Sorrow begets many questions. And mostly, we direct them at God.
Raised Catholic (I am not now), I was lectured to frequently in school about how brave Job was. How stoic. He was a role model. He never questioned God. Right we all said. Like Job, I'd Like to Be Like Job. We shouldn't question or wonder why God threw Job these challenges.
One day, recently, I read the Biblical account of Job for myself. Holy cow, thought I. Contrary to what I had been taught, I saw that Job was all about questioning, all about asking "Why me?" In fact, that Job was almost whiny.
Many faiths, too simplified, too much interpretated for the benefit of the interpretors.
And in many of our interpretations, God sure gets a bum rap.
Our world is a battleground of diametrically opposed forces. Human nature? Scientific? Mathematic? Archetypal? God vs. Satan? However you look at it, with good comes evil, with sorrow comes joy, with the bloggies come the anti-bloggies. Why don't we see this when it comes to God? Why do we assume that the loving and innocent who die, those who are murdered, war among the axes of evil and good, are all His doing? I say, cut God some slack.
When my father died I was 5. He was just 36. Did he deserve the agony of pancreatic cancer? No. To miss his children growing up? No. He was a very gentle and good man. Yet, as it was explained to me in the only way my family could muster, my father was needed in heaven. God apparently had an important job for him. Since my father was a bassist and grocer, I couldn't imagine what God needed my father "up there" to do. But I thought about it a lot. Sometimes it even made me laugh.
Even so, I don't hold God accountable. When my cat was stolen and never found, didn't even occur to me to charge God with the crime. When my dumb dog choked my smart, sweet dog to death with a choke chain, God didn't even pop into my mind. When I almost lost my own life, I prayed a lot for God's help, but I didn't ever think He was the reason I was where I was.
With absolute good and absolute justice comes the antithesis--one that isn't as comfortable to ponder or as easy to explain away. I'll leave it at that. AKMA is a lot better at this than I am.
