One of the temptations that human beings face is to imagine if things are going well that God is for us and when things are going poorly we wonder where God is. St. Paul wishes to disabuse us of that kind of thinking. He wants us to understand that God is always for us. He wants our default position to be one of trust in the love and mercy of God no matter how things are swirling around us. The image that came to me was dealing with a glitchy computer. Since I don’t have any idea of how the thing really works when there is trouble I turn the machine off and then back on again. By going back to the original programming the problem can be dealt with. While all analogies limp this seems an apt description of how we might heed the message of the apostle. No matter what is happening around us, “anguish, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or the sword,” we can be assured that God is still loving us. Our default position is that nothing will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
