When The Heart Cries, “Why, O God?”

My wife and I have a dear young friend, Christine, who is battling cancer- for herself and her daughter. After surgeries and PET Scans, the news is still frightening. Christine is a faithful but weary believer who knows how to care for others and finds it hard to think that maybe, just maybe, God isn’t caring for her. She asks the question that never goes away.

Hear the cry of her heart in in own words;

“I’m sitting in the hospital injected with radioactive dye for next 90 minutes and then they’ll start my PET scan.

I’m trying to figure out why my prayers haven’t been answered , and I keep getting struck down with bad news, and I’m struggling to not be mad at God for allowing me to have to endure all of this.  I’m trying to go back to accepting that he allowed me to wake up today, and to find these issues so I can get treated, but that doesn’t seem like enough and I’m angry with him, so I want to know how to feel that love from him again instead of the pain and suffering that keeps occurring.

Just why, when you try and do everything right and everything your supposed to that he continues to allow more suffering.

Christine

So we sit in silence like Job’s friends, leaving space for the grief, despair, questions, and search for God. 

And I’m afraid we are tempted like Job’s friends to eventually give her advice, Bible readings, platitudes, and some good books to read.

What Christine needs is people who understand the search, the silence and a glimmer of hope in the God who loves her.

What she needs is our solidarity with her and our prayers. 

Please pray for Christine and her family. Let’s knock on heaven’s door.

WHY DOES GOD ALLOW SUCH TERROR AND SUFFERING AND DEATH?

I’m writing this in response to a question on many minds these days. As my friend reminds me, it is the perennial question of humanity affected by suffering. I am thinking of Israelis and Palestinians whose worlds have been devastated. And children who are dying every day.

Why does God allow this, permit this, ‘will’ this suffering? Many who have suffered ask this question. Some have even given up their faith.

This is what I want to suggest. GOD DID NOT WILL THIS. GOD DOES NOT WILL SUCH SUFFERING. GOD DOESN’T EVEN ALLOW IT. 

We see God clearly in Jesus Christ. God as we see in Christ is love, self-sacrificing love. Healing love. There is no hatred in Christ. Christ was against suffering. He healed people. He cast out demons. He worked against evil.

God cannot stop this suffering because of God’s own being and design of this world and the creatures who inhabit it. God did not want Hamas to kill Israelis and terrorize a nation. God doesn’t want bombs to rain down on the Palestinians. God is against such horror, always has been. 

God is moving in the hearts and minds of all people through his powerful love and it will be when people open themselves to such a God that God will be able to stop this madness. God cannot singlehandedly affect what is going on. 

There are evil powers at work in this world. There is chaos. Read the book of Job. This world is complicated as Job found out. 

God wants us to live, to love, to flourish and God is moving to make that happen. But evil and free will are at work to oppose God, who chooses to work by the essence of his being which is love. 

Every day I think and pray about this question of suffering. And the closest I come to any comfort at all is to believe this: GOD IS EXPERIENCING THIS PAIN THROUGH JESUS CHRIST. 

Christ knows terror, abandonment, torture, and death. Through Christ, God is in his creation, enduring by love everything that causes pain and agony in the humanity of this world. God feels it. Dietrich Bonhoeffer once wrote from his prison cell in Germany, “Only a suffering God can help us now.”

God wants it to end. Yes, we know that one day there will be a new heaven and earth. But God wants his will to be done on this earth as it is in God’s Kingdom. Now. God wants us to live. Every life is made in the image of God and matters deeply to God. 

According to what I know in Christ and read in God’s word, God is doing all he can to work good out of this mess, this unspeakable horror on all sides. It’s not happening soon enough for us or for God. Keep the faith. Work hard against evil and suffering. Pray. Love one another.