Monday, October 12, 2009

God and suffering

What heartbreaking news. Two-year-old Aisling Symes. One week missing. One child's body found tonight in a gutter in West Auckland.

Last week, the tsunami in Samoa. Earthquakes in Indonesia. Floods in the Philippines. Et cetera.

In September, me, my friend, visiting Auschwitz. It happened a long time ago but time does not diminish the horror of what happened.

Break the teeth in their mouths, O God;
tear out, O LORD, the fangs of the lions!

Let them vanish like water that flows away;
when they draw the bow, let their arrows be blunted.

Like a slug melting away as it moves along,
like a stillborn child, may they not see the sun.


It's times like these that I am thankful for a God who is just and who will punish the evil.

But it's times like these that I feel I have to justify the title of my blog. How can a God who lets these things happen possibly be nice? The Psalm I quoted; why doesn't God always answer this prayer? And I'm never going to have a definitive answer for this.

I will be thinking about this over the next while and I will try to say something that does not sound incredibly trite and easy. At the same time I will not deny that I feel, overwhelmingly, that God is GOOD.

1 comment:

LEstes65 said...

I don't mean to spout rhetoric. But I think He does. But His timeline is different than ours. I may never see the justice doled out. But my faith knows it will happen. I don't mean to diminish the horrors man does. It's just something I've recently begun to see and accept after reading the bible in chronological order.