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Why Does God Allow Horrible Things to Happen?

WHY DOES GOD ALLOW HORRIBLE THINGS TO HAPPEN?

Mike Cunningham

November 23, 2014

Every Sunday before Thanksgiving I like to remind myself of all the wonderful things I’m thankful for. This morning, I also want to speak about “some” of the many reasons why every follower of Christ should be thankful. So much so, that when we die and leave this world we will be able to enjoy an eternal thanksgiving with our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

There are many nice things my wife and our four children do for me in this final chapter of my life in this world. Their children and their spouses have also been used by God as a means for Him to bestow wonderful blessings upon me.

Something else I’m thankful for are all the insightful books the Lord has inclined me to read in my attempt to know Him better so that I will have a better understanding of why He allows some horrible things to happen to human beings-things that cause agonizing physical and/or emotional pain and suffering. For instance,

When Rose was warned by her mother to keep away from men who hid behind bushes and did unspeakable things to children, she was very careful to check behind every bush. But when her parents encouraged her to go on frequent trips with family friend, Uncle George that was different wasn’t it? Rose loved to be filmed dancing-until he showed her the film, which looked rude. Suddenly Uncle George was asking what Mummy would say if she saw it. He said he’d keep it secret, as long as Rose did everything he expected…and as his demands grew Rose was plunged into a terrifying and painful world. Only when she reached mid-life, and with support, was she able to face what had happened in order to find hope for the future. Written almost entirely from the child’s perspective, this remarkable true story gives unique insight into how abusers gain control of children and their families-and why children often cannot speak up. (1)

He’s coming to get me. His hands will get me. I’ve managed to stop myself from thinking about anything-everything-nearly everything-ever since last time but now that I’m going again, suddenly it’s all flooding back.

“What can I do to get ready to go? How can I prepare”? No! I mustn’t panic. I must be calm. Everything’s fine. I’m not “there” yet. I’m just saying goodbye…

Goodbye, desk.

I’m just staring now, staring and staring and not moving at all.

Goodbye, room.

Nice pink room.

I still want to have a nice, dainty room…a pink room…

But I have grown out of child things now; so that must mean that I’m too old for toys and for baby pink. I’ve changed and things have changed.

There is my Bible, on the top of the pile. Oh, what a comfort that keeps being! So many promises; so much assurance that God knows, and cares. Thank You, Father, for caring like a Daddy, and an extra-thank You that You are such a good Friend to me, and thank You that nowadays I’ve come to know You better. I really love You, Lord.

But please, God…please…I know You heard me ask this before, but please can You help me feel You today” I know that You see everything, and I do trust Your promise that nothing’s too hard for us. It’s just that it’s much easier to trust if I can feel you “there”-You know-in the middle of everything with Uncle George. Because when I can’t see you or feel you, I get more frightened and sometimes I want to cry from loneliness. Just accidentally cry that is!

Lord, I’m a bit muddled. Thank you for understanding when I can’t explain. Thank you most of all that I know I belong to you and I still know that in the middle of everything.

Goodbye for now, Bible.

It’s nice that I can’t say goodbye to you, God, because you do stay with us even when we can’t feel you.

I don’t like saying goodbye.

I must have become practiced in saying that sort of goodbye. I hated every time I went out with Uncle George and developed a little ritual of parting with everything familiar in my room. One of the things that happened since I started telling my story is that the old loathing has crept back, unbidden and unwanted, so that nowadays-thirty-five-years later-I’ll be on my way out and I’ll suddenly find myself in a pickle that I would call “ridiculous” or “unnecessary”, quite out of character. My mood will become tinged with tension so that, instead of my feeling the excited anticipation I associate with going out, my mood will suddenly sabotage me, catching me unawares because my “goodbye” becomes tinged with apprehension.

With the benefit of hindsight, I have come to wonder if I absorbed into my every goodbye a sense of foreboding, an unspoken confusion of grief as I parted with teddy or my yellow-dressed dolly. Neither of them corrected me (of course!)-I was a child, learning on my own with only my toys to “teach” me. Perhaps I traced my finger along the line of teddy’s mouth so many times that his black, stitched-up silence traveled through my forefingers, trickling up the very nerve fibers to my brain until it became imprinted indelibly on my mind.

Why did I keep saying those silent goodbyes, anyway?

Was there really no way I could have told my parents? I know they loved me. However much I used to quake at the thought of making Mum cross. I didn’t doubt that she loved me.

I’m beginning to see that the web that entwined me had also been spun around my parents. They had no reason to question what Uncle George did. He was known in the community as a kindly gentleman. Maybe my parents were so helped by his generosity and encouraged by his thoughtfulness that they were blinded to any distorted motives he may have had. (2)

Dr. James Dobson writes about an incident that occurred during his son’s early childhood that illustrated for him the profound love of the heavenly Father. Ryan had a terrible ear infection when he was three years old that kept him (and us) awake most of the night. Shirley bundled up the toddler the next morning and took him to see the pediatrician. This doctor was an older man with very little patience for squirming kids. He wasn’t overly fond of parents, either.

After examining Ryan, the doctor told Shirley that the infection had adhered itself to the eardrum and could only be treated by pulling the scab loose with a wicked little instrument. He warned that the procedure would hurt, and instructed Shirley to hold her son tightly on the table. Not only did this news alarm her, but enough of it was understood by Ryan to send him into orbit. It didn’t take much to do that in those days.

Shirley did the best she could. She put Ryan on the examining table and attempted to hold him down. But he would have none of it. When the doctor inserted the pick-like instrument in his ear, the child broke loose and screamed to high heaven. The pediatrician then became angry with Shirley and told her if she couldn’t follow instructions she’d have to go get her husband. I was in the neighborhood and quickly came to the examining room. After hearing what was needed, I swallowed hard and wrapped my 230-pound, 6-foot-2-inch frame around the toddler. It was one of the toughest moments in my career as a parent.

What made it so emotional was the horizontal mirror that Ryan was facing on the backside of the examining table. This made it possible for him to look directly at me as he screamed for mercy. I really believe I was in greater agony in that moment than my terrified little boy. It was too much. I turned him loose–and got a beefed up version of the same bawling out that Shirley had received a few minutes earlier. Finally, however, the grouchy pediatrician and I finished the task.

I reflected later on what I was feeling when Ryan was going through so much suffering. What hurt me was the look on his face. Though he was screaming and couldn’t speak, he was “talking” to me with those big blue eyes. He was saying, “Daddy! Why are you doing this to me? I never thought you would do anything like this! How could you…? Please, please! Stop hurting me!”

It was impossible to explain to Ryan that his suffering was necessary for his own good, that I was trying to help him, that it was love that required me to hold him on the table. How could I tell him of my compassion in that moment? I would gladly have taken his place on the table, if possible. But in his immature mind, I was a traitor who had callously abandoned him.

Then I realized there must be times when God also feels our intense pain and suffers along with us. Wouldn’t that be characteristic of a Father whose love is infinite? How He must hurt when we say in confusion, “How could you do this terrible thing Lord? Why me? I thought I could trust you! I thought you were my friend. How can He explain within our human limitations that our agony is necessary, that it does have a purpose, that there are answers to the tragedies of life? I wonder if He anticipates the day when He can make us understand what was occurring in our time of trial. I wonder if He broods over our sorrows.

Some readers may doubt that an omnipotent God with no weaknesses and no needs is vulnerable to this kind of vicarious suffering. No one can be certain. We do know that Jesus experienced the broad range of human emotions, and then He told Philip, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). Remember that Jesus was “deeply moved in spirit and troubled” when Mary wept over Lazarus. He also wept as He looked over the city of Jerusalem and spoke of the sorrow that would soon come upon the Jewish people. Likewise, we are told that the Spirit intercedes for us now with “groans that words cannot express” (Romans 8:26). It seems logical to assume, therefor, that God, the Father, is passionately concerned about His human “family” and shares our grief as in those unspeakable moments “when sorrows like sea billows roll.” I believe He does. (3)

I think you folks will agree that Dobson’s comments give us a lot of food for thought. Here’s something else to think about.

When our daughter was 15 years of age, she began having trouble with one of her knees. For a year and one-half, she saw doctors, had laboratory tests and scans, and two extensive biopsies on the tumor they found. We waited for weeks for word from the many pathology labs around the United States who were studying her mysterious lump. Finally one evening our physician came to our house and gave us some very distressing news. He said that Becki had a malignancy, and that it was necessary to amputate her leg. You can imagine how that devastated Sally and me, I refused to believe it. I determined to prevent this surgery by praying until God promised to heal her.

“You’re not going to have your leg amputated,” I told Becki. I believe God is going to do a miracle. He said we could come to Him in times of trouble. “I’m absolutely convinced you are going to be spared this surgery.”

Our church then began a 24-hour vigil of fasting and prayer. Thousands of people around the United States and overseas were praying for Becki’s healing.

On the morning when the surgery was scheduled< I said to our physician, “Scott, as you go into the operating room, please verify that the cancer has been healed. God is going to come through. I’m sure.”

He left and did not immediately return. Forty-five minutes went by, and still, Sally, my other two daughters, and I sat in the waiting room. An hour passed, and then two. I began to realize that a lengthy medical procedure must be in progress. Then the doctor came out and told me that they had amputated Becki’s leg. I was absolutely shattered. I was crushed. I lost God! In anger, I was beating on the walls of the hospital and saying, “Where are You, God? Where are You?”

I was in a state of shock and wandered down to the morgue in the basement of the hospital. That’s where I felt I belonged, surrounded by death. I was dealing with more than Becki’s surgery, as terrible as that was. I struggled to handle the theological implications of what had happened. I could not understand why God permitted this to happen. You see if I had been a plumber instead of a pastor, I could have gone out to fix pipes the next day, and my spiritual confusion would not have affected my work. But my job required me to stand before people and teach them the principles of the Bible. What could I tell them now?

If I had been a liberal pastor who didn’t believe the Bible to be literally true, I could have survived by doing book reviews and talking about irrelevant stuff. But I pastored a Bible church. My style of teaching was exposure to the Word, reviewing it verse by verse and drawing out its meaning. How could I go back and tell my people that God had let my daughter lose her leg? It was a terrible moment in my life.

As I sat outside the morgue that day, a friend found me in the bowls of the hospital and came to my rescue. He was a Godsend to me! I’m not part of the Charismatic movement, but it was Dick Foth, an Assembly of God pastor, who stood by my side and cried with me and prayed for me. He said, “I’m not worried about Becki. I’m worried about you. There are a couple of thousand people in your church and thousands more elsewhere who are hanging on for you. You’re going to get through this.” Then he and two other guys took turns working with me. One would go for a coffee break and the others would take over. They just kept me talking-letting me spill out the frustration and the anger.

They didn’t condemn me even though I was angry at God. At one point I said, “I think He was so busy finding a parking spot for a little old lady that He didn’t have time to save Becki’s leg.” Dick would listen and then say, “Is there anything else you need to say?” I didn’t have to worry that if I said something disturbing, maybe these guys would doubt God. I didn’t worry about them giving up on me. I didn’t have to hold anything in and say, “I’ve got to keep up my professional front because I’m a preacher. I’ve got to be good.” They let me deal with the pain.

When a person is going through this kind of terrible depression, some believers don’t know how to respond. They say, “I’ll pray for you,” which may mean, “I’m no longer really listening to you.” That can be a way of ending one’s responsibility to shoulder the load. In fact, when it comes to bearing one anothers burdens, the secular world does that job better than we do. They know the importance of letting resentment and anger spill out, whereas Christians may feel they have to hold it inside. The Scripture tells us, “The righteous cry out and the Lord hears them; He delivers them from all their troubles” (Psalm 34:17).

It also bothered me later when people began offering simplistic explanations and flippant comments to “cheer me up.” It was irritating when they quoted Romans 8:28, “all things work together for good,” when they had not earned the right to brush off my pain. I wanted to say, “Tell me about it, Charlie. Tell me when your 15-year-old daughter’s leg is amputated. Come back when you’ve gone through something like this, and then we’ll talk again.” (4)

  1. Cited on the back cover of an outstanding book, goodbye pink room text © 2012 by Jane Grayson. This edition © 2014 by Lion Hudson
  2. Ibid. Pages 142-146.
  3. When God doesn’t Make Sense © by 1993, 2012, 2013, 2014 by Tyndale House Publishers, Inc. Pages 60-63.
  4. Ibid. Pages 83-87

 

There’s obviously much more that can be said about the things that I addressed today.

Lord willing, next week….

 

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November 23, 2014 Posted by Categories: Uncategorized Tagged with:
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