Look To Him and Live

A Reflection on the First Reading for Sunday, September 14th, 2025:
The Exaltation of the Holy Cross

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Numbers
21:4-9

In those days: the people became impatient on the way. They spoke against God and against Moses, “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food.” Then the Lord sent poisonous serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many children of Israel died.

The people came to Moses and said, “We have sinned by speaking against the Lord and against you; pray to the Lord to take away the serpents from us.” So Moses prayed for the people.

And the Lord said to Moses, “Make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live.”

So Moses made a serpent of bronze, and put it upon a pole; and whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live.

Pause. Pray. Reflect.

Many times along my journey, I have looked to the heavens and cried, “Where is God?” Other times, my circumstances were so bleak, I didn’t have the wherewithal to even contemplate this question. I perceive this same sense of inner conflict and desperation in the cries of the Israelites as they stagger their way through the desert. Maybe they wondered, “What is the meaning of this? Where is God in this suffering? What kind of god would tell us he chose us and then desert us in our time of need? Is there even a god at all?”

These are questions I have asked more than once in my lifetime. The darkness that overtakes me in the midst of suffering can be blinding; deafening. It can render me impotent in bodily action, human will, and spiritual strength. Emotion can run wild in this state, often moving me into anger and resentment. In the worst case scenario, my anger can turn to apathy as my head droops heavily in defeat. I feel abandoned. 

There is no worse suffering than in this place—the place where I assume the absence of God‘s presence. This is a bare-bones description of hell. Hell is that place we choose to descend into where God is not.

Yet here, in this life, is there a place where God is not? Saint Teresa of Avila in her book The Way of Perfection, writes this, “We need no wings to go in search of God, but have only to find a place where we can be alone and look upon Him present within us.” This has been the key to the redemption of all the suffering I have experienced in this life. When I lack the spiritual fortitude to look upon Him in the midst of my suffering, I can always look back upon those dark places, and with His hand in mine, ask Him for the eyes to see Him there. It is in these moments that my suffering is transformed because what was once draped in darkness, is newly framed in His gold, glimmering Light. My hardships are no longer symbolic of an orphan mentality, but rendered glorious as a measure of the resilience of the human spirit—because I have been chosen by Him. He was there, so now, I am here.

It must have seemed odd to the Israelites that Moses would create a beautiful symbol of the very thing that set out to kill them. Still, isn’t it true that with God, we are free, even in those moments when the world would see us as oppressed. We, as His chosen, can always look to Him, and live.




Lori MacDonald

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