It’s easier to know of God’s goodness when I can be selective with my reality.
When I can step outside and breathe in the blue sky and the green grass and embrace Him in the breeze and forget for a moment.
Forget that my loved ones have lives that are crumbling around them, forget that they stepped out in obedience and fell headlong into an abyss of abandoned promises…forget that there's a homeless man somewhere depending on me for things I don't think I can give. forget that babies get taken away and long-awaited and anticipated miracles don’t always come the way we believe Him for. Forget that children starve and mothers struggle and the world breaks in a million little ways.
We break.
Since the tearing of heart from Heart in the garden, we’ve been breaking the world and ourselves.
The age-old question… “How can there be a good God when bad things happen?”
this ISN’T my question.
My question is, “how can bad things happen when there is a good God?” these two realities…His unchanging love and goodness, and this brokenness all around me…they don’t match up. These realities are tectonic plates that don’t quite fit together, and so they push and grind and create quakes in our faith.
I find I can’t deny either reality. I can’t pretend Him away, this Lover who breathed life into being…and I can’t deny that this life He gave is full of things that hurt.
I’m not ready to blame the whole thing on man either. It seems like a cop out for those who feel like He needs to be defended. “God is good, Satan is bad, and we live in a fallen world.”
Yes, we broke the world He gave us. But His sovereignty remains. He allows. And how to tell someone walking through a door in obedience only to have it slammed in their face that He can be trusted? That He doesn’t go back on His word? That He always keeps His promises?
And He doesn’t explain Himself either. we know His ways are higher, but is it really that far beyond our comprehension?
This lyric from a song haunts me: “Healing doesn’t come from the explained.”
We can’t explain any of this away. We can’t justify it. We can’t unbreak the world.
So, what then? Trust? Trust in the face of the unexplained is the difference between clenched fists, shaking at the sky…and open hands, lifted in worship.
Trust that He is good not in spite of, but inside of, our brokenness. That in the center of the whole mess is a Heart that beats wildly for us.
Do you want to know what His reply to me was?
“Because I love you."
He does love, and this love turns clenched fists into clinging hands and clinging hands into lifted hands, outstretched in trust that He will pick us up and carry us through.
If you don’t feel like you can trust His actions towards you…can’t trust the things He allows…trust the Heart behind them. this will make all the difference.
And someday, He will finish what He started 2,000 years ago, when Heart tore away from Heart on Calvary.
He will unbreak the world.
