The picture above is of Alan Kurdi, a two-year-old Syrian boy who drowned on September 2nd, 2015, in the Mediterranean Sea along with his mother and brother. Alan and his family were Syrian refugees trying to reach Europe from Turkey amid the European refugee crisis.
Some are born only to suffer and die young. How I long to prevent it, to be everywhere at once, and have the power to stop the senseless suffering. I can’t, but God can and does not. I have no idea why. I am uncomfortable with the trite explanations that God loves us and that evil is from Satan or us. If something good happens, it’s God; if something terrible happens, it’s not Him. Aren’t you a little suspicious that the all-powerful creator of the universe gets a pass no matter what happens? Ultimately, God, as the all-powerful, all-knowing creator, must be responsible for the good and bad.
Dostoevsky vents this same frustration in his novel The Brothers Karamazov through the character of Ivan:
“I understand, of course, what an upheaval of the universe it will be when everything in heaven and earth blends in one hymn of praise and everything that lives and has lived cries aloud: ‘Thou art just, O Lord, for Thy ways are revealed.’ When the mother embraces the fiend who threw her child to the dogs, and all three cry aloud with tears, ‘Thou art just, O Lord!’ then, of course, the crown of knowledge will be reached, and all will be made clear. But what pulls me up here is that I can’t accept that harmony…
You see, Alyosha, perhaps it really may happen that if I live to that moment, or rise again to see it, I, too, perhaps, may cry aloud with the rest, looking at the mother embracing the child’s torturer, ‘Thou art just, O Lord!’ but I don’t want to cry aloud then… It’s not worth the tears of that one tortured child who beat itself on the breast with its little fist and prayed in its stinking outhouse, with its unexpiated tears to ‘dear, kind God’! It’s not worth it, because those tears are unatoned for…But how? How are you going to atone for them? Is it possible? By their being avenged? But what do I care for avenging them? What do I care for a hell for oppressors? What good can hell do, since those children have already been tortured?”
Brothers Karamazov Chapter 4
In this present life, I agree with Ivan that no amount of future joy will make the suffering of one child worth it, but will I feel the same when faced with the power and majesty of an awesome sovereign God? No. I will bow in reverence to the One who declares, “I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I, the LORD, do all these things” and proclaims, “Behold, like the clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in My hand”. Like Job, I will “despise myself and repent in dust and ashes.”
For now, though, I’m stuck, overwhelmed by evil, yet keenly aware of Good when it does appear. I sense an ever-present Goodness in the midst of the horror, and I hold onto that.
Some of us are just born restless
Dazzled by the hard and softness of things
Sensing an ever present goodness
Still circling on wings
“A Great Wild Mercy” Carrie Newcomer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M73Cg1ywIGQ&list=RDM73Cg1ywIGQ&start_radio=1
