| Looking For Answers |
| I posted a question on the “Yahoo Answers” website. On this website, people can ask pretty much any question they would like others to answer. I simply asked, “Why doesn’t God make sense?” I then added, “Why do bad things happen to good people? Why do good things happen to bad people?” Within minutes, the responses were flooding in. |
“God is beyond comprehension! (Just trust Him and stop tryin’ to figure Him out!) It is impossible to!” – Karl P “Fairy tales aren’t supposed to
make sense. They’re supposed to make you feel good.” “Of all the claims that God asserts, he never claimed to make sense.” – Wry “Because God leaves us at our own fates.
He doesn’t control us, we aren’t his puppets. I have a
word for you - it begins with a Free and ends with a Will.” “Because God doesn’t EXIST!” – Mystic_l “Because he’s too busy making rainbows and lollipops.” – arnach04 “Because the idea of a god is senseless.” “Because there is no god. Bad people do bad things to good people. Bad people are able to obtain “good” things through oppressing others. Humans are responsible for good and bad. And sometimes bad things do happen to bad people.” – Green “Because the good people are not really good and the bad people are not really bad. They just look that way...” – Rampa “God doesn’t make sense if you think of God as some big kid in the sky playing with everyone on earth like a bunch of sock puppets. Many things determine what happens to us in life, but mainly they come down to this: choices and circumstances. We have to deal with them both and make the best of them and do the best we can with them. ”God makes a lot more sense if you don’t think of him as spending eternity hanging over us saying, ‘hmmm, today this person will win the lottery, but this person will get an eviction notices and all these people here are going to have their houses blown away by a hurricane.’ ”I just don’t think it works that way— I don’t think God is on my side that day because my football team wins or not on my side because my puppy runs away— maybe my team’s players just worked harder or played a better game, maybe I didn’t secure my yard well enough or one of my kids left the gate open. ”I think it is human ego that makes anyone think that every time they get caught in traffic or stub their toe or get lucky on a business deal that it was all part of God’s ‘Master Plan’”. –MSB |
Cover Story
Sarah and her husband, Rick, are great people. They are very involved in the church they attend; they donate a lot of their spare time to helping with the youth. People always tell them they wish they had Sarah and Rick’s joy and positive attitudes... but most people don’t see the pain that makes Sarah cry herself to sleep at night.
As Sarah sits in the living room of a close friend watching her open baby shower gifts, she once again becomes painfully aware of what she is missing: a baby of her own. She has tried to conceive for over five years, but still, no baby. Sarah has tried many of the fertility options out there, but still, no baby.
“Why God? Why can’t we have a baby?”
Sarah has asked God this question many times, but the answer has not come.
For Tamara Coleman, it wasn’t really a question, it was just life.
“I grew up in a home in which drugs were God and I was an afterthought,” said Coleman, a young mother of three. “My father was just plain mean and committed rather cruel acts to all of us,” she said.
If that wasn’t enough, her mother would become abusive when she wanted more drugs but couldn’t get them as fast as she thought she should. “There was constant verbal ridicule and slander, times of physical abuse and the ever blaring understanding that it wasn’t normal to live like that,” she remembers.
Because of the drug habits of Coleman’s parents, neither could keep a job and therefore a place to live. No nice clothes, no home stability.
“We literally moved 21 times in one year. We were on and off of welfare. I would sit in disgust and watch my parents as they were passed out on the couch burning cigarette holes in themselves and the furniture and think to myself how I loathed drugs and what it had caused for me and my family and how I hated the fact that I was forced to live that way. I grew up fast and without experiencing a mother or father’s unadulterated love; and I was bitter.”
How could a God who created the universe withhold the beauty of creation to a childless couple? How could a God that claims to love people let a child suffer such heartache? Why?
It just doesn’t make sense. And at sometime or another in our lives, most of us have asked this challenging question: “Why doesn’t God seem to make sense?”
It may have been at a time of loss or profound grief. Perhaps it was at a point when all hope was lost and there were no options left.
Many asked, where was God when terrorists invaded our soil and forever changed American life when the Twin Towers were destroyed in New York in 2001. Many asked, where was God when more than 225,000 people were killed in the 2004 Tsunami that hit 11 countries in Southeast Asia. Still many asked, where was God when more than 1,800 people perished as Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in 2005.
I asked this question in 1998 when it seemed that my eight-week-old son would die from Whooping Cough. As he lay on a hospital gurney with tubes coming out of his arm, nose and mouth, I cried to God, asking why. I remember asking God, “Why my son? This doesn’t make sense? Why?”
Even some of the famous figures from the Bible asked why and tried to comprehend God’s ways. In the Old Testament, a man named Job questioned his own existence when he suffered the loss of his children, his home and even his health. He lost everything, and at one point he said to God, “You have become cruel to me.” But Job still gives us one of the strongest affirmations of faith in all of the ancient writings, when he exerted: “Though He slay me, I will hope in Him” (Job 13:15).
Making such a statement of faith is hard, however, for most of us to do. We want answers to the questions of what seems to be injustice or even cruelty.
Theologians explain tragedies such as rape, drive-by shootings, murder, child abuse, etc. in terms of free will. We are not robots, programmed to only do good things. We each have the freedom and ability to make choices. So the good news is that humankind has free will. The bad news is that many pervert their freedom and make choices that cause harm and destruction, rather than good.
“The Bible says that God’s ways are not our ways, and His thoughts are not our thoughts – they are higher than our thoughts,” said Dick Moser, an Elder in Pastoral Leadership at Pathway of Hope Foursquare Church. “When bad things happen to bad people, some of us will even applaud. But when bad things happen to good people, we get confused. And that’s where we have a promise from God’s Word that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God (Romans 8:28). So when bad things happen, that is a point where God steps in and says I’m going to turn this into your good. He is able to do this because His ways are higher than our ways.”
Moser explains that we are unable to think the way God thinks. “Often when bad and evil come against us, we cannot perceive that good could ever come out of it. But God specializes in turning every bad circumstance around for our long-range good.”
For me, the question I asked during the time when I didn’t know whether my son would live or die has been answered a hundred times over. Because of what I went through, I am able to share my story with other parents who are dealing with the potential loss of a precious child.
For Tamara Coleman, helping others is her gift.
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“I know that there are more ‘Tamara’s’ out there living in wretched conditions in which all they wished for was someone’s love and I want to be that one who comes to their aid. I refuse to allow all the trials I faced to be in vain.” Coleman said that her passion is to bring love and healing to those who are been physically abused. God is able to use the bad that she endured to help others suffering the same experiences.
Not only is God able to make something good out of something bad; God also shows up in tragic circumstances in ways we might not realize. God is present in the midst of chaos even though it seems His presence is absent. With the horror that took place on 9/11, for instance, many people asked, “Where was God?”
A poem written anonymously helps to answer this question. Here’s an excerpt:
Where was God? God was in the rescue workers who were running into the buildings as most people were running out.
God was in the two men who carried a wheelchair-bound woman down 70 flights of stairs to safety.
God was in the people who were begging to volunteer, to do anything to help.
God was in the thousands, if not millions who flooded blood banks thousands of miles away to help people they had never met.
God was in the people who were comforting someone even when they didn’t know what to say.
God was not in the hearts of the people that caused these inhumane events,
however,
God was indeed there, where He was needed the most.
For you, the question may persist. But know, that even when God doesn’t
make sense in the way we think He should, He still cares and see our hearts
breaking and is able to work through those tragic situations to bring hope,
healing, and restoration to the world around us.
© 2008 Good News Tucson™
