If Christ was born into the world to redeem it, why doesn’t our world look more redeemed? Why is our world still full of loneliness, anxiety, betrayals, sickness, poverty, violence, war, and death? What did Christ’s birth into our world change? Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that these aren’t irreverent questions but the right ones. Only in struggling to answer them do we begin to understand the mystery of Christ more deeply. The fact that Christ is born into our world does not mean that those who believe in him will be spared the pain, loneliness, seasons of sickness, heartaches, betrayals, anxieties, fears, and humiliations that afflict everyone else. Faith offers no one an escape from pain. Moreover, believers, like unbelievers, will suffer too the darkness of doubt, the painful fear that the heavens are empty. Faith in Christ doesn’t remove any of the pains inherent within the human condition, including the pain of doubting God’s existence. Faith promises no magic pass-cards. So how can we say that “God is with us” when mostly it feels like God isn’t there for us? Generally, we struggle to feel God in the present moment, to see God’s face in the here and now. In the present, God often seems absent. Yet, when we turn around and look back on our lives, when we look back on our story, we more easily see how God has been there all along and how we have walked in a divine presence, protection, guidance, and love that were imperceptible at the time but are apparent in retrospect. We see God more clearly in our past than in our present. This can help us understand how Christ is present to us, even when it doesn’t always feel like it. Faith doesn’t promise us a ladder to crawl out of the pains of life; it promises a friend to walk with us through those pains. Mostly, though, it’s only when we look back on our lives that we see that this friend has always been there.