Finding God in Tragedy

A tragedy like what happened yesterday on the campus of Virginia Tech University inevitably calls people to question where God is in the midst of senseless pain and suffering. It's small comfort to many to know that God is grieving with us. People want to know why He didn't stop the tragedy from occuring. The answer is not that God doesn't care. He cares about each of us very deeply and intimately and His heart is more grieved that we can know. What happened yesterday happened because of sin which entered the world because God chose to give us free will. Sometimes people use their free to will to sin and hurt other people, whether on a smaller scale such as theft, adultery, rape or individual murder or on a larger scale such as the mass murder that happened yesterday. The innocent are hurt because of the actions of the guilty. This is the nature of life. God did not create robots. He gave us free will because He wanted us to have a genuine love relationship with Him, but with free will comes the option to reject God, and, in cases like what happened yesterday or what has been happening around the world with genocide and wars, that rejection of God leads to heartache for many. Much of the pain in our world is caused by somebody's sin. We complain when we are hurt by the sin of others because it doesn't seem fair, but do not think that we are alone in our tears. God is hurt by our pain and by the sin that claims the lives of the innocent and the innocence of the alive. This is not how He wanted the world to be and it's not how it would be if we chose Him.

Events like this always bring me back to the importance of living in today. Tomorrow is not a guarantee for any of us, and that fact is so easy to forget when we move comfortably through our routine lives. I know that God has used the most heart breaking events in my life to bring me back to Him and take me away from the false security of my self-focused existence. On a large scale, He uses these experiences to bring us together as a people to pour out love and prayers over each other whereas during most of our days we are negligent and lazy in truly and actively loving one another. I am not a wise theologian, and I certainly don't pretend to know the mind of God. I do know from personal experience that the only way to get through tragedy is to focus on the good, because if you only look at the bad, you will lose heart and the enemy will have victory. We serve a God who is capable of bringing good out of everything (Romans 8:28), even the effects of our sin. He is working in this Virginia Tech tragedy already, and we just need to keep praying and watching Him move. In many ways, this is a helpless feeling for human beings who want to be able to fix everything. I watched the news last night and heard all the finger pointing that the media was attempting to do, and I turned to John and asked him what they were trying to accomplish by casting blame. We want things to make sense and we want to sleep peacefully at night knowing that someone was to blame when something goes wrong. Life isn't that simple. Situations like this show an even larger societal failure that goes beyond university leadership and that would probably be too complex to address in a 30 minute news segment--a societal failure that cannot be fixed without reexamining our values, our lifestyle, and our relationship with our Creator, whether we acknowledge Him or not. The media does not want to tackle this so they cast individual blame, but I challenge the followers of Christ to check to see how much of your life aligns with God's word versus how much aligns with society's noise. Ask yourself what you can do to help further the cause of God today rather than the world's cause. And make sure that you are not sleep-walking through your daily routine when you should be living every day like your last because you never know when your last day will be. Sorry to be morbid, but it's true, and if no other good comes from this situation for you, I pray that you would gain an awareness of the preciousness of every breath that you take and that you would treasure the miracle of being alive even in times of pain.