Disaster

What do you do with what’s happened in Morocco and Libya? What do you do when you’re a Christian? How do you understand these kind of events? How, if you even try, do you explain them? And how do you answer the question about where God is? Or what God was, or wasn’t doing? One response is the very human one of rushing to help and support those who have survived. And we’ve seen that happen. And that brings out the best in us. But questions remain. I spoke with someone who, at a very difficult time in their life, wants to connect with God in some way, but who, when looking at the events of the past few days, says: “And that’s my problem with God!” And for many of us, it is a problem. With God. To be honest I don’t have any answers. Maybe once I would have done. But not anymore. Maybe, at one time, I might have muttered something about the world being affected by sin, but even as I write that now, I’m struggling. I’m not saying sin doesn’t exist, or isn’t present. It does and it is. But I’m not sure how that answer helps anymore. The idea that somehow, in ways that we will never understand or see, God weaves life’s events together for his greater purpose is one I find it difficult to go with. Like we see the reverse side of a tapestry, with all the mess of the different threads, and God sees the beautiful picture on the other side. I’m not convinced about that. So what do I do? I struggle. I struggle to makes sense of it. I struggle to understand if God has any part in any of it. I struggle to understand why God wold “allow” these things to happen, if he even does. What I do is I look to books like Job and Ecclesiastes and I say: “Thank God they are in the Bible!” No, seriously I do. These are books that, to me anyway, challenge simple understandings of how the world works and that God is even present in some things. Job’s world is turned upside down for absolutely no reason. He’s done everything right. And what God said would happen, doesn’t. And he never gets a satisfactory explanation for anything that happened. By the end of the book things are better. But wouldn’t he rather have missed all the tragedy? And Ecclesiastes simply declares that there is no point to anything. Even after careful consideration by a wise person, the conclusion is that what God had said doesn’t really work. But then we get what I hold onto. At the end of Ecclesiastes, after coming to the conclusion that life is like a chasing after the wind, the book ends by inviting us to trust God anyway. No doubt there’ll be people who disagree with what I’m writing. That’s fine. But where I go when I see things like we’ve seen in the last couple of weeks, is to say that, even in the face of terrible things I simply don’t understand, I’ll choose to trust God anyway.