HOW COULD A GOOD GOD ALLOW SO MUCH SUFFERING? by Chris Morphew for Core Christianity
I first met Alegra when she was five years old, on her very first day of school.
Alegra was this fun, thoughtful, big-hearted kid—the kind of person who was always way more interested in paying attention to other people than trying to make them pay attention to her. And even though, as one of her teachers, I’d been told that Alegra was recovering from brain surgery and still had a bunch of medical stuff going on, you never would have guessed it by how enthusiastic she always was about school.
But then one day, Alegra didn’t come back to school. And as the days went on, we got the news that she wouldn’t be coming back to school.
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Alegra’s cancer was back, and this time it wasn’t going away.
Not long after her sixth birthday, I found myself standing in a crowded church, surrounded by the hundreds of other friends and family who had gathered for Alegra’s funeral.
As we prayed and hugged and cried and said goodbye, the same questions burned through my mind over and over again.
God, how could you let this happen?
Don’t you care?
The Biggest Question
Maybe you’re going through something awful and heartbreaking yourself—or maybe someone you love is. Or maybe it’s just that the constant stream of horrible stuff on the news is making you feel anxious and scared about the world, and you don’t know how to make sense of it all.
Maybe you wonder where God is in the middle of all this.
When you think about it, all this hurt and brokenness in the world seems like a pretty big problem for God. Or at least, it seems like a pretty big problem for us, if we want to believe what God says about himself in the Bible: in particular, that he is all-loving and all-powerful.
Because if God truly is all-loving, then surely he’d want to stop all the suffering that’s going on in the world, right?
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