Tonight, while driving home from her basketball game, Anna looked out at the first snow of the season and asked me if God brings natural disasters because of our sin. I asked her to explain her question further. She wanted to know if things like blizzards and tornadoes and earthquakes happen because God is punishing us for our sin.
This is not the gospel message I want my daughter to know or believe.
One of the questions that pervades my thoughts most often is one I don't believe will be answered in my lifetime. Why does God allow the horrific? Why was there not another way? I've read the books. I hear what wise authors say. "The hard shows God's glory. The hard causes us to recognize our need for God. God is God and I am not."
If God is God, then couldn't They have found another path for glorifying Themself? If God wants us to need Them, and They are all-powerful and all-knowing, couldn't They have created beings who recognize their need for Them without all the suffering? Is God too small, too powerless to have done it differently?
I don't get it.
And I don't have an answer for that question...
...but I am convinced that all living things on earth have a life cycle - birth, life, death. That cycle always includes the creation of life, the birth, the living, and the dying. In the forest, when lightening strikes the dry brittle branches of a dead tree and ignites a fire, that fire often burns up healthy, living trees and plants as well. It takes the lives of thriving animals and the homes of birds. It also, by the way, kills diseases that, left unchecked, can run rampant wipe out an entire forest. When it burns out, what is left looks like utter destruction, but when the rain comes again, the grass starts to poke up through the ash. Young trees spring up. Animals begin to find lush and fertile fields of grass and foliage to live on. Birds come back to the area and build new nests. The disease is wiped out and the cycle begins again.
I don't know why this is the way of life, but even God modeled it through Jesus Christ. God knew that the eternal answer to death was a dying and rising again. This truth doesn't explain away the horrors that are taking place in our world today. It doesn't mean we shouldn't grieve when life is lost. It doesn't call us to avert our eyes when we witness suffering or abuse for which we have the ability to stop. We aren't called to give up. Even plants and animals have an innate striving for survival. The drive inside of us to avoid pain and death is from God too. Jesus begged his Father to not have to go thru the dying, but he knew the dying was required to get to the living.
In the course of a lifetime, the recognition of and submission to the lessons of the cycle come through experiencing the cycle. We don't get the option of avoiding pain and death. They come for all of us. We can respond by believing we are being punished, or we can look for the wisdom of our Creator. What do They want us to learn? We can respond with fear or lean into Love. Reconciling the truth of something is very different from acknowledging the emotions of each stage of living. Leaning into the lessons does not explain the why of how things play out in each circumstance. We may understand the overall cycle, without understanding the why of the individual cycles that take place in each of our lives. Fear may be the right and unavoidable response in the moment of a terrifying accident or assault, but afterwords, as we process, time allows us to seek Love over fear in how we learn from the story. Seeking love builds the muscles of courage, wisdom, presence and trust.
It is my desire to turn my kids (and myself) back to Love over fear when they ask me questions about the hard. Love grows life and courage and truth in our souls. Fear grows anger, cowardice and a death to freedom. I do not and cannot comprehend the why of so much of what happens in our world, but I know without a doubt that God has met me in the hard and has shown me how to receive Love and how to give it too.
I wonder if my kids will soon be asking me if God has turned Their back on the country we live in. It appears that fear is ruling the day. I easily fall prey to the fear and find myself wallowing in anger and judgement. If I can remember and trust the cycle, can I believe that the fire burning here and now may be purging us of the disease that would ultimately wipe us all out? The fire could even turn back on itself and not harm all that we fear it might. Is the pain right now necessary because it is causing the Love and Truth in our spirits to awaken and fight for the Life we innately long for and were created to experience? As we witness what feels like death to much of what we know, can we use the drive inside of us to fight for the Life that is on the other side? Can we be a shelter for the defenseless and pour out a healing rain on what looks like destruction? Can we look for where new Life is springing up out of the dying and marvel at how God's plan cannot be destroyed by what feels far bigger than we can combat?
I will keep getting distracted by the size and intense heat of the flames, for they are daunting, but I'm committed to not getting stuck there. The fear may well show us real danger that we should avoid, but the light of the flames is also illuminating where the Life is and I am drawn there. Life will win in the end, but dying is still part of the cycle. I may have to die to some of what is comfortable for me as the flames burn some of my temporary hopes into ashes, but there is a richer Life to be found after the destruction and what is burning up will feed the soil of hope and Love.
This answer is far more detailed than Anna was looking for (and I didn't burden her with all of it). To simplify it: Do I think God is punishing us? No. Do I understand then 'why' bad things happen? No. Do I see how Life is born out of death? Yes, I do. I don't get it, and I don't always like it, but I have certainly experienced the richness of being forever changed by seeking the Love after the dying. I have most certainly found Life, and that more abundantly, through the cycles of dying and being reborn each time to a deeper understanding of my Creator's Love.
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