When I asked “What’s next?” or “What would you like for us to think about together?” I received several replies asking the question about Why bad things happen – that is, if there’s a good God. Sometimes this is an intellectual puzzle. More often, the question is a cry from a place of agony and loss – captured achingly on film by Sally Field in Steel Magnolias.

We want to get past asking Why do bad things happen to good people? – as if God should shelter the good, but let things fall upon those who aren’t. And who’s good and bad? I don’t really want bad things to happen to whomever the “bad” people might be. God’s not a rewarder of the good and punisher of the bad. God is all grace and mercy. And then, sometimes we aren’t insightful in what’s good and what’s bad. We buy society’s measures too thoughtlessly.

C.S. Lewis estimated that 4/5ths of human suffering happens because of human wickedness, greed, and stupidity. My percentage would be higher. A tornado, or a cancer, or other seemingly “natural” disasters aren’t inflicted on victims by a hateful person. But isn’t it the case that the cumulative impact the world’s whole population has had on the world have heightened the occurrences of terrible happenings? Corporate greed and careless governing have led to toxicity in the environment and illnesses in our bodies.

God not only isn’t the rewarder of the good and punisher of the bad. God isn’t your personal bodyguard. God doesn’t weave a protective bubble around those who pray. It’s dangerous out there. And God made it so.

God could have created a world where no harm ever befalls anybody, where all people always do the right thing, basically a world without sin. People say God is in control, but we should praise God for not being controlling. Love would not and cannot control the beloved. God loves us, asking us to love God and one another – which leaves us space not to do so.

And God could have created a world without death – which we usually count as one of those bad things that happens to people. Of course, earth would fill up pretty rapidly. Would we be careful, caring, and gentle with others if death weren’t looming? Would we be grateful for another day, or any acts of kindness? Isn’t there an ironic burst of beauty in many deaths? The colorful leaves of autumn? You’re looking at the death of those leaves. The tender words of love and precious memories exchanged in your mom’s final days? So lovely.

What God promises in Scripture is that God is and will always be with us. As we age, what do we value? Not things so much as who’s with us. God was so determined to be with us that God become one of us, a vulnerable child like we all once were, knowing hunger, a scraped knee, economic uncertainty, friendship, rejection, sunny and rainy days, aches, pains and pleasures, and finally death itself. God is in all of that with us, suffering the single most unjust, unfair and premature death ever.

God is one with us in all suffering.  And God redeems us from the inside, raising up Jesus and ultimately raising us up into a beautiful life where there is no suffering and no questions about why bad things happen. God will ever redeem all of creation, restoring and perfecting that originally glorious creation we’ve mucked up over the millennia.

Having said all this (and I wrote a whole book about it, entitled – rather uncreatively – The Will of God), God always welcomes the question, Why? Not so much the intellectual, prideful one thinking he’s clever enough to debunk Christianity. God welcomes the Why? from any and all who suffer. It’s a sigh, a scream, a moaning, a pleading to make sense of what was unthinkable, or unbearable.

The healing begins only with the shrill, exasperated cry, Why? The Bible’s prayers are full of Why?s: read the Psalms, or Job. Listen to Jesus himself, the one entirely close to God, crying out in his hour of desperate agony, “My God, my God…Why?” God didn’t shelter him, as God doesn’t shelter us. But God was with him, and will always be with us. The redemption to come is sure, precisely because Jesus entered into our Why?