Op-Ed: Do You Suffer? Thank God.

"God didn't make cancer (or depression, death, poverty, etc) because cancer (depression, death, poverty, etc) is not good. So don't go blaming God for something He didn't make." (Same Kind of Different As Me, 2008)

Is your mind blown yet? Mine was after reading these sentences this morning.

And it made me think: do I blame God for the pills I have to take, for the energy I don't have, and for the demons that circle my bed and won't let me sleep at night?

To be honest, I don't blame God very often. But the reason is pretty ignoble: I'm lazy. I know in my head that the bad things in my life are not God's fault, so why waste the energy yelling at Him and laying the blame on Him for things that were never His idea in the first place? Why get all worked up and more frustrated than I already am by yelling at someone I can't see over an illness that others can't see? I know He'd hear me, so it's not for a lack of faith that I abstain from blaming God. I'm really just lazy.

Okay. So it's not God's FAULT that I suffer, He didn't do this PURPOSELY.
BUT - why does He ALLOW it to happen?

Oh, there's a question that has yet to be answered after centuries upon centuries of the world's tears.

In fact, there's an entire branch of thinking and studying  that tries to rationalize the relationship between God and suffering, and it's called theodicy. I'll be the first to admit that I'm not much of a theologian. I'd rather know things in simple terms and be able to explain them in simple terms to people who don't speak Theologese. So here's my theodicy, in simple terms, the way I know how.

God didn't create the evil things in this world. He's INCAPABLE of creating evil. As a 100% good being, He created us to be 100% good beings to share the world with Him. Since we messed that plan up, He now pushes through the evil to be with us and share His good with us. God is certainly powerful enough to wipe out evil forever, but would we really need Him after that? We certainly proved (and continue to prove) that we think we can handle everything without God. Eve figured she could do whatever she wanted with the infinite freedom God gave to her and Adam, and that quickly became doing something God told her not to do. She figured she knew better than (or at least as well as) God when it came to her well-being. Every single one of us is guilty of this.

Without evil, we'd be immature children, dependent on no one, least of all on God. As it is, many of us only turn to God when something goes wrong, right? So if nothing went wrong, we wouldn't have to turn to Him at all. We would just frolic through sunshine-y life, waiting for God to appear when faced with evil. In fact, I think that after awhile, we wouldn't even notice God's intervention in our lives because we'd take it for granted.

Does that scene of sunshine-y perfect life even include human free will? If we don't have the opportunity to face evil and make a decision about how we handle it, where is the free will? We would be children sheltered so completely from evil that we would cease to even be human. Think about it:

If there's never anything to get upset about, the range of human emotion disappears.
If there's never any reason to mourn, there's never a reason to celebrate.
If there's never any death, we would cease to value life.
If there's never a reason for tears, there's never a reason for smiles.
If there's never any sickness, there's no reason for healing.
And if there's never any evil, we would cease to recognize good.

I think the reason that the prospect of Heaven is so absolutely breath-taking is that we know what it's like to live without Heaven. We will appreciate it so much more after knowing what suffering is. If we stayed in Heaven without ever having to experience suffering, we probably wouldn't appreciate Heaven all.

God allows us to suffer because He knows we would never need Him without it. We would cease to see His hand in the events of our life because, really: what are events? We characterize them as good or bad, and without bad, it would be an endless succession of good. And life would become meaningless.

So I guess you could say that God lets us suffer because He loves us so much.
He would rather that we live, truly deeply emotionally live, than simply exist without knowing the difference.