I thought you were a loving God....

Whew.

How many times have we had that thought? I mean, honestly. 

It's late. Way too late. Greg has already woken up twice and told me I should be sleeping. My heart weighs heavy tonight thinking of all of the parents who have unexpectedly lost their babies. The school year is winding down, summer plans are just on the horizon, and now so many lives have been changed forever. There are vacations looked forward to that will never be taken, clothes hanging in closets that will never be worn, memories that will never be made...it's all too much for me to process.

Our first reaction in these situations is to say, "Pray!" Pray for these families, pray for peace, pray for our world. It's all over my newsfeeds. And that's good...sometimes that is all we can do and the best we can do. It's what I'm doing.

But I understand the temptation for some to pause for a moment in the midst of it and say, "But wait, hold on a minute. Why am I praying to the God who let this happen? Why did you let this happen?? Why would a loving God ever let something like this happen?!"

We'd be lying to ourselves if we didn't admit that these families who need our prayers right now aren't also asking these same questions. "Why MY baby? Why didn't you stop him?!"

I don't know. I don't know why God allowed it. 

Here is what I do know.

We live in a broken world. It's a world run rampant with an ugly curse called sin, and sin is something that God hates. Therefore, what happened to those innocent people is something that God hates. Jesus wept over death, and I am certain he weeps with these families. 

In the moments we falter and begin to question God and his goodness, it's important for us to shift our perspective to reality. We can't let our grief and our anger distort the truth that it is ONLY by the grace of a loving God that these horrible events don't happen every.single.day in schools across our country. We will never know how many instances have been stopped by divine intervention. It's scary to think, but how many times have we or our own children been spared from something awful...and we have no idea.

The truth is, without God our entire world would be nothing more than anarchy akin to the Wild West, where there is no order and everything is chaos with no end. For everything bad that happens, there are easily a thousand things that don't, because He doesn't allow it. God holds back evil like a giant shield every second of every day.

So what about the things that seem to slip through the cracks? Does God blink for a minute and lose control?

No.

God is always in control. 

God allows bad things to happen sometimes, and he always has. It's not for me or anyone else to try and conjecture why. "'For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,' declares the Lord. 'As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts higher than your thoughts.'" (Isaiah 55:8-9) Would we even understand if he explained himself? I'm not sure our human minds could wrap around it.

Rest assured that nothing God allows is done without purpose. We don't have to get it, we just need to believe it and trust him. God is a redeemer, and as our preschoolers learned this week in Sunday School, that means he turns things that are bad into things that are good. He always gets the last say.

God reminds us not to be surprised when bad things happen, and that he will walk with us through it when they do. Christ himself suffered, and likely more than any of us ever will. He doesn't ask us to go through anything he hasn't already gone through himself. He is a God that is not only sympathetic to our suffering but also empathetic. He promises to be near the brokenhearted, even calling them blessed, because it's in our darkest hour that we draw nearest to him...and that's the safest place we can be.

God doesn't think like we do, because he has an eternal perspective, and we are incredibly narrow-minded. We think that this life is the focus of everything, when God knows that this life is a vapor in the wind. It's such a short time compared to what comes next. He cares deeply for our eternal souls, and he will stop at NOTHING to get our attention...even...possibly...taking things from us? 

Things that don't seem fair to take.

Like a marriage we were committed to.

A career we worked our entire lives for.

A child we so dearly loved.

A life that seemed so perfect.

Not fair when we keep our eyes focused on the here and now. But if he has to take something to get our attention for eternity, someday we will be able to look back and make sense of it all. He will redeem it. If you put your faith and trust in him, he PROMISES he will redeem it. And God often finds a way to pay back ten-fold what he took...even the things that seem irreplaceable. I have seen it with my own eyes, and continue to see it play out in my own life.

Tonight, I weep for the families. Now isn't the time to try to figure out the "why." God says there is a season for mourning, and in his loving kindness he respects that and is simply there to comfort. And yes, he even expects people to yell and cry out to him and question him...he's God. He can take it. He understands. He understands that we don't. And when the season of mourning slowly begins to lift, and our grip on him loosens, he can look us in the face, wipe away the tears, and remind us that he has a plan.

Lord, I thought you were a loving God...and I was right. You are. You love better than we do, higher than we do, and you do so unconditionally. Forgive us when we doubt it. We just don't get it sometimes. And all we can ask is for you to fulfill your promise to be near the brokenhearted. They need you. 

Actually, you were there with them before we even asked, weren't you?

There is none like you.