Suffering Souls

You know, I’ve been thinking long and hard about sacrifice and suffering lately. Why does God allow hardship? Why do bad things happen to good people?

I’ll admit I don’t have a lot of answers, but I have a couple of thoughts on it. Maybe, together, we can getter a better understanding of it all.

First, I believe that free will is the catalyst for all that is evil. There is God’s will and free will. And that gift of free will is the only thing in the universe for which he does not already possess.

So, with that gift we have to decide, perhaps a thousand times a day, what we will do, which path we will follow, God’s path or our own path. And whenever we don’t choose God’s path, evil is allowed to exist.

So, why do bad things happen? Sometimes because our free will has allowed it to happen.

Let’s say there’s a young teen that’s at a party in high school and is offered illegal drugs. He can take a hit or not. It’s his decision, his free will. He takes a hit. A few years later, in college, he’s gotten involved in heavier drugs. Later on he’s addicted. He loses his job. He loses his marriage. He is forced into other illegal activities to feed his addiction. He ends up buying a gun. He ends up using it while holding up a convenience store, killing the mother of two behind the counter.

The parents or relatives of the mother of two ask… God, why did you let this happen? The answer is, he didn’t. There were a million moments of free will that led up to that awful event. And none of them had to do with God’s will.

The reality is that we each have a unique journey, a unique path filled with opportunities to follow God’s path or our own path. All of those paths overlap and interact and are interconnected.

But what about natural disaster? Free will didn’t cause a Tsunami or Hurricane Katrina. Well, some global warming believers will tell you that it did, but still, why does God allow natural disasters to occur?

That’s a good question. Maybe because it is all part of God’s pallet.

What I mean is that we are very limited creatures. Our brains can only understand so much and our ways to interact are primarily limited by the only thing we control… the way we communicate, either by writing, touch, body language, speech, etc. And we, arrogantly so, expect God to communicate in the miniscule way in which we can readily comprehend. We expect God to “speak to us.”

But, we are so limited. Why would God only “speak to us” through our feeble ways? Our pallet only contains colors which are merely similar shades of the same gray. Where, by comparison, God’s palette has an infinite number of colors available to him.

God is not limited in communicating through words, written or spoken, or body language or touch. For he controls everything. He created all of us and everything around us, “seen and unseen,” from the amoeba to our pets to our planet to galaxies to the infinite universe. So, maybe God communicates with us through things other than words or writing or body language. Maybe he is speaking to us through the totality of his creation. The wind is part of his creation, why can’t he use that to make a point. Or water. Or tectonic plates. Or low pressure systems. Or cold fronts or tornadoes or earthquakes or blizzards.

Maybe he's speaking to us everyday... and we just don't comprehend it.

Or maybe he’s much more passive than that. Maybe he’s developed this interacting, interdependent environment in which we can live and the price of living here is the random nature of it all. Maybe a hurricane hits simply because the ten thousand variables in play made it hit when it did, with the strength it did and God wasn’t really guiding it at all.

Maybe that’s part and parcel of being alive on this planet.

And what about illnesses, like cancer or tumors or other terminal illnesses? Well, some of those may be tied to free will. The choice to begin smoking in middle school may lead you to cancer at sixty-three. Then again, some of us are simply born more susceptible to one illness or another. Sometimes, that's just part of our creation.

And sometimes free will has nothing to do with it, like when a child develops leukemia or is born with life-threatening birth defects. Why would God allow that to happen?

I think the day we can look into the eyes of a terminally ill child and understand the reason behind it is the day we have left this planet and are in the presence of God himself. Because, using the limited brain power available to us, I don’t think we could ever comprehend a good reason for that.

But God does.

And I guess that is where faith comes in. Maybe that’s the reason for all suffering. Maybe they are opportunities of faith. Maybe they are chances for us to place our life in his hands, to fully trust in his path for us and the ones we love, even if the outcome hurts. Maybe suffering exists simply because it is a catalyst for people to pray, some of whom would not normally do so.

Maybe...

In the end, after all of this time and effort, the reality is that I don’t really know.

But, I find comfort in knowing that God does...

And maybe... that should be enough.