I still believe that Life Doesn’t Suck but even if it ultimately doesn’t, there are times when it does…

Personal and global hardship are difficult to reconcile with the existence of a good God, even with the belief that it’s not God who allows evil, but we humans, along with evil forces (another conversation…)

Whenever this question resurfaces I find that it always comes back to trust.

Interestingly, the closer I get to God, trust must increase to maintain my existing trust. I believe this is because the closer our relationship gets the more personally I take it when something has me questioning His character – or my perception of it. Both scary. This made resolution harder than ever when this conflict arose again.

 
Though my faith is consistently increasing as I see God doing amazing things in my and others’ lives, one of the things that still bothers me is His foreknowledge of the terrible things that would happen in this world yet choosing to create it anyway.

Though I believe God loves us so much that our suffering hurts Him more than it hurts us, that Jesus’ crucifixion is evidence that He’d rather suffer in our place, and that God’s desiring our free-willed love called for the risk that we use this free will to choose poorly (hence our tragic world circumstances), I still wish that somehow things could be different (and speculate that God wishes so too…)

Evenso I continue choosing to trust, yet every so often something stirs up the hurt and bewilderment that someone I’ve come to know as a loving Father could allow terrible things that seem to oppose His kind nature.

Again it comes back to ‘trusting in God and not leaning on my own understanding‘, and thankfully I’ve been able to work through it better this time, due to timely wise counsel: by remembering all the ‘too good to be true’ things God has done for me and others.

 
Ironically, being able to cling to concrete knowledge of His goodness while my trust in Him – the foundation of my life – was being shaken, has meant everything.

A couple of resources I most thankfully ‘happened’ upon that helped me immensely through this last bout included this teaching by Bill Johnson who says:

“God is better than we think, so we have to change the way we think.”

As well as this less familiar (but AMAZING!) Old Testament story about Zelophehad’s Daughters who knew that they knew God was better than He was thought and taught to be.

Has God’s goodness been challenged in your life?

What experiences in your and/or others’ lives can you hold on to, to keep and even increase your trust in His goodness?