Your Dying Spouse 650 - If You Love Me, God, Then Why..? {FMF}

Gordon Lightfoot said it best, and most poignantly, in The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald:

Does any man know

where the love of God goes

when the waves turn the minutes to hours?

Indeed.

If we're the children of a loving God, then how in blazes can He allow shipwrecks and cancers and genocide and the trafficking of children?

Does He really care?

Is He even there?

It's tempting to say that the question's unanswerable, and that you've just got to have faith in a purpose you can't see, but that's a cheap way out.

So here goes, with my version...

For our place in Creation to be meaningful, God had to include free will; the choice of Adam and Eve, and the choice we all face every day, for good or evil, for faith or apostasy.

Without free will, we're puppets. Not children of God.

But with free will, we can go seriously off the rails, hurting ourselves...and hurting others.

And that free will carries over into nature, beause through it, death by things like cancer entered the world.

I suspect God strongly wants to rescue us from this, but if He does, He negates His own purpose in creating us...back to being a puppeteer. 

He has, in a sense, tied His own hands...and the only thing He can do is be there for us. The trials that come from free will can be awful, but He is still bigger than they are, and He offers that 'bigness' to us.

We may not survive, but we will not perish, if we but take His hand.

You say, God, that you love me,

and I'm the apple of Your eye.

Then why did you craft this destiny

for which I have to die?

Don't get me wrong, I know the score;

death cometh from the Fall,

but what did I do to earn much more

pain, before your homeward call?

It seems You are the mighty hammer

and I, the humble nail

who cannot but reply in stammer

from this cancer's durance vile.

Came God's reply, so loud and kind,

"Like my Son who died, you are Mine."

Now, I'll bet that at this point you're expecting to see the The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald as the musical theme...

...but this has been a heavy post, so let's have some fun with The Ramones, and I Don't Wanna Grow Up. (It's the closing credits song from Shazam!, a really wonderful movie that portrays Christian faith as normal.)

Thanks to Carol Ashby, Blessed Are The Pure Of Heart is back on Kindle, and will be available in paperback soon.

Friends are everything. I couldn't have done it.

Marley, the canine waif from Afghanistan, whom WE helped save, has a Facebook page! Please drop by to see how happy he is today.

Below are my recent releases on Kindle -please excuse their presence in the body of the blog. I haven't the energy to get them up as 'buttons' in the sidebar. You can click on the covers to go to the Amazon links.