"I love life", she said, "I love my family, enjoy dancing, horseback riding, snowmobiling and the outdoors. Then one day I woke up with a pain in my stomach. The doctors can't figure out what's wrong. I can't eat without throwing up. I have diarrhea. I'm miserable. Why has God done this to me?"

Isn't that the way we tend to think of God - as out there directing our lives. Some think that God is like an accountant, watching everything we do and noting in the book of life what's naughty and nice. And if things get too bad, God sends a flood, a plague or an invading army. Indeed some look forward to Armageddon, the final battle between good and evil, because they want God to come and set things right once and for all. Others see God as one who tests us as in the story of Job. Now those who wrote the Bible and we who read it can certainly find those elements in the Bible stories, but is there another way of reading the Bible?

The answer is YES. It requires a more careful reading and looking at the entire message of the Bible. Now there is no question that our actions as individuals and as a people have consequences. There no question that everything material in this world is going to decay. And so a certain number of us will get cancer or have heart attacks. A certain number of us will be involved in car accidents and so on. But God is not sitting there like a movie director making these things happen. Rather God is with us helping us find a way through the various situations we find ourselves in. God is with us. God is on our side. That's the fundamental message of the Bible.

One day I asked woman who had come to see me how things were going. She told me about getting up that morning and puttering around the house before she went off to see another doctor. She told me how she had spent 5 to 10 minutes trying to get a penny out of her kitchen widow sill. It kept rolling around and getting stuck. She had to get a knife and ease it out, but she finally got it.

I said to her, "Do you know the story of the woman searching for the lost coin." She said "No". I said well it comes right after the story of the Good Shepherd finding the lost sheep. It's parallel story. The woman is really God searching for us so that we will not be lost. I said, "You shared with me earlier how you felt abandoned by God. But just as you would not give up on getting that Penny, know that God has not given up on you and will not abandon you. With all your trials and tribulations, God is on your side and will help you find a way through it all.

When we feel down and out, that nothing is going right and that we are totally insignificant, we need to remember that God cares for us and will never let us be lost. God is on our side.