Why, God, Why
We question God, but do we ever listen when He answers?
Imagine you find your baby floating in the pool. In your haste to get him to a hospital, you drive over the toddler playing in the driveway. The shock gives you a heart attack.
Imagine your thirteen-year-old daughter is violated and her life is ruined forever. Your sixteen-year-old son is run over on his motorcycle by a texting teenager. He ends up a quadriplegic. Your wife can’t cope and she packs her bags and leaves.
What if your parents get killed in a plane crash on their way to visit you after you insist it is safer to fly than to drive? Your sister is held hostage in the Middle East while doing her job as a journalist. Your baby brother dies of a horrible disease.
I can list dozens more scenarios of disasters and tragedies if you have the rest of the day to read them. Like you lose your job, your house and everything else, forcing you to move to a trailer park outside of town, or worse, survive on the streets. But I am sure your imagination can kick in well enough.
Pain, loss and personal disasters make people question God. Why did He let it happen? Doesn’t He love us? If He loves us, why does He not step in and protect us from tragedy? We ask Him, we accuse Him, but how often do we listen when He warns us? We often don’t. We choose to go our own way. And we choose to go alone, without God.
Bad things happen all around us, almost daily. Open any newspaper, tune into any TV channel and you’ll get more than an eye-full of bad news. There is famine, pestilence, earthquakes, storms and floods, not to mention wars and rumours of wars. While those may not affect everyone personally too much, inflation and the poor economy do get closer to home.
Whether distant or personal the daily trouble, we usually ask: Why, God, why did You allow this? Being almighty, why didn’t you prevent it from happening? Often we blame God for everything bad and turn our backs on Him. When something good happens, do we give credit to God? We very seldom do. We pat ourselves on the back and say well done, I, me and myself. But I’ll get back to this later.
It is impossible to stop or avoid many of the things that can happen, but often enough the Lord warns us not to do something, not to go to a certain place, to hurry up or to slow down. It may take a few minutes to miss the oncoming truck that may crash into your car. Or if you leave earlier to go somewhere, you may prevent a robbery that is about to take place.
Living close to God, waiting for His instructions and warnings, we might spare ourselves lots of trouble.
You knew inviting a certain person, let’s call him Bob, to your house on this specific Saturday would be a bad idea. You wanted all your buddies to watch the playoffs, so you invited them all, including this individual. I you waited for the finals, like your Heavenly Father suggested to you in your mind, Bob would not be able to make it. Bob wouldn’t arrive with alcohol, get drunk and leave the gate to the pool open. Your baby would not crawl through the gate and get into trouble which would lead to your toddler getting run over and you getting a heart attack.
But you didn’t listen to the still, small voice of Wisdom. You wanted to watch the playoffs with all your buddies.
Your boss enters your office and starts talking bout plans for a project. You remind him you need to leave to pick up your daughter after swimming practice, but he keeps on rambling about work. Polite as you are, you get nervous about the time but do not have the heart to take your coat and excuse yourself.
By the time you get to the school, your daughter has been grabbed, dragged into an ally and ruined. You find her curled up in a ball, bleeding and staring into the blue yonder without acknowledging what happens around her.
You were uneasy about buying your son a motorcycle because he was so young and inexperienced. Everyone encouraged you to go ahead and do it. Against your better judgement — which is the prompting of the Spirit of God — you buy the bike. Your son, naive as he is, took for granted that all road users would obey the rules and stop at stop signs. And here comes a teenager texting behind the steering wheel, misses the stop sign and in an instant, your son loses the ability to do anything without assistance.
Many such instances are avoidable, but when they happen, we ask why, God? Worse, we ask Why me? Well, why not you? Would you want bad things to happen to someone else?
What about the things we have no control over? How do we handle those? How could you have prevented your sister from getting kidnapped in the Middle East? Or your baby brother from dying? You can’t. But how dare you accuse God of not caring?
What did you do when you were little? You fell and hurt your knees. Did you yell at your mother for not caring, asking her why she didn’t prevent you from falling? Absolutely not. You ran into her arms and took comfort in her embrace. Shouldn’t you now do the same? Find comfort in the presence of the Spirit of God in every heartbreaking situation.
We can make our lives so much better if we become like little children, trusting in the One who knows best, and rest in Him when we need comfort. And, don’t forget to give Him honour and credit for all the good things that happen. That way we will not get lost so easily, avoid much sadness and get stronger to face whatever life throws at us.
Open your Bible in the middle and read the first chapters of Job. Be encouraged that there is always someone worse off than yourself. Be thankful for that and learn from Job. Though he felt sorry for himself, with good reason, he never turned away from his Creator and kept on believing and staying faithful. In the end, he was victorious as you will be, reaching the mountain top, if you put your hand in the hand of the Man of Galilee,
As I am climbing my mountain, I will keep on writing romantic stories about everyday people finding themselves in not-so-everyday situations.
I am a member of Author Masterminds, where every reader is a friend and every author is approachable. You can find my books on the Author Masterminds website, Readers and Writers Book Club and also on Amazon Email me. schoets@yahoo.com