We suffer

Another friend miscarried. She was at the end of her first trimester. What is there that you can say to ease the pain of a loss like that? God could have prevented this. Why didn't He?

Why?

Why are my parents getting a divorce? Why is my mother sick and alone? Why doesn't my little brother believe anymore? Why do unborn babies have to die? Why is there so much suffering outside my window?

The list goes on and on... God is sovereign, and He is good. He suffers too. He sees the world He has created, the people He has taken time to carefully design, and all of their pains. He allows death and destruction. He didn't stop the earthquake that ruined Haiti... It hurts Him too, so why does He allow all of it? I know that we live in a fallen world, that death is the result of our sin nature, but the amount of pain and suffering on this planet would seem to indicate that we serve a cold hearted God who doesn't have a concern for the billions of people on earth. So it would seem.

But that isn't the God that we serve. We serve a God that we cannot begin to understand. A God whose depths we would lose ourselves in if we tried to understand Him. We serve a tender loving God that has a very special love for those that He has chosen. And even those He loves He breaks, and binds them up again. He never punishes- Christ bore that. The life and death of an unborn child is not wasted. As cliche as the truth is, it is still truth: Our God has a plan.

Suffering is such an intense emotion, and common to all people, yet people handle it so differently. Today, as I sat and watched Christie weeping for her dear friend, I thought of my own times spent locked up and Christie and Jackie's room, sobbing- mourning the brokenness of my family. Jacquelyn, Ruth, Christie, and Christy sat around me as I wept, offering their soft condolences and praying for me. My suffering looked so much different than Christie's. There is always more anger in my emotions, more frustration. I question with more passion, with more disturbance. When it comes to feeling at all, to expressing my thoughts and emotions, it always seems to be more fiery than what I see in others. Christie considers herself to be a more emotional person, and as far as outward displays of emotion go, I would agree most of the time. However, my own emotions are more inwardly self destructive than outwardly expressive. And when they are outwardly expressed- it is more often than not inappropriately expressed.

I do think it is natural and okay to question and to be upset with our circumstances. We were not made for pain and suffering. We were created for complete, unhindered communion and fellowship with God. We weren't created for this separation, this process of living and dying, all the while being broken and brought low, our lives pockmarked with loss after loss after loss. It seems a great injustice. But if we, as sinful humans are seeking justice- we find it in damnation. That is justice. Yet God has reinvented justice, in a sense.

And one day the tears will be wiped away, and perhaps life will be like some vague dream, or some horrifying nightmare that we have been rescued from. And we will have what we were created for, we will be who we were created to be.