I give spiritual direction to quite a few women, and we frequently wrestle with what to do with hard situations and how they fit into God’s will.  Perhaps one of the hardest is children who have strayed from the faith.  I am currently reading Peter Kreeft’s Jesus-Shock and came across this section in one of his “7 beginnings”, in the seventh to be exact.  I think it proposes a very true and helpful perspective:

Christ is not, ultimately, our solution.  (Is your lover your “solution”?) He is our divine Lover and Lord.  All the “problems” of our life are part of His marriage to us, His lovemaking, His foreplay.  As Francis Thompson wrote in his classic poem “The Hound of Heaven,” “Is my gloom, after all, shade of His hand outstretched caressingly?”
     All things in life must be that, becasue He is not relative to them, they are relative to Him. Everything is, for He is God, and God is the absolute.
     He is not the solution to our problems; He is the giver of our problems.  Our problems are His tasks and our opportunities, His teaching and our education, His will and our sanctification.  Whether they are as small as a dropped earring or as large as a death or (worse) a divorce, everything is somewhere on that love-line that runs from Him to us.  He is our Universal Other, the One we are always in dialog with, the One pulling at the other end of the line.  Whether we see it or not, whether we believe it or not, we always struggle with Him, not with our problems, our lives, our deaths, our friends, or our families.  They are on the line with us;  He is the One at the end of the line.  Do you have a child who is dead, or who has done something awful, or who is in terrible trouble?  (No problem, no “locked door,” can be bigger than that for a parent.)  Christ is not a mere means to the end of solving your problem and relieving your sorrow.  Your problem, however big it is (or however small), is His wise and loving will to you, even though it may not look wise or loving.  It is His deliberate permissive will.  And your response to it is your response to Him.

I encourage you to read through that again and to linger on “He is our divine Lover” . . .