Suffering–Bad or Good?

You read the title and thought that’s a no-brainer, right?

This morning my devotional thought was “called to suffer,” (1Peter 2:21) And my instant reaction was yuck!

I think I understand a lot about suffering–the good, the bad, and the ugly, and still my reaction is bad–certainly not what Peter and James talk about. If you’ve never read them, they say “count it all joy.”  Oh sure!

Seriously? Consider suffering as joy? Why?

Because it brings good. Brings the true you out. Can you suffer gracefully? Do you run from it? And what happens when you can’t? Do you go into self-pity? Whine? Cry? Become the martyr? Blame God? Others? Or all of it?

Pain is hard. It can really mess up your head. I’ve seen the lies that get spun from it–all bad things about us, and many times others. Sometimes they deserve it, and times they don’t. And God gets a bad rap too, usually.

So what is good about hurting? It shows what is truly valuable to you. Do you know who you are–your worth? your value? Do you know what is important to you? What you really believe? Is there anything or anyone you will suffer for? Or are you just a storefront? A façade? A pretend person? In psychology we call it a “persona,” the mask we wear for the public; and we all have them, but hopefully they don’t have us. In other words, we don’t completely believe that is who we are–we are aware that we have a dark and a light side. If you don’t know that, you will be suffering at some point.

That is the good in suffering.

Also this morning I am leading out in a study on chapter 5 of book 5 in Love’s Playbook. It is still following Moses through his dark night of the soul experience where he is questioning everything, especially God and himself. He thought he knew who he was and what he was doing, and then in an instant it all went south. So much so that it was like starting with a pile of ashes. A lot of people in California can relate to that. Only worse. He had nothing, but he wasn’t sure if he believed anything either. His literal and faith-based world had been turned upside-down.

I’ve decided to go back to the introduction in Job, because his story is all about suffering and what we can learn about it and from it. Seven life questions are listed there and I even came up with another one or two–mainly making sense of where we are and what we live with. It provides a framework for understanding many things–especially why we believe crazy things about God. Why we suffer, who is responsible (besides our poor choices), and what we can do about it.

People who suffer graciously bring good out of it, and often will tell you they would never give up the experience. I heard that again this week on the news: from a girl who lost her legs to save her life because she kept having heart problems. It was a radicle solution, but it worked, and she is now a nurse working in the same hospital that saved her life. She said if she could give up her prostheses and have her legs back but would miss that three years experience, she would never do it. The suffering was that valuable to her.

I’m sure Jesus would say the same thing about his three and a half years of suffering here–more like 33 years. (Can you even imagine not having a dark side and yet being stalked by the dark side continually? Horrific!) And he didn’t even need character development. But “he was perfected through suffering,” meaning he values the experience so much because it helped him (and the watching universe) understand us and relate to us, and understand the heinous character of evil and its ruinous effects.

Isn’t it interesting that suffering is the means to the end of good. That something God won’t allow in the hereafter is used as the purifier. Hmmm.

What does that mean? Could we say the doorway to character is how we relate to suffering? It shows if you can be trusted. Do you really want good? Really want love? Or does it grow hate and anger in you? It separates the phonies from the solid. Are you willing to trust God even when He allows you to suffer?

Choosing Good and Grief

Going through something horrific brings out the good or the bad. We either get stuck in everything is bad. Or we choose to see grace and good in our lives in spite of what we are experiencing. There is always reason to see both. And sometimes people not sharing the experience can’t see any reason for good, but that is because they aren’t inside it. They don’t see what Ruach (Holy Spirit) is showing you. It’s as if you have new eyes.

The past week in California was horrendous, and especially so for people who lost their children and homes (in my area). Further north people lost not only homes but people, community and their city. It is traumatic and disorienting. And feels like a repeat of last year. Hundreds of homes a half hour away were lost then too.

Horrific happenings are going to happen to everyone. (I heard on the news yesterday that more people lost their lives in the blizzard back east than lost their lives in our fire!) Evil is going to be given more and more power so we are all given clear choices. How will you relate? How will you deal with evil?

That can be scary if you are a person who believes the negative. If you see the bad before the good. Such is my particular personality and I’m afraid I fostered it. Trying to turn it around takes lots of thought and choices.

First it takes seeing and admitting it. I can tell you, if you are like me and have allowed yourself to lean that way, you are going to need help undoing it. The good news is God is ready. He’s been waiting to help you change to seeing the good in your life. Don’t be ashamed that you need help. Be grateful it is readily available.

No matter how bad things are, you can ask God to give you eyes to see it as He does. There is always something good. And seeing that one thing lifts you up into seeing another good thing. After practicing for years it gets easier to see everything differently. It is a choice. It is looking at things through God’s eyes.

And it’s not all good. But there is always something good that can come from it. Something good in it. Or at least the seeds of good that faith will cause to sprout. You may not even be able to imagine any good in the beginning–that’s where faith takes hold. You choose to believe in God’s goodness. Then in His goodness towards you (I like to say Their goodness because there are Three mighty ones who fill this good-God position.) You are never alone if you latch on to this belief and choose it. You aren’t alone anyway, because He (They) are always there hoping you choose Them.

As you’ve read here before, this is the most important part of life. We live in a war zone. It’s not safe to live here unless you make good choices–choices for good–choices for God. If you do that you are safe no matter what happens. It may look like He has (They have) abandoned you, but they never will. They are just letting you have experiences that show you what you need–the next choice to make. As Graham Cook says, the site of your next miracle! And if you don’t know what the next choice is, choose Them. God and goodness are always the right choice.

A powerful example was aired by the media this past week. They showed a mom and her kids going through the rubble of their burned home. There wasn’t even a structure left. They were finding little things that they were delighted to find. The reporter asked, how they could be so positive, and she said, “It was a great home. There was a lot of love here, but its just a house. The memories and love are still here.”

That is choosing love–choosing God. It doesn’t focus on loss or self-pity; it doesn’t blame. It looks for good. Grief is real and very necessary to do, if you don’t it will get you later, but don’t get stuck in blaming or negativity there. Good grief processing feels it and goes through the sadness for sometimes a month, sometimes a year, or five years for children, then turns toward hope, believing in good, finding God is there for you. He (They) can bring good out of anything, but not without our permission.

Grief is important to honor for yourself and others, understanding that it is different for everyone. But holding onto anger will make you bitter and keep you from moving forward. It really is healthy to let go. And please know that your loved one who is gone wouldn’t want you to go on mourning or being angry–they would want you to make something good out of it. Also know that grief comes in waves for years. Let it be ok, accept it, feel it, ride the wave, and then go back to living in the present. Graciousness is there for you.

My clients tell me that the best strategy I’ve given them is managing grief. Give yourself an hour or two to just grieve every day and later every week. Look at pictures listen to the music, work it. Then put it on the shelf and live your life.

The First Shall be Last and the Last First

I learned something in church. “The first shall be last and the last shall be first.” It’s in the gospel of Mark and my pastor nailed it!

Jesus was the first human to succeed living in contact with God. Eve believed Satan in the serpent and failed. Adam tried but failed when Satan tested him through losing Eve. And every human since. But God became human, our do-over, our servant, or the last; and yet he was first to succeed passing every test Satan devised by trusting and depending on God. 

He was God–first in the universe, but died as a criminal, the lowest or last. And now he has been raised to the position of first in the whole universe. “All power and authority has been given to me.” He is now first in honor and authority because he laid power down and became last.

I’ve heard it many times, said it many times, but never truly understood it, not like that.

I just always thought it related to everything here is backwards. I’ve thought that for years. It is true because we were made to run on love and we don’t now, but have you ever wondered why everything is backwards?

Kids wonder. “Why do we have to go to bed when we aren’t tired and get up when we are?” Especially teenagers want to know this one!

And even little children wonder why they have to eat green food they don’t like instead of ice cream they do like. “Why do we have to learn to like vegetables? If candy and ice cream isn’t good for us, why did God make it? And if vegetables taste bad why did He make them?”

Good questions! And many more need answers, “Why do bad things happen to good people?” “Why do bad people make money and have everything they want?” “Why are evil adults allowed to hurt children?” Many of them never recover. Some of them act out their pain and shoot a bunch of innocent people.  Trying to make things fair?

Why does a loving God allow evil and suffering? The two don’t seem to fit together. Why don’t They destroy evil? Why didn’t they long ago? If you read the Bible you can read a long time before you come up with answers. Well not really. It’s there in the third chapter of Genesis, but it isn’t on the surface and it isn’t explained. Even when you get to the New Testament it isn’t explained. It’s being demonstrated.

Why?

God didn’t want it to be My word against his. They (three persons in one God) needed us to understand the war between good and evil that we are in the middle of. Tonight I just saw pictures from HUBBLE, our space camera, on TV. They were phenomenal. I knew it was a big place–100,000,000,000 galaxies! But seeing it is so cool! I’m pretty sure we were not the first world of beings created but the last. We were the grand finale, because we were a new order, given the gift of procreation! And yes we blew it.

We are some tiny speck of a planet in a small peripheral galaxy and yet we are the focus of interest because God came here and  became one of us! Wow! Our war story is a love story also, all the way through, and is better than any out there. You can read my version of the story in episode 1 of Love’s Playbook. But back to my question. Everything is backwards here because we don’t know how to live love. We were made to run on it, it is how we do best, but we aren’t so good at it.

I’m not talking romance, just love, the kind of perfectly balanced pure energy that gives to everything else. If we try to give to everyone it is usually from deficit called pleasing, or worse, because we don’t really understand love. And because we have dual natures.

This is probably all getting too heavy so let me just say that God is demonstrating the difference between love and evil so we can choose. In fact we must choose. God created us free to choose and that is why things don’t make sense here. That’s why evil is allowed with the suffering it brings. Because our failure requires that each individual chooses. And that is why freedom is so important. Love is only real if it is freely chosen.

Next week, I’ll share a love story that I’ve just finished writing for Love’s Playbook book 7. It is a metaphor of our story and answers the most important questions beautifully.

 

 

 

Unafraid and Thankful

I doubt that very many of us will give thanks this Thanksgiving for our suffering. It is so counter-intuitive. And yet our willingness to suffer for God is such a gift. I suppose it is mostly because our arch-enemy said we would never do it. He loves to ask God to test us. I don’t think Satan thought we were capable of suffering and staying with God. By now he must know we are capable, but he knows as humans we fight against it and struggle with understanding it. It is foreign to our creation. We were made to run on love, and to live in beauty and goodness and peace.

Suffering is probably the one thing that really sets us apart for God. Because we would never naturally do it unless we were horrendously abused from childhood. Even then sometimes we will fight against it. But to choose suffering for a greater good, a huge cause, or the good of someone else is what God did; and I think that is what it means to “fill up the sufferings of Christ”–not because God wants us to suffer–but our willingness shows an attitude like His. He hates suffering more than we do! But Jesus chose to suffer to set the universe free–above suffering forever.

When God created freedom, the possibility of suffering was an option, and when it became a reality, They chose suffering rather than power as Their way of dealing with it. It wasn’t just Jesus who suffered–They all went through his suffering–it was probably worse for Abba and Ruach. They believed that They should experience the consequences of creating the possibility to suffer.  They could have picked up Their power and squashed any rebellion. But They knew the only right thing to do was taking responsibility for creating a world (a universe) where something could go wrong.

Suffering shows character, anybody can get angry and retaliate, that’s natural to broken beings. But suffering gracefully makes us stand out as definitely His–when we do it willingly, unafraid of anything as long as They are with us.

Last week I wrote about my friend who just learned he has brain cancer, and is facing death; his faith and attitude are amazing. Last Thursday I saw my friend,  who has suffered terribly with cancer–more than I can even imagine suffering. She was minutes away from death a year ago, and also last month, but rallied again. She has had a stroke, lost her sight, most of her hearing, and her ability to eat and taste, but her love and faith and strength of spirit is even stronger than it was before. And she was already full of them! Watching her family cope with it has been an education and a marvel as well. She told me every day she wakes up with excitement for what God will do that day because He hasn’t let Satan kill her. She said every day she is getting better!

What an idea! Unafraid of anything that comes because we know God and know They are with us! It makes us truly “Bulletproof” (I love the song by Citizen Way.) And it proves that relationship with God is not only possible, but the only thing that really matters! I don’t want to suffer (of course), but I want that intimacy with Them! And when I look back at my life, the suffering has been worth it. Worth what? Getting closer to Them. Knowing God. Experiencing Their incredibly sweet unlove and friendship.

Far-fetched Ideas?

Is it a far-fetched idea to believe we live in the middle of  a war with a perspective way bigger than we can imagine? It might have been 100 years ago before the Hubble and the Hadron Collider. Or if you had never read the Bible. But if you had read the Bible with an open mind even then you had a window into the bigger picture; like 17th century author  John Milton, a blind poet.

And if you read the whole thing putting the bits and pieces together, a story emerges that is even bigger than our redemption. That is just a corner of it. Some people will be offended by that, and that’s ok. It’s just that when you have seen more suffering than most people because of your job, it pushes you to big questions more often than most people go there.

The little boy who was killed a year ago on our street lost his mother by suicide this past week. What will happen to the little girl who pushed the brother (playing) now that her brother and mother are gone? How will she grow up? How will she ever make sense of life? Thank God for a bigger picture window on the universe that helps us understand suffering. I hope she gets it. And though I don’t know her, thank God I can ask Them* to carry her and to send someone to tell her what she needs to know before her brain is damaged by hideous self-talk. I can even ask Them to run interference with the self-talk and  let her know They are with her.

Suffering is a reality here. No one escapes it. And what you do with the suffering makes all the difference for you personally. If you lean into it, and into God, you will be walked through it and grow like you can’t imagine. Afterwards, you will look back and say it was horrible but it was good for you.

What will happen to this little girl if she fights or denies the pain and walks away from God? It will make her hard and bitter, blaming herself, and steal her life. That is unless she is told God caused it and that’s why she  walks away from it.

God does NOT cause suffering. True, They don’t stop it. They can’t always, or it would end freedom, and that is Their highest value. Well, actually, love is Their highest value, but They have to have freedom to have love, so They are adamant about freedom.

The rub is the enemies, that love to cause us pain just because God loves us (all three of Them). We are loved–well loved. They can turn tragedy into forgiveness with our choice of acceptance. Opening up to Their love will create beauty instead of ashes (Isaiah 61:3).

 

*Them. If you haven’t read last week’s blog, it explains my concept of three beings in one God position.

 

Truth can Help

Everyone has disappointment. I watched a video today of my last baby grandson taking his first steps. Of course I was thrilled that my daughter got it on camera and sent it, but later some anger came rumbling up in my chest. I am missing it. I’m missing being in their lives every day. I’m missing the milestones!

It’s the new reality I live with. At times like this it can come up without warning. I have decided to accept it, and sometimes it makes me angry, other times sad, but it is the reality of choice. My husband wants to stay here till he dies. So it pits my love  for him against my love for my grandsons. My desire to be Gama as Jack says.

The only thing that keeps me sane is focusing on the fact that my life is wonderful in every other regard.

People made choices based on the best information they had, and now there is sadness in my life. It’s not a matter of blaming anyone, that wouldn’t help. It’s just the way it is. My husband and I made our desires known to each other as clearly as we can; and there seems nothing to be done, except acceptance and loving what is.

But I know people are, at this minute, over-coming worse pain by looking for the good. The pain of loss of parents, of partners; of living with terminal illness, of no security, no stability, no power, no perceived love. Sometimes we have to forgive God for this expensive way of living. Allowing suffering to be the marker for character.

God hates suffering. I know that. He never intended it. He didn’t bring it on; but it is a great indicator. He (They) have suffered far worse, and far longer, than any of us because of being willing to go on trial to keep Love as the basis for freedom.

And I know He will make it up to us who choose Him, and choose to have a good attitude about suffering, bringing harmony back to the universe. That’s a good truth to hang on to when it gets dark in your life.

My husband and I have been reading the end of The Book — His story — for two weeks–Revelation 21 and 22. It’s pretty amazing. He wants to read it every day for a month.

God says it’s truth you can count on. He will wipe away every tear, along with death, suffering, sadness, and evil. It will all be a faint memory with no pain. And ALL of life will  be wonderful from then on.

Reliable truth (truth that has survived suffering) is a good thing to know in disappointment and sadness.

 

 

 

A Perspective on Perspective

I promised to answer questions I raised about suffering with the last blog, so for those who are interested: here are my answers. And my disclaimer is don’t take my word, search it out for yourself. This represents 50+ years of Bible study, but you need to know for yourself, asking God’s Spirit to teach you.

Perspective is a very flexible, subjective thing. Beauty and wisdom are in the eyes of the beholder. We don’t have to come to consensus, but you might think if we have the same teacher, we would.

If we could see all the variables God sees, we would be amazed and overwhelmed. But this has helped me understand a sliver of why my brother wasn’t healed in answer to his sisters’ prayers.

If he had been healed, just to watch his baby girl (now 44) die from cancer, it would have been over-the-top pain. She was the one who sat by his bed the last week of his life.

But why not heal her? My religion shows and teaches Jesus healing everyone who asked. Even now Jesus heals those who ask, but not always in their time frame.

He’s promised to heal, He’s promised to answer, but not necessarily now. And not at our demand. Because like a loving and faithful parent, he sometimes says “Wait a while,” and other times He says “No” because His wisdom sees ahead.

However, He has supplied some examples of changing His “no” to yes with disastrous results because someone cried and asked Him to.

The story of Hezekiah* is one of these. He became very ill, and God sent Isaiah to tell him that he would not recover. Now Hezekiah was one of the best kings Israel ever had. He brought tremendous reforms, and did wonderful things, and God honored him–even defeating Sennacherib and the whole Assyrian army when they threatened Israel.

Because he had been so faithful to God, he cried to God and used his record of faithfulness as reason God should heal him. And so God did. He even gave him a sign that he would recover that got the attention of the secular nations around.

But when ambassadors came asking about it, Hezekiah’s faith failed him. He didn’t talk about God or his healing. He showed them what he knew they could relate to–treasure. And they did–they came back and got it.

But that isn’t the worst. During the extra 15 years given to Hezekiah, his son Manasseh was born–one of the worst kings, if not the worst, Israel ever had. He took Israel away from God for 40 years, and undid all the work of his father. It was the beginning of the end that led to being conquered. So what do you think? Was that just so we could read about it and learn to trust His “no”?

If we can get to the place of trusting God–just believing He is all good, and knows what is best, we would be happier. We would be a lot less confused and more relaxed. We don’t know what He sees, what He knows, so knowing Him becomes the only thing we can depend on. He is the loving, all-wise parent.

I’ve been trying to understand what life is all about for 55 years, and in the last ten, two things have become very clear: God is all good and He’s not afraid to suffer and die, and even though He hates suffering and death, He’s not afraid to let us suffer and die. He sees death very differently than we do.

But that’s for next time.

Chronicles 29-32

Choice — Guest Post by Loxlia Paltz

I found myself in the dark of night this week. That black space where the silence covers you like a heavy blanket. I was there, on the floor in the bathroom, sobs born of my own weakness, my failure, shaking my bones. The only sound–my heart splintering in my chest. Why did say that? That’s not me. I didn’t mean to. Didn’t want to. It didn’t matter. It’s the worst thing I could have done to him.

And He was there. Whispering comfort. Promising the future. Forgiving. Always there.

For days I’ve thought of this approaching Easter, this celebration of His resurrection, my head twisting all around it. Do I get it? Really “get” it?

I’m not sure I did.

I don’t even like to say that. It feels wrong. But it’s truth, stark honesty of my humanity.

Many have died for His name, tortured and disfigured, refusing to deny Him. Many even crucified. Peter, His Peter, crucified upside down, feeling unworthy of dying His death.

And we dress up, go to church, and hear about this Son of God crucified for us. Risen from the dead. And it fits neatly into a little package in our minds. Yes, we’re grateful. Yes, it’s beautiful. Yes, it absolutely changes lives. But do we really get it?

What made Him different? Able to save? Was it His divinity? His humanity?

What made Him choose me? In those splintering moments of anguish that I cannot make sense of, what was different?

Jesus was both fully human and fully divine. And it was neither His humanity nor His divinity that made Him different. It was both. He grew from a baby, learning about life and about God just as we do, in a time of strife and conflict–statistics of that time show high death rates, crushing poverty, and persecution. All those things that developed His compassion, His awareness of suffering and pain.

It is learning to suffer, to feel, that makes us able to fully love. We are not as humans able to dissect our hearts. We cannot choose to only feel love. If we are to feel love we must be willing to suffer. We must learn to suffer. We must live–hearts wide-open.

I’m struck by this. Undone by the thought that it was the careful development of Christ’s humanity that made him the only atoning sacrifice. That His humanity could not have carried the weight if not carefully woven with His unused divinity. He could have at any moment chosen, “That’s it, I’m not doing this, its not worth it.”

And it would have been true. I am not worth it.

He chose me. There in those moments, when the fullness of His humanity tested the fullness of His divinity. He chose me. He embraced the crushing anguish. The brutality. The very worst darkness ever known, death and separation from His Father. He surrendered to it. Not in weakness, by choice He went there.

He was ravaged and broken by my brokenness. Held it in His hands and said, “I choose you”. A warrior in battle surging onto the front lines. Giving every last ounce of Himself for me. For you. And then He lay silent. Dead. It was over.

They had taken it all. His very breath. I had taken it all. With my wounds and weakness, the dark corners of my heart, I had taken everything He had. His humanity, His divinity, spilled onto the rock for me. He died my death–my broken, sinful, separating, human death–by choice. Because He loves me.

Then the sun rose and there in His divinity He walked out of my tomb. Broke the shackles off of my forever darkness, just walked out into the light. And that is what is different. It was not His humanity nor His divinity, that made Him my atonement. My rescuer. It was His love. His choice. I am always His choice.

His reckless love takes on the very greatest anguish to never be apart from me. To never have to let me go. In spite of my flaws, my weakness, the crippling weight of my guilt, He made the world His stage to show His love.

He loves me. Really loves me. By choice.

And there it is – Choice. The defining word.

Love is never love without choice. It is the choosing, the action, that makes it love. It is willingness to suffer that allows us to love. And there has never been anyone more willing to suffer.

Nothing can ever separate me from Him. Nothing. Because the question was my freedom, my heart. And in all my messiness He chose me. Wrapped His broken body around my shattered heart and chose me.

The difference is Love. Wild, reckless, unchanging love. The difference is Him.

I really get it. He is completely mine. So very completely that my death has already been endured. Already been conquered. Just because He loves me.

I, in awe and surrender, can simply dare to be Loved.

 

by Loxlia  http://Godhelps.net/About us    also   http://Brokenbeautyproject.com

Mandela — A Guide to Being You

I’ve written how I loved Invictus, a movie about Mandela and how he used the rugby team to solidify South Africa. I remember Matt Damon (team captain) going to visit the prison where Mandela spent 27 years, and in wonder spreading his arms to touch both walls, both ways of the 8×8 cell. There was a hard-back chair and that was all.

I still can’t imagine it–how anyone could survive that and come out as a beacon of love and forgiveness. But he did. One man can change a country, a world.

Inspiration like that doesn’t last long unless you feed it. Have you noticed that? But how can we keep it alive?

The same way he achieved his amazing triumph of spirit–by choice.

It just now came to me. He was in an easier place to do the thing we don’t do, because in that kind of desolate place, it is continually before you every waking minute–choose! You have to choose how to think about this, how to relate to it, or your emotions will eat you alive.

Here’s what I know: in that situation emotions take over and fire up every possible kind of anger, fear, and despair–running the gamut and determining your perspective. Or you completely shut down and go into depression, overwhelmed by the enormity of it all.

The grinding day after day sameness and privation would break most of us, but not Mandela; or you, if you believed in choice like he did and if you were committed to right like he was. The one line of “Invictus,” the poem he kept with him continually, says it all, “I am the captain of my soul.”

In other words, I don’t have to react, I can choose and depend on Goodness and Love to bring it around–eventually.

Sometimes all you can choose is your perspective, but that is yours. And no one can take that if you don’t allow them to choose how you see or how you react.

Think about that. You are capable of choice.

My husband and I are currently reading the prophet Hosea in the Holy Scriptures. What has jumped at me is God’s perspective on pain. He says He took them to the Valley of Achor (Suffering or Troubling) as a door of hope.

Really? Say again… So He did. When they had plenty, they became full and left Him…they didn’t need Him when it was good and forgot that He was their Source, their protector, their happiness.

If God blessed them they forgot Him. That became a huge problem for Israel. Over and over it happened. They either didn’t believe that He really loved and cared for them, or they didn’t care. But again and again when things got good they forgot about their living God and ran after gods they created.

Suffering was their safety.

Suffering is one of our best teachers, and we have another sublime example of it in Mandela’s life.

Suffering forces choice. But it’s not God’s desire.

His problem and ours is that when things are good enough we forget about God and choice.

When Bad things Happen…

I think God gets blamed for things He doesn’t do.

Many think if God is sovereign–all powerful–why do we suffer?

Especially if He’s already won?

Why doesn’t He stop things?

In my first job out of college–teaching in the California women’s prison, the number one question I was asked was, “If there’s a loving God why did He allow what happened to me as a child?”

It’s taken 40 years to come up with a good answer, and I call it The Story Behind Our Story.

I made it the last chapter in my book, The Worst Evil–Losing Yourself, and truly, I told it as faithfully as I could through human eyes. The gist of it is that God values love and freedom. He wanted a government based on love and that requires freedom.

Love is a choice, not a feeling. And it requires three things:

1.  beings capable of making choices

2.  real alternatives to choose

3.  that God allow and honor their choices.

It’s important to note here that God started us out with only good–we  were only attracted to good, only responded to good.

Originally we didn’t have this pull to evil or selfishness. Now we respond to good and evil. We’re pulled both ways.

So what happened? If we were only good…why is there evil now?’

First, we have to learn to think much bigger than we have been taught.

We have to understand that if God desired only Love, then He had to allow freedom.

We have to be allowed real choices that are really respected.

Creation was great until He was opposed, but then He had to allow the whole thing to play out.

Because the entire universe needed truth to be evident to all.

I’m sure that God tried over and over to reclaim the dissident–show him where he was headed, what would happen if he insisted doing his own thing.

But once evil is embraced, it takes hold –like cancer–it destroys good.

The war was on.

Now the question arose: who is responsible?

If God had completely separated from the opposition, they would have died.

But the whole watching universe would have wondered who caused their demise?

Enter, the developmental model.

The plan to give creatures procreation was a great stage for the truth to become obvious. It’s my belief that it was already a design in God’s mind, as another means of showing love. But now, though extremely risky, it was also the most powerful demonstration of good and evil choices.

If we embrace love we hand it down to  our offspring–even with broken natures.

If we embrace evil we hand it down to our offspring with its resulting death.

Again, we were started out good–with freedom.

Choices become the building blocks of our identity (also known as character).

Twenty-plus years as a Family Systems Therapist proved to me that generations usually repeat their dysfunctions. Sometimes getting better, sometimes getting worse.

Perception is a choice. There are always two ways, at least, to see things. But evil is resident here.

I like things simple. So I believe the Genesis story. And how exciting that science is catching up to endorsing it!

If evil moved in with Eve’s choice, then the Garden went from 99% good and 1% evil to 50% good and 50% evil.

God put a boundary on evil inside of us. He gave us a hatred for it. (Genesis 3:15) So I believe that it has to keep balanced unless we choose or agree with one or the other.

God doesn’t want us to be afraid. He will keep safe what is His. But He won’t force you to be his friend.  Neither will He force you to heal your brokenness.

The good news is God is always looking for ways to get through to you, to show you His Love. He doesn’t give up until you can’t hear or see Him anymore, until you truly are “done” with Him. And He is the only one who really knows when that is.

If you need a bigger, better picture of God, and suffering, come to my blog for five minutes a day. In a year you will have the most compact and comprehensive picture of God available. http://Godhelps.net/God-in-a-Box