What does our faith offer those suffering pain, despair?

Death and dying have been crowding my life recently. Several longtime friends have been suffering with terminal diseases. One recently died.
The theological issue of theodicy has been much in my and their thinking. The illnesses all focus on the ending of active lives. The relevancy and efficacy of prayer in such situations is a major theological concern.
As one of the elderly who is reasonably healthy, I find myself struggling with these end-of-life issues. Where is God, and what perspective does the Christian faith offer to those who are suffering in pain, discouragement and despair?
I am becoming convinced that God is to be found not by trying to transcend the suffering but by entering more fully into it. God is in the midst of suffering. For me the Jesus story is coming to the foreground in all of these end-of-life concerns.
Perhaps the most powerful symbol is in that often troublesome phrase in the Apostles’ Creed: “He descended into hell.” Early Methodists tried to eliminate that phrase, but it has come back as: “He descended to the dead.”
One Presbyterian pastor, guest preaching in a rural church, was greeted by the elders with the word: “We do not descend here.” After a moment’s reflection, he got the message.
Probing that phrase has given me a new perspective on suffering, pain and death. Originally the descent into hell was simply saying that Jesus died, a word in opposition to the Gnostics who claimed that he did not die. Jesus went to the place of the dead, in Hebrew, “Sheol.”
Later hell took on new meaning with the Greek substitute for Sheol, Gehenna, the Hebrew Valley of Hinnom outside Jerusalem. This valley was the landfill where burning garbage meant constant fires. That is where we get the fires of hell.
Gehenna was a lonely place and God forsaken, a place to be avoided because of the stench.
Christians affirmed that Jesus descended to that kind of hell: loneliness, meaninglessness and as a life’s outcast. He cried, so the Christian community recounts, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” He entered for a moment a very human extremity.
Was God absent from the cross on which Jesus suffered and died? No, because Christian theologizing affirmed that Jesus embodied the presence of God. Known at a given moment or not, God was present in the suffering, and God’s self was suffering.
Jesus descended symbolically into Gehenna (hell), but the story didn’t end there. A victory emerged that we call the resurrection. The residuum of the resurrection is the church, the Christian community.
The suffering God brought victory from suffering and death. We can see that in Jesus, but what does that mean for our sufferings and deaths?
We are not Jesus, and a church won’t come into being following our deaths. We don’t know our after-death states. What we can say is that as God was present in Jesus’ suffering and death, God is present in ours.
What God will bring to pass following our end of life experiences, we don’t know. Jesus didn’t know. But into the hands of our suffering God we place our own lives in the faith that suffering and death are not the last word.
By faith we join the sufferer whose victory in some mysterious way presages our own.
That belief will not satisfy the skeptic, the agnostic or the atheist, but I have found no secular response to suffering and death as powerful and as existentially satisfying as this one.