I am in what is loosely called a “people-helping” profession. I've been in one people-helping profession or another since 1967. I've been a neuropsychiatric technician helping combat personnel return to civilian life after becoming psychologically traumatised by war. I've been line staff in a renowned child care centre, helping pre-adolescent wards of the court find some structure and stability after their biological parents and parental homes had become untenable. I have been staff in adolescent therapeutic schools. I have helped set up labour rooms so that delivering mothers could have their babies. I have nursed the sick and wounded. I have worked as a mental health therapist in a dual diagnosis hospital, helping those with both a substance addiction and a psychological disorder put the pieces back together and build a foundation for recovery. I have been in Christian ministry as both a children's pastor and as the pastor of a church; hopefully helping people consider what one theologian called ultimate issues. I've been a university instructor, helping some learn New Testament Greek, but helping others learn to pay attention to patients as persons while attending to the business of charting their progress. I have been, and still am, a parent, helping my children with the perspective of one who has gone before them a few years in life. And I am now a psychologist, helping people who are troubled or depressed or otherwise bothered, stifled, confused, scared, or broken and bruised to heal or to grow through the healing.But sometimes I cannot help. Sometimes “it” doesn't work. The person continues to suffer, and that feels bad. That is when I realise, all over again, that I cannot “fix it”. I am not the one who provides the healing and imparts a better life.Jesus said, “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”While talking to His Father, He also said, “This is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent.”The knowledge of God, the experiential encounter with an actually existing divinity, is the crux of the issue. A person can be attracted to an experience itself, as with those who have come to Jesus looking for a “natural high,” but that is off target. A person can come to Christianity like any other religion and learn a set of rules by which he or she attempts to please God and “get into heaven.” That is also off target, even though Jesus did not claim to set aside God's value statements in the law. A person can come to God hoping He will be their ticket for success in this life, and success is then variously defined but summarised by the statement, “Just give me what I want”.There are endless peripheral targets people can identify and associate with living the Christian life, but they all fail. Then, Christianity appears to be a cruel hoax. God appears not to make one happy. God appears not to actually make one successful. God appears not to heal all the old wounds and make sadness and loss disappear. God appears to be a fraud.This is basically what Job's wife believed when she and Job had lost everything, and she said to him, “Curse God and die.”However, Job did not do that; he stepped past her advice, and that of his religious and “theologically correct” friends, and he came directly to God. What did he find? He found a deeper knowledge of God, and he said,“I have heard of You by the hearing of the ear; But now my eye sees You…” He attained eternal life. He moved from hearing things about God to God Himself the seeing that makes one really hear. This is what J I Packer described as the difference between knowing about God and knowing God.Knowing God in the midst of difficulty makes difficult circumstances disappear. Understand what I am saying. It does not necessarily make the circumstances themselves disappear; it makes the difficulty of the circumstances disappear. Well, let's try that again. It doesn't make the difficulty disappear; it makes the way to endure difficulty appear more clearly, more usefully, with more comfort and encouragement, and with peace.CS Lewis called this feeling of peace and warmth “joy”. This joy is not the silly laughing gas kind of experience; it's an ardour that satisfies deep quest, straightens confusion, settles questions, and grounds a person in a sense of wholeness that, as the scripture describes it, “passes all understanding”.For me, then, the message is clear. It is my solution, and probably will not suffice for others. It's not the same as when I'm too tired and need to give up struggling; then I simply yield to whatever God might bring my way. When life seems too hard and I feel discouraged, when I cannot see my way around the bend and worry about what's coming, when I'm confused, when I feel like I must do something, but I don't know what to do, then I must clear away all the noise and that which distracts me. That is when I must come straight to God, talk straight to Jesus, and commune with the Holy Spirit.“Oh God, do more than hear me; BE with me! Like Job, I will say, ‘Though You slay me, will I trust You!' I already have eternal life, Lord. I know You. I want to crawl up into You; I want to sense Your presence. I want to hear your voice and think Your thoughts after You. Leave me here or take me there. For richer or for poorer. In sickness and in health. Even death cannot tear us apart. Now let me be still, and listen… and sense your movement… and hear your quiet voice, oh People Helper of all People Helpers.”