Trying to Answer: Why Does God Allow Bad Things to Happen (part 3 of a 3 part series)

I'm trying to answer these questions for no one but myself, but if you are interested in reading my first two essays, you can find them here and here.

In the middle of our infertility issues, I remember wondering which of all the terrible things I had ever done had caused this to happen, for surely this was some kind of punishment.  After all, I believe in a God of miracles.  I know that He and His Son can cure any affliction.  Clearly, I was unworthy of such a blessing.  Or maybe I was just so stubborn that God had to teach me the hard way.  Or maybe I just didn't have the kind of faith necessary to call forth such a miracle.  Whatever it was, whether in my past or present, obviously the problem was due to some deficiency in me, and God was just going to have to punish it out of me.  That was the conversation in my head on the bad days, even though I knew better. 

I don't, in fact, believe in a wrathful, angry, vengeful God, but when things go wrong, it's only human nature to find a reason for it, and sometimes when there is no good explanation, the one we grasp at is that our suffering must be a sign of God's displeasure.  Suddenly, God no longer resembles a loving father, but looks more like Zeus, grabbing that lightening bolt of his in rage and pointing it right at my back.  And so it was that in my late 20's I began to question the nature of God, His plan, His purposes, and my place within all of it.  Who was He, really?  And who was I to Him?  Once so sure of the answers--at least when the questions were much more simple--I was now floundering in deeper waters.

Then one day, as I turned to John, I read, "And as Jesus passed by, he saw a man which was blind from his birth.  And his disciples asked him, saying, Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?  Jesus answered, Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him" (John 9:1-3).  Never before had this particular passage spoken to personally to me.  It looked like I was asking an age old question, and there was peace in Christ's answer...but there were more questions, too.  Like, what exactly are the works of God?  And how, exactly, were they going to be made manifest in our infertility?  I still didn't have the whole answers for those.

As I have come to believe, the true answer, I think, begins in the lesson of the third of the host of heaven who in their premortal existence followed Satan and his plan for forced salvation.  Elder Robert D. Hales taught that, "Those who followed Satan lost the opportunity to receive a mortal body, live on Earth, and progress.  Because of the way they used their agency, they lost their agency."  What I find fascinating in that teaching is the connection between progress and agency.  Because they do not have the opportunity to experience mortal life, in all it's imperfection, they can not progress.  There is a direct correlation there, and it hints, I believe, at what the works of God actually entail.

His goal does not seem to be to provide a perfect life for each of us, but rather to give us life so that we might become perfected.  He doesn't seem to be so interested in clearing our path but far moreso in clarifying our hearts.  Like a good parent, He knows that what is best for us isn't that we are always just happy.  If that were the case He would give us everything we want the very minute we want it.  He would protect us from natural consequences.  He would shield us from pain.  Every real life parent knows how well that would turn out, right?  Though we want our children to be happy, we know that focusing primarily on giving them only happiness will actually end in misery.  God knows that real happiness--progression, salvation, and eternal life--come with certain costs.  Costs that seem necessary in some larger way.  In making those payments we have to opportunity to reap gread dividends, but He also knows that it is how we manage those payments that will make all the difference.

Our use of agency in responding to pain determines the outcome.  Pain does not have to embitter us.  Pain does not have to ruin us.  I absolutely know that there is a way to encounter pain so that it can be our best teacher.

(to be continued...because although I have deep thoughts, I have a life that gets in the way of writing them down.)