Ed, you wrote, "There is a reason for the struggle, a reason for the strife, and you will come out of it stronger." That's what people who are NOT struggling through something try to tell people who ARE struggling. They have good intentions - they are trying to provide some kind of comfort, some kind of noble reason for the struggle. I've been on the receiving end of that kind of advice, and it's usually not very comforting at all.
I've had some extensive discussion recently with an old Navy friend who posed the question of why God allows bad things to happen. He's a strong Christian but would like to be able to provide a reasonable answer to people that have experienced tragedy (like the loss of a child) who question God's sovereignty, God's control in this world, and God's will. This question has been around for a long time. Just go to Amazon and do a search on "why bad things happen to good people" and you'll find enough books to keep you occupied for a few years. It doesn't surprise me. When we hurt the most is when we are most likely to ask the question, "Why?" We don't ask why during life's successes and achievements because we don't care why. We're just happy.
I don't have a good answer, and certainly not one that will fit neatly into a blog. All I can really offer is what I usually provide here: a few random and probably incoherent thoughts.
First, I've learned through the years that the best way to provide comfort is NOT to try to provide answers. When I come home from work frustrated and vent to Jennifer, the last thing I want from her is to explain why. What comforts me the most is to hear her say, "I'm sorry you had a tough day honey." When someone suffers the death of a loved one, the best comfort you can provide is to say, "I'm really sorry for your loss." When someone is in the grips of grief, telling them that the death was all in God's will, that it's all part of God's plan that we will understand someday in the future, there is no comfort. The result is usually anger at a God who we are told is a God of love. How does a God of love cause such pain?
To make this a little more personal, why are there 15-year-old girls that have sex once in the back of a car and carry a baby to full-term, when a married Christian couple who wants to have children can't seem to make it happen? Where is God in that situation? There is no pat answer. I think we can all agree to that.
We live in a fallen world. Genesis 3 tells the story of the fall of man and how sin entered the world. The world we live in is not the one that God would have chosen, but when WE chose sin, we ended up with a fallen world. God created us with free will, and that means mankind was free to choose sin. The fact is, we choose sin in some way or another every day. It would be nice to blame it all on Adam, but the fact is, if Marc was the first man, we would be calling it Marc's original sin instead of Adam's original sin. So our world, in many ways, sucks. We have death, disappointment, abuse, hate, fear, etc. because of sin. Jesus himself said, "In this world you will have trouble." (John 16:33)
I'm not saying that, "We brought this on ourselves" is any more of a comfort to people. But for me personally, a huge part of the story of Jesus Christ is understanding why he needed to come to earth in the first place. And the answer is that he came to deal with the sinful world that we live in. I'm also not saying that all bad things are the result of personal sins we have committed in the past. The Bible is full of stories of righteous men and women that endured terrible circumstances (Joseph, Job, Paul, Daniel, etc). That may be what Jesus meant when he said, "In this world you will have trouble." In other words, it doesn't matter what you do, you'll go through some shit. But his statement immediately following was this: "But take heart! I have overcome the world." God knows that we're going to experience shit. But he never leaves us when we're going through it.
If you think there are a lot of books about why bad things happen to good people, take a look at the volumes that have been written trying to describe the God himself. Theology is the study of God, and the number of books written on God could fill the oceans. Isaiah 55:9 says, "As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts." For me, I've just reached a point in my life where I am comfortable with the fact that I will never fully understand God. With each passing year I realize that although I keep making the box that I want to keep him in even bigger, he'll never fit in it. Omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence are not concepts that our mortal minds can ever fully grasp. I'm comfortable with saying, "I don't quite get it."
But in the end, I know that God IS love, because that's what his word tells us, and he demonstrates it to me all the time. I love the story of the prodigal son (Luke 15), the story of the shepherd leaving the flock to find a single sheep (John 10) and the multiple stories of God accepting his people, the Israelites, back. God GENUINELY REJOICES when people turn to him. He doesn't care what you did five minutes ago or five decades ago. He loves us so much that he is simply delighted that we've turned to him. So Ed, he doesn't care WHY you may be drawing to him now. He could care less. He's just glad that you are. The bible tells us that God delights in his people (Psalm 149). Our pastor preached a sermon a couple of weeks ago in which he said, "God cares about you more than anything RIGHT NOW." Psalm 103 says that God has removed our sin as far as the East is from the West. He does not take it into account.
I'm all over the place. I will summarize by saying that I find comfort in knowing that God is bigger than all the shit in my life, that he loves me NO MATTER WHAT, and that he hurts when I hurt. That is where I receive my comfort. No human situation on the earth can ever change it. I don't think I'll ever understand completely how any of that mixes with "God's will". I'll finsih with a quote that I like by A.W. Tozer: "The yearning to know what cannot be known, to comprehend the incomprehensible, to touch and taste the unapproachable, arises from the image of God in the nature of man. Deep calleth unto deep, and though polluted and landlocked by the mighty disaster theologians call the Fall, the soul senses its origin and longs to return to its souce."
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