God is Good? [question God]

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“God is good, a hiding place in tough times. He recognizes and welcomes anyone looking for help, no matter how desperate the trouble,” Nahum 1:7.

“God is light, pure light;

there’s not a trace of darkness in Him,”

1 John 1:5.
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God is good. That’s easy to proclaim, even shout from the rooftops when life is as we would choose. It’s easy to see how God is working for our good when the bills are paid, our family is healthy, vacations are planned, no one’s in trouble… In fact, sometimes it requires effort to remember to give God more than a quick shout out of “Thanks” while we are moving on up to our next level of conquering.

It’s not so easy to proclaim God’s abundant goodness when test results come back malignant, when babies we dreamed of cradling never make it beyond month 4 of the pregnancy, when abusers lay hands where they were never meant to go, when children around the world die of starvation daily while Americans scarf diet pills off the shelves. I had to ask myself, is God still good when one life is full of exuberant joy and another full of horrific pain?

I’ve had to ask God that question many times over the years. Usually it’s been a friend’s hopeless circumstance that has my heart pulled into that pit the Psalmist says has a miry tear soaked ground. Here is where I meet with God. Not a comfortable Panera lunch kind of meeting, but an often ugly encounter full of accusation, questions and tears. I want answers! No, what I really want is to make all the pain go away and have the person come back fixed and whole and unscathed. God has different plans and doesn’t seem scared off by my tantrum. He still beckons and He still speaks, so I keep coming back.

What He’s taught me is that His goodness is immutable, regardless of my circumstances. His goodness is and will always be. The circumstances of my life are never a reflection of His ‘badness.’ He caused me to contemplate how His goodness could possibly be so changeable. If He is ‘good’ when a couple settles on their first home is He also bad when another couple vacates that very house, on that very day, because of foreclosure? If he is good when one son returns from Iraq is he bad when his best friend’s remains will forever be in Iraq? If He is good when one life is saved; is He is bad when another is horrifically ended. No, He is good all the time. This is a truth that I have to relearn, and thankfully He’s a patient teacher!

I wrestled with these inconsistencies. I wondered how I could proclaim the goodness of God in my circumstances when others were dire. In particular I wrestled with God over the murder of a student I taught for two years. Shen had been lured to a bogus babysitting job and was abused then murdered. I don’t think I’ve ever felt my heart sink as it did when I heard this news. I was close to Shen because I was her Psychology teacher, so she had opened up about things in her life through her writings. I kept thinking back to our last conversation when she came to my room after school one day, just before her senior year was over. We talked about her plans for the future with excitement and trepidation. Now there would be no future.

Of course I knew that murders happened every other day before Shen’s when I had been proclaiming God’s goodness, they just hadn’t affected me. But now this murder had reared its demonic claws in my life and I questioned how God could still be good. In my head I knew that God’s goodness couldn’t have changed just because an avalanche of pain was crushing me. I knew at that moment others were rejoicing for the victories in their life and praising God. But as I watched the devastation Shen’s mother and father walked through, I was angry at God. What possible comfort could anyone provide this family, absolutely everything felt hollow. I remember leaving Shen’s viewing to go to Bible study and feeling outrage at the person who had prayed for this murderer. I wanted Shen's killer to be murdered, not see him be redeemed!

I would like to say that after a month of prayer I came around and nestled back into my beliefs in the immutable nature of God’s goodness. No, this was a journey of over a year that included several nightmares and a part of myself being locked off from God, then my wall broke. The message I woke to one day was whispered very gently into my broken heart, God said, ‘Jennifer, I did not desire this to happen. People are sinful and you live in a broken world where people will choose to do what I abhor. My goodness has not changed.’

I was confused because I now felt rest in my soul which had been writhing for over a year. What confused me was why this message, which was something I had known for years, was now piercing my heart as truth. I had not received some new word from God that created healing. My broken heart was calmed by an eternal truth that my heart was finally ready to hear. After this day the nightmares stopped and I slowly began to open back up and be vulnerable with God once again.

I had to come to the conclusion that God is good because His Word says so. I had to trust that His timing is not mine. I had seen Him turn tragedy into triumph countless times and now He was calling me to trust in His ultimate goodness. He does not desire ugly and horrific things to happen, but in our broken world they do and He is the master of using them to create beautiful things within the Body of Christ. He will bring beauty from ashes in His time, which rarely is a match for our own.

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“God sent me to announce the year of His grace---a celebration of God’s destruction of our enemies---and to comfort all who mourn, to care for the needs of all who mourn in Zion, give them bouquets of roses instead of ashes, messages of joy instead of news of doom, a praising heart instead of a languid spirit,” Isaiah 61:2-3

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