Behold! I am with you Always! Today, I am beginning a new series of reflections on this theme.
What a awesome promise Jesus makes to us! It is a promise of a lover which satisfies the heart of the beloved. To know that one will never be left alone, even in the darkest moments of life. To know that another has made a commitment to continually remain with me. To know that another loves me so much that nothing will separate us.

Did this realization of Jesus’ promise furnished the basis for Paul’s hope? For he wrote: “What will separate us from the love of Christ? Will anguish, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or the sword?.... No, in all these things we conquer overwhelmingly through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor present things,  nor future things, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom 8:35-39).

Victor Frankl came to a clarity concerning what enables some people to survive tragedy and others not. He began to study the people who survived the concentration camps of WW II. He discovered over and over again the one thing that sustained the survivors was the assurance in hope that someone was waiting for them to come back. The will to see that person was stronger than the will to die under the circumstances. (To be continued)