In humanity’s distorted way of looking at the world, we ask, “How could God allow this pain?” Honestly, it’s a question I dare not ask myself very often. I work around a lot of pain and brokenness.
Paraphrasing something I heard in my church’s Good Friday service yesterday, “We live amid pain & darkness, & because of what Jesus did, we can’t be okay with that. We have to fight against it. And if we don’t hear people’s stories & know the bad news in their life, how can we begin to tell them the good news?”
The questions, then, is not, “How could God allow this pain?” We brought that on ourselves with our sin. We inherited some of it, but we chose it over and over again. The real question is, “How could God, knowing how painful & dark this world is, knowingly send His son here?” And yet, He did. Jesus came. He was here. His Spirit still is.
I read a blog that said, “And our God is not a God to merely believe, but to experience, not to only believe in, but be held by. A God who not only breaks for you but breaks with you, a God to not only have creeds about, but to have communion with, a God who not only who dies for you, but who cries with you, the God who touches you and binds you and blesses you and heals you and re-members you because He let Himself be dismembered and He is the God we not only believe in— but we know. We know – know beyond a shadow of doubt, death or despair.”
When a teenage boy is shot and killed on Cleveland’s east side, where is God? The best answer I can think of is the one that I believe to be True. He was there. Right there. He wasn’t looking away or distracted. He came to the inner city & hung out right where that kid died. That’s more than I’ve done. That’s more than most Christians are willing to do.
The God I love on this Holy Saturday is one who is with us in the darkness, and that is something over which we can rejoice!
-K
light & word 