Every time we turn on the news there seems to be more bad things happening to good people. People are losing their jobs. Wars are raging. Lives are falling apart. At times like these, we turned to God for guidance, but sometimes we are left to wonder, “Why is God letting this happen?”
God is always there. He never abandons us. The fact that the sun keeps coming up and the world keeps moving forward into the future is the proof we need. The world is constantly changing and with that change comes the promise of a better tomorrow. If we have the ability to feel sorrow and pain, that must mean that at some point we have felt joy. Otherwise, how would we know what we were feeling? We hope that we are able to experience joy on earth, but true joy is to come after we leave this world.
So, we have established that God is there, but why does he let bad things happen to begin with? God gave us a gift of free will. While it is an amazing, wonderful gift when used well, there are people who choose to use this gift of free will for their own selfish needs and thus afflict pain on others. Then it is our responsibility as good stewards of our free will to find strength in this pain and create a positive energy out of negative experiences. In this action, we begin to understand God’s love and share in his grace.
God is there when terrible things happen, but He wants us to be able to use our gifts to deal with these things and eventually come out stronger as a person. Like a parent who has to let his child fall a few times before he learns how to walk, God must let us deal with these situations on our own, but we also have his loving hand to hold on to as we go and the comfort that he will pick us up and set us back on our path when we fall.
