I DO/DON'T UNDERSTAND

Why is it, I often wonder, that some of the best people I know, some of the kindest and most caring people around, seem to suffer so much, whether physically, mentally, spiritually or a combination of some or all? Then, on the other hand, are those people who are outwardly not so good, obviously sinful and selfish people, who seemed to have life by the tail, who have an abundance of the world’s goods and could care less about their actions and the harm those actions inflict on innocent people.

It just doesn’t seem fair especially when I truly believe that when we die here on earth, we are immediately alive with God forever: no hell for those who seem to deserve it and no purgatory for the rest of us, sinners that we all are. Thus, contemplating Hitler walking alongside Francis of Assisi in eternity is sometimes both hard to imagine and even more difficult to accept, but I still believe it to be true.

In many ways it has little or nothing to do with The Problem of Evil, to capitalize the phrase and to note that that issue is one of the great God-questions. If God is All-Good, and if God is All-Powerful, why does God allow bad things to happen to good people let alone bad things to happen to anyone? The answer, of course, is free will. Without it we are robots. With it we can do all manner of evil and often do.

The real issue is why some people suffer more than they deserve. Yes, we all bring suffering upon ourselves when we do that which we know we should not do. When we eat too much, drink too much, drive to fast, place ourselves foolishly in harm’s way, we deserve the pain and suffering that follows. But does anyone deserve to be ravaged by cancer or become blind or deaf or, well, the list is long?

To say that our reward will be great in heaven if we suffer in such a way does not make the suffering any less painful. Undeserved punishment is still undeserved and the promise of a later reward is of little or no consolation in the meantime. In the meantime, in the here-and-now, we believers are confronted with God-questions that we cannot answer, with situations that we do and don’t understand.

What we are left with is a faith being tested sometimes every minute of every day. We may be tempted at times to chuck it all in and determine that there is no God, that heaven is foolishness, that when we are done with this life, we are done. Sometimes that seems to make so much sense especially when there seems to be no logical or sensible or even sane answer to our questions.

But we can’t go there. Something inside us says that even though we do not understand why things happen the way they do, we still believe. Yes, the belief gets shaken to its very core sometimes, and rightly so. But we hang on. And why do we hang on? Because, very simply, we won’t let go of God and God won’t let go of us. That’s why.