Difficult Seasons

Amy VanHuisen writes about faith and struggle, and I often find that her blog makes me think.  Today she wrote about the loss of a young mom in their community who leaves behind a husband and three young children, the youngest only 8 days old.  She titled the post, “God, How Could You Do That?”  Amy’s writing is honest, and you’ll be blessed by clicking over to read her post before coming back to read some thoughts that occurred to me.

The first thing that jumped into my consciousness was a conversation my daughter Sara, a nurse practitioner, had with a colleague this week.  They are members of a palliative care team, and deal with patients and families suffering tragedy daily.  Faith nearly always becomes a part of the conversation with the patients and families, and sometimes among the medical staff.

The conversation went something like this.  The colleague said, “I don’t believe in God because if there were a God, he wouldn’t let the things that we see happen to people every day happen.”  Sara’s response was, “Do you really believe that God is the only force active in this world?  What about Satan?  What about the free will God allows people?”

This is a good summary of the faith struggle that we all go through as we experience events like Amy writes about, and our question often becomes like Amy’s, “How could God…”

I don’t have the answer.  But I will offer a couple of thoughts.

1. God has not yet won the final victory.  The Bible makes clear that we live in an active battle ground with God on one side and the forces of evil led by Satan on the other.  Until that final victory when God creates the new heaven and the new earth, this earth that we live on will continue to experience injustice, tragedy, illness, poverty, and all of the other things that are wrong, that are unfair.  And these come equally to all of us, whether we are people of faith or not.
2. When I read what we call The Beatitudes in Matthew 5,  I see Jesus talking about people who have suffered and who are suffering what’s not fair about this world.  He doesn’t say that we won’t have to mourn (v4), for example, but he says simply that those who mourn will be comforted.  Jesus seems to be offering hope for those of us who suffer in this life.

Which leads me to this final thought.  The more of life I experience, the more I look forward to that point in time when God claims the final victory, when all the bad stuff ceases, when God is fully in control.  That doesn’t mean I don’t love this life and getting to experience it with my family and my friends –  just that more and more often I am aware of how flawed this world is, and how wonderful heaven will be.