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 18^th 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.

I do not presume to have the full understanding of what I am searching for. I am just pushing out in my mind not so much of why we are not saved from tragedies, as how tragedies happen and how God feels with us when they do. I do not know whether my own mind wondering would satisfy me if I was looking at this from within the situation rather than from without. Perhaps I am still searching for answers which I somewhat  depreciated when I began this writing.  One thing I believe with my whole heart. God knows and feels with us. He is just that close. That may give us courage and strength to go on in our new life after tragedy strikes.