While I served in the Marines during Korea, I was never in a situation of being shot at, so I can only appreciate the horror through what others have told me. But having been in very stressful situations in my life, I know these are the very times that God draws nearest to us. And yet sometimes it doesn’t feel this way. We wonder where God is in the midst of our suffering.

In a new book by Andrew Carroll, Letters of Faith in Times of War, Lieutenant Colonel Scott Barnes, a doctor who treated hundreds of wounded patients in Iraq, offers an answer to that question in an email home to family and friends:

“Where is God? He is in the O.R. guiding the hands of the surgeons, He is in the will of the sergeants helping organize a blood drive as only they can, He is in the hearts of the soldiers who immediately rolled up their sleeves to give what they had to save a dying brother whom they don’t even know”—or even a captured enemy.

Ultimately, the answer to where God is in times of war is that he’s on the Cross. As professor Preston Jones of John Brown University noted in a recent article “The Cross and the Man in Combat,” “The soldier’s agony, loneliness, and loss of morale are also God’s. On the cross Jesus suffers because of us, and for us, and with us—with those who have to face the violent consequences of the disasters we all create.”

God created us to live with Him in paradise. But he also gave us a free will. We rebelled, which brought sin and what Christians call “the Fall” into the world. A most extreme example of the Fall is often war. But the Christ who died on the Cross to take away our sins is with us in the midst of horror and carnage and bloodshed caused by the brokenness of this world. Christ paid the ultimate price to restore shalom, true peace. We experience that most when we are suffering with a God who suffered for us.