Where Is God?
(When Tragedy Strikes)
In the face of tragic loss, we
likely will turn to these questions: where is God, and where was God when this happened? If we are at all realistic, we may even feel
it is a preposterous matter to even understand where God was then, and what
where he is standing now, or what he wants us to think about our situation. We
feel it is only honest to believe that it all just doesn't make sense. That
God's purposes are beyond our comprehension. And so we feel we must move ahead
without understanding just where God is,
or was in the unfolding of our tragedy.
Even more for me to set this
up as to our typical response may seem like there are alternative ways of
thinking to which I have some insights. No, I do not have answers for the
whole thing of meaning of tragedies. I
cannot guess what God's purposes are. I may even wonder if he has an
overarching or specific purpose in tragedy. Like, why was my oldest nephew
killed in a car accident soon after his 18th birthday when his life
was just unfolding? Why did God let it happen? We tried to make sense, like
some good must come out of it or it wouldn't have happened. We grasped for
meaning, but I still have no good and satisfying answer for that loss.
Perhaps another focus may be
to ask where is God now as he sees our grief. How does he feel
about it? What does he want us to know about him at this point? One would think
we just have to use our imagination and creative thinking if we have any at
all. I like to think of another tragedy, the greatest of all time in history,
and think of what God was feeling and thinking in that unfolding. How did God
feel when he saw his own son hanging and left to die on that instrument of
death, the cross? God so loved the world, that he went through that intense
suffering of seeing his son suffer and die. If God made us in his image in many
ways, which I assume, then he likely was weeping streams of tears, rolling down
his cheeks and flooding heaven and earth. Still letting it happen for Jesus to
suffer. It was the nature of things that evil causes pain excruciatingly. God
accepted it, and cried his heart out.
But we may wonder, why did God
tolerate our tragedy? Here we go out into further understanding of God's love,
which we can never fully understand, but we just see glimpses of it in a
hundred ways. His love is so tolerant that he allows people to flourish for a
long time before justices rules. But that hardly explains why his children
suffer innocently in traffic accidents. We also see the fact that in his
creative natures that he has endowed man with ingenuity, so that man can create
things that are bigger than himself and that can recoil back on him, destroying
him because he can not guarantee his own safety using what he has created.
Would we wish we did not have this creative capacity to create what potentially
can harm us? We could find many such examples of destructive capacities of our
creativity.
