious circumstance that we face.

I cannot comprehend Ukraine, Israel, Gaza, Syria, Iraq, Ebola… there seems no end to the inhuman struggle that these people face every hour of every day; the continued suffering of ordinary people, with the very real prospect that someone will have died as I write this sentence, is too traumatic to comprehend – here’s me, withering on about automatic negative emotions, while someone is being butchered.

If I was living in Mosul today, I would not renounce my faith, but would my love for my family and desire to protect them, make me react differently under fire. The IS fighters would immediately recognise my allegiance to Yahweh due to my clothing and clean shaven appearance. I do not look anything but western: My fate would be humiliation and death… My wife and children would become part of the forgotten 1 million Christians who have left Iraq since the 2003 allied bombing campaign Desert Storm.

Each solution or action, mandate or ceasefire, seems to conflict with too many variables to be certain of any lasting change or security for the indigenous population. I’m not certain that there can be a lasting human solution, as we read of the atrocities that are playing out before us on the various news feeds around the world. The genocide of an oppressor over an oppressed people, has an all too familiar feel to it.

Let’s be frank about this. This is not a Godly war. Just as those exasperated by the circumstance that befall us, cry out to God, ‘Where are you?’ we can be certain that in each situation we witness around the world, as fellow human beings, we stand alongside the oppressed, the downtrodden, the victimised, and God also stands with you. Where? One might ask. He stands alongside every human heart. He experiences what you experience; he feels what you feel. “Well how can he?” you might cry out, “Where is he?”

The answer from the Christian faith is that God the father is revealed in his son Jesus, not just some prophet, hallucination or made-up figure head or deity, but a real person. God’s son. This is what separates the Christian faith from all other world religions; faith is NOT about US, it’s ALL about HIM. There is nothing that man can do to believe that he is worthy to represent God’s will on the earth. It is certainly not the bullet – this is man’s doing, his technology.

Many claim to represent the will of God and have been found wanting… indeed, they have been found to lack the fundamental of Godly leadership: humility, righteousness, justice and peace, but above all hope. The truth is that Jesus came to serve. He came to seek out and rescue all those who are lost. He doesn’t achieve this through oppression, totalitarianism and the autocratic control of a population through a central spokesman declaring himself to be chosen. No, God works through the still small voice found in the human heart.

When Elijah had defeated Jezebel’s pagan worship through a demonstration by God of his power and authority in 1 Kings 19, he immediately fled to safety because he feared the reprisal of Jezebel. God finds Elijah in the cleft of a rock, a cave, where he encounters God as he goes by. God doesn’t exist in great displays of supernatural wonder even though this is part of his armoury and we can experience it through the power of the Holy Spirit. No, Elijah’s experience of God was the still, quiet voice, reassuring him of his place and his purpose in God’s story and in his restoration to his rightful place as leader of his generation.

“Go out and stand before me on the mountain,” the Lord told him. And as Elijah stood there, the Lord passed by, and a mighty windstorm hit the mountain. It was such a terrible blast that the rocks were torn loose, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake there was a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. After the fire there was the sound of a gentle whisper. When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his cloak and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave.”(1 Kings 19:11-13)

God asks Elijah why he was hiding away, to which he replied (paraphrase), ‘I’m scared, everyone else has been murdered, those that remain, reject you as their God and I am the only one left.’ This is a good description of how the Christians in Iraq must feel today under the hand of IS? You see, God knows the folly of human endeavour and he knows how much we can bear. If we remain true to him, even death can be faced with dignity because we know that death is not the end.

History is replete with war. This year, Britain remembers the fallen of World War 1 on the 4^th August 2014, which marked the centenary of the date that war was first declared in Europe. It’s as though it was the first time that war had ever engulfed our civilised society. History reveals to us however, that humanity has always been a blood thirsty, power hungry, domineering, arrogantly presumptuous race, believing that one is better than one’s neighbour. 



We have dressed up our human nature with all kinds of justified hatred towards our fellow man but in the end, we are all fearful of showing weakness, paranoid of failure and so, we play out the story lines of history as though nothing has changed. “Our military action is justified because…”

God see’s all of this and sent Jesus as a symbol of hope. That is why I would not be able to renounce my faith if I was a Christian in Mosul. By all accounts, my wife and children could be beheaded, sold as slaves or raped. Even if I declared Allah and his Prophet Mohammed as holy, I would still be executed. Renouncing my faith would not change the evil. Some blame religion on all of the wars we have ever fought, but I'm not sure. I don’t believe that the pagan god’s of the Pharaohs, Persians, Hellenists or Romans, were used as the inspiration for their bloody campaigns. Their gods do seem to provide a sort of superstitious form of strength, to enable those with a will to conquer or subjugate others, to do so. Indeed, the Romans believed it was the Christians and their allegiance to Christ that unravelled their once glorious empire, until Emperor Constantine made Christianity the faith of the empire.

Jesus stands within our world history at odds with all those who would perceive to hold authority or power over a conquered people. At Jesus’ birth, the Romans had absolute authority over the law, demanding taxes for the security offered to the Jewish people from Caesar. King Herod, holder of the monarchy of Israel, also demanding loyalty and taxes. But the real power rested with the temple authorities in Jerusalem. The High Priest controlled a temple guard alongside a High Council of Pharisees, rabbis and teachers of the law, dictating how one should live their life.

Into this setting, God’s greatest intervention in the lives of the people he loves, is revealed in the life of Jesus. As Elijah had protested many centuries before, many had turned away from God. Jerusalem was a tinderbox of political, religious, economic and social disharmony, as it appears to be today. Jesus would use this to his advantage by being counter cultural. He could question the inequality that existed as a result of the decline in the people’s moral and ethical standards, and the corruption of the temple leadership. John the Baptist came first, like Elijah before him, making a way for Jesus, calling the people to repent; to turn away from lives that dishonour God.

Jesus upheld the law of God while questioning the moral authority of each aspect of civilised behaviour and the conduct by which he was being judged. Even to Pontius Pilate, Jesus states that he, Pilate, could only dispense the law because his Father in heaven allowed it. ‘Then Jesus said, "You would have no power over me at all unless it were given to you from above. So the one who handed me over to you has the greater sin."’ (John 19:11, NLT)

Today, we are watching the very same thing happen before our very eyes. No longer are our leaders acting out of principle; all too many are acting out of pure pragmatism. Just as Jesus too was put on the cross because it was convenient to do so. The Jewish leaders wanted rid of him, even though no crime had been committed, and Pilate was caught in a blackmail trap where his non-compliance with the will of the people, would be reported to Caesar. It had to be this way to show that man was absolutely corrupted by sin. Jesus' response to sin gave him the moral authority to judge the affairs of man... His novel solution was to be willing to pay for our mistakes, by hanging on the cross.

We have seen a great deal of social and political unrest within our recent history, similar to that found in the crucifixion story. Our human nature seems indicative to a mind-set for injustice, particularly if we don’t get our own way. The very idea that we can ignore certain rules, laws, ethics or international conventions when convenient, does not seem to dissipate with the passage of time. 

The naturalist or scientific view of the world may be able to accommodate this type of unbalance by suggesting that this is purely natural selection in action; the survival of the fittest. The humanist would cling to their long held view, that religion is evil and it is the principle cause of the social intolerance that our society has to endure. Without religion, we would solve most of society’s problems. Without religion, this inhumanity we are witnessing today, wouldn’t exist.

The Historian could point to countless examples of sectarian violence, dissent, and non-conformism that does not have a religious context. Here the ideal could be political, social constructivism or simple power mongering. Indeed, some might blame colonialism on the fractious relationships of the populations that live in the areas effected by recent conflict, than just religion per se. There are deeper social issues to do with how we value each other, how we interact in community, and how we show regard for alternative cultures and lifestyle choices, than mere religion. 

Some regarded Jesus' teaching to be a precursor to a violent insurgent conflict with the Roman authorities; indeed, when the temple guard came to arrest Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, prior to his trial, the disciples had but two swords. One was held by Peter, who unsheathed it as though he was to fight his way out of the situation in order to protect Jesus. Jesus’ mission was always one of peace. In healing the guardsman’s ear, cut off by Peter’s clumsy lunge, Jesus revealed that his mention of a sword in Luke 22:38, was not for violence or armament, but a metaphor for the disciples to be on guard...

"Look, Lord," they replied, "we have two swords among us." "That's enough," he said.

Indeed, Jesus’ own response to his arrest and the ‘show’ trial conducted in the middle of the night was an act to enable Jesus to be processed quickly. No grounds could be established by the High Priest to authorise Jesus’ death, nor could witnesses offer more than circumstantial evidence that could only be regarded at best, to be tantamount to blasphemy.

Politics played its part too. The Jewish leaders plotted to process Jesus through Roman law, which they despised as much as Jesus himself. In order to get what they wanted, the Chief Priest was willing to do a deal. God’s law prohibits murder – the Passover celebration was about to take place and the Chief Priest and temple authorities knew that they would be ritually unclean and unfit to take part in the Passover celebration, if this matter was not processed swiftly.

It was unthinkable to the Chief Priest, Pharisees, Sadducees and temple authorities, to be absent from the Passover festivities, as this was a high profile, social and political event used to affirmed their status and authority. Going to Pilate’s home in the early hours of the Friday before the Sabbath, was risky, particularly as the High Priest calls Pilate outside of his home. They wouldn’t go in to the home of a gentile for fear of being ritually unclean. What an insult to Pilate’s authority and a very risky political move. Pilate is blackmailed into doing his duty and you know the rest of the story. If not read the Gospel of John, chapters 18 and 19.

Jesus knew that he was to become the focus for mankind’s schemes and political manoeuvring; he knew that the religious authorities and his very own followers, were to offer him up for death. Jesus spoke words of truth, life and reconciliation, demonstrating the power of God through the many miracles he performed in front of their very eyes. Yet they still chose to reject him for fear of what he represented.

Jesus went to his fate willing to do the will of God. His followers deserted him; he was brutally flogged, humiliated and his human weakness and brokenness was paraded in front of the people, as they called for his death while freeing the murderer, Barabbas in his stead. In Iraq today, IS fighters daub an Arabic letter ‘n’ for Nazarene, on the door of each Christian home, marking them out for execution.

On the cross, Jesus suffered the most poignant of all of the events of that night. Hanging on the cross, his body pummelled and broken, battling with asphyxiation, dehydration and insurmountable pain, Jesus faced the sky and cried out: ‘My God, My God, why have you abandoned me?’ (Matthew 27:46, NLT). Isn’t this the cry we all use when faced with injustice? Why me God? Where are you God..?’ The significant message for each one of us is that without God, we are truly lost.

Jesus was tried by godless people, blinded by their own self-importance, religious rules and political wrangling. It had to be that way for him, but it doesn’t have to be that way for us. Jesus went through the agony of his separation from his heavenly Father so that we can be restored to God through his shed blood. His sacrifice.

JESUS CONQUERING THE GRAVE – IS A FACT. How do we know this to be true? Eyewitness accounts recorded in the final chapter of each of the Gospel stories and the book of ACTs, reveal how when all hope was lost, Jesus who was thought to be dead, was resurrected to new life. The tomb was empty. Jesus visited his disciples, ate with them and commissioned them to build his people into his church, with all of its faults and failings. 

How do we know that the tomb was empty? There was an armed Roman guard, plus the temple guard, preventing the body being taken. A heavy stone was rolled over the entrance, requiring a degree of muscle and leverage to move. The grave clothes were folded and placed in a position to indicate that the wearer had removed them. Importantly too, the authorities could have presented the body in order to discredit the disciples and call them liars, if they had taken the body to prevent him becoming a martyr figure. 

In fact, the re-telling of the Gospel story was made possible through the lives of ordinary people like you and I. When all hope was lost, a few clung on to the truth of what Jesus taught... it was the women who found what had happened at the tomb, and it was the women who motivated the crestfallen disciples, hiding away in fear, just like Elijah, to spring into action.

It is the truth of these events about Jesus' death and resurrection that sets you free. No longer are we slaves to our sinful nature, we are free to revel in the love of God and the gift of the eternal life he offers us. No matter what life brings, knowing Jesus’ love for us, helps us to endure, just as Jesus himself endured. In this world, many obstacles will come our way but absolutely nothing can separate us from the love of God.

When IS fighters in Iraq crucifies a Father, beheads his child and violates his wife, this is pure evil, of which I cannot fathom in my western surroundings. All I know is that God is alongside each grieving heart, sharing in our pain because he knows what life is like; it was the same pain he felt when he saw his Son dying on the cross for our sake; having to turn his back on him because of man’s sin.

Jesus himself knew no sin. Although his mortal body died on the cross, the resurrection of Lazarus in John 11, reveals that Jesus has Godly authority, to release us from the power of death. Death could not hold Jesus; he rose victoriously to new life, conquering the fear of death that has cursed mankind since we rejected the will of God in favour of our own. God had to set the punishment for our sin within our own mortality, to prevent the perpetuation of our evil conduct. Life as we know it here on earth therefore comes to an end, and we account for the lives we have lived and the choices we have made before God our creator who loves us more than we know and is desperate to show mercy.

Jesus makes it possible for us receive God’s mercy and forgiveness because God loves the son. Whoever the son loves, God extends his Grace towards restoring our hope for a relationship with the Father and the Son for eternity. 

"Those who accept my commandments and obey them are the ones who love me. And because they love me, my Father will love them. And I will love them and reveal myself to each of them." (John 14:21, NLT)

Through accepting Jesus as saviour, we repent of the life we chose to live before we met him; that self-centred, egotistical life, choosing instead to become selfless, just as Jesus did, in the certain knowledge that God is Sovereign.

Those that choose to go their own way, choose a life, separated from God, and all that goes with an eternal life without love. It is unfathomable to me that one would want to leave their fate in the hands of an unknown. Maybe that is where the recently deceased Robin Williams chose to find solace? After a life entertaining us on our screens and endearing him in our hearts with great fondness, Robin chose to end his life. Mental health illnesses and addictions are this generations most malevolent of enemies, seeking to rob us of life. This is why Christians believe in Jesus so passionately: the enemy of this world wants to rob us of the abundant life that God offers all those who accept his offer of grace.

My heart is full of sadness and my eyes tearful as I recount the many images from this week: the children of Gaza, the children of Iraq, the Ebola victims, Robin Williams and Alan, sitting in an empty shop on the high street, with only alcohol for company: his guitar stolen.



Final thoughts...

Reflecting on this eclectic blog, I have wanted so desperately to share that despite all things, God still loves the world that he gave his only begotten son Jesus for. Jesus left the heavenly realm and became a man. He become a sacrifice for us to save us from ourselves. Whoever believes in Jesus will not perish, even when faced with an IS gun, Israeli blockade or Hamas rocket. Even the deception of our own mind cannot separate us from the love of God. Jesus came into the world to remind us of God’s love towards us, not to judge us or to condemn us, but to restore his creation.

Whatever it is you are going through, I urge you to do one thing: Instead of becoming enraged by God’s apparent inaction, turn the situation around. Perhaps you are ready to say this prayer: 

“God, if you are out there, come and introduce yourself to me. I am full of doubt, bitterness and resentment about what is going on in my life and the lives of those I care about. I am aware that some of the things that are happening are my own doing, but there are some things that are outside of my control and there is nothing I can do about them except ask you to intervene. I am sorry for the things that I have done that have harmed others and my own sense of peace, and I ask that you come rescue me and those I love, through the power of the Holy Spirit, Amen.”

If you have said this prayer, I encourage you to start to pray specifically about the issue you are facing. Ask God to protect you. Ask God to surround you with his love and to put people and/or organisations around you to help. If you are not in a church community, I again urge you to find one that best suits your personality and can give you the support you seek. Above all though, as you experience breakthrough in your life, give God the glory, he would like that.