I recently read a news article about a woman who lost her two-year-old nephew in the Texas floods. This week, I’ve been praying for girl shot in a chapel service in Minnesota. I struggle when anyone experiences loss and trauma, but when children are involved, it feels particularly unbearable.
If you’re like me and pray daily for people like these families, friends battling cancer, and God’s protection for your family, school shootings and campers being swept away in raging flood waters probably messes with your faith. If God controls everything and unimaginable horrors happen to children,
Why pray?
I’m old and humble enough to know I can’t answer that question. A trite answer to such a complex question would also be foolish and deeply insensitive to those who’ve experienced the unimaginable loss of a child. But as I’ve been processing this question, I remembered something I once heard a pastor share. He said whether you believe there’s a God or not, bad things still happen. Sickness, egregious violence, and death are an inevitable part of life. Then he asked, “If horrific things are part of life and the Bible is wrong,
Then what?”
If there are earthquakes and mass murderers and the Lord’s not good or loving, then what? If in the end God doesn’t wipe away every tear, death and mourning and make everything new (Revelation 21:4-5), what then? If Christ didn’t exist or die for our sins to give us eternal life, then death and evil would terminate on themselves. We’d then be left not only without answers to suffering, but without that which gets anyone through this cruel and often unfair life,
Hope.
And then the pastor, with humility in his voice, said that although he didn’t know why God allowed suffering, he still prayed because hadn’t discovered anything better. And I felt like he didn’t say it because he was a pastor, but because he was a human who’d wrestled disillusionment, pain, and confusion, too. And in the end, he learned to trust God and the Bible were not only truths he’d come to believe, but hope he needed when life felt
Particularly unbearable.