God is good all the time and all the time…. “God is good!” The congregation shouted back. I wished I had their confidence as I sat back down in the plush, padded pew. One week before launch and I still wasn’t sure that God was all that nice of a guy. It seemed like He had His moments of showing up every now and then (those miracles tho) but some of His teaching moments seemed rather sinister to me. The weeks leading up to launch were emotional, stirring up a lot of apparently unresolved issues. The harshness of rejection, the strain of complicated relationships, and discomfort of leaving everything I felt secure in ripped open old wounds I thought had already healed. Instead, it felt like I was reliving it all over again… And I just wanted to know if this was the doing of the so-called good God. Not something a missionary should be questioning… Yes I know. I realized that I had never asked God if He was good…. And if I had, I had never stopped and listened for His answer. So finally I decided to “confront” Him. After all, God created me.. He should be able to handle any hard questions I might have. Here’s how it went:
Me: God, are You good? Like really?
God: You don’t think I’m good?
Me: Not really..
God: Why not?
Me: Well look at all this crap I’ve had to go through that I didn’t have anything to do with. I could think of a number of scenarios that could have been improved.
God: Did I ever fail you? Were you ever hurt beyond repair?
Me: Uh… Well… I mean… Like… I didn’t know where You were sometimes and it was 50/50 whether I would make it out of there alive or not.
God: But you’re still here.
Me: Well yeah but…
God: The shadow of death was near, but death never touched you. Evil was present, but it never overcame you.
I didn’t say much after that, but I still wasn’t convinced. A day after we landed in Costa Rica our ministry host led us in a devotional on “to live is Christ, and to die is gain.” I was overcome with the realization that I viewed these sorrowful times as loss of life. Life that had been stripped away from me. I had mourned and grieved them… Not realizing that that loss of life was what led me to finding a rich abundant life in Christ. Matthew 16:25 says, “For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” I lost that life but found a whole new complete one in Him. I traded a half-rate existence for something out of this world. That’s how GOOD He is.
