when bad things happen

Why?

When horrible, painful things happen people often say “How could God allow this to happen?” I don't think that’s the right question. The real question is, “what do I do now?” In life, bad things happen. Whether you believe in God or not, bad things are still happening everywhere. And they are happening to Bible beaters, Atheists and Sadists. Bad things happening do not mean there is no God- that just proves His existence. Scientists have proved by observing the world around us that things in nature are not as simple as they might seem. Isaac Newton made many discoveries including “for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction”. Chinese mysticism says that everything has an opposite. There is dark and light, hot and cold, up and down, positive and negative ions, etc....

Think about it, in every Disney movie there is a good guy and a bad guy. Those movies stand the test of time because at the end of every movie the bad guy is dealt with and the good guy triumphs. All I can say is this, there better be a God. There better be someone out there who is stronger and smarter than the rest of us because until there is a pill for hatred and ignorance human beings are destined to continue hurting each other. When I watch the news I cannot deny that the bad guys of the world are having a hay day. There is no way that 9-11 will ever make sense to me. Innocent people died. The holocaust is another one of those horrible large scale human injustices that will never be “okay”. Why do bad things happen?

The debate of predestination, and freewill rages on. If God knows that something bad is about to happen why doesn’t he do something to prevent it? Does God allow bad things to happen? If so, why should he be trusted?

When my Granny was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s she was seventy-nine years old and a widow of almost four years. When I found out about her diagnosis I remember suddenly replaying in my mind every cheesy made for TV movie that I had ever seen. Have you ever noticed that they are all very similar? It starts with the mundane everyday lives of this wholesome but imperfect family. And suddenly a loved one is struck down by a terminal disease. And at some point in the 2hrs one or two people have a nervous breakdown, the husband has an affair, the mom doesn’t get out of bed unless it’s to get another bottle of whiskey. The loveable aunt is pale and sickly because of some hard to pronounce illness but throughout the whole debacle is smiling and telling everyone “I’m not afraid of death”. Meanwhile, the little sister starts dating (and probably sleeping with) bad boys and the little brother starts skipping class and hanging out with the “wrong kind of kids” who do drugs and steal. And that’s always as far as I would get. Of all of the sappy dramatic movies I have seen I couldn’t begin to tell you how any of them end. It is when things are falling apart and everyone is self destructing that I usually get fed up and leave the room while my mother sits with her box of tissues engrossed by every twist and turn of the plot. Those movies never seemed real. Even their pain seemed fake. I mean, I knew people who knew people who had a loved one who was dying, but they didn’t behave like the TV families. There is nothing that prepares us for things like this. And though the idea of going off the deep end seems appealing, how does the story end? Is that the best way to handle it? This was my sweet little grandmother who suddenly couldn’t remember if she had eaten that day, or the day before, or the day before that. She moved in with my parents three years after the initial diagnosis and my role model, my mother became her caretaker. It took a really long time for it to sink in that things would never be the same again.

Growing up in the Bible belt, churches are not hard to come by. I was raised in a devout Christian home by two pious and honest parents. I say pious and honest, because piety is pretty, honesty isn’t always. Both are necessary. I am not saying that bad things never happened in our family, but I don’t remember any. I always thought that if I said the right thing, and did the right thing, and didn’t “fall off the band wagon” nothing bad would ever happen to me or anyone around me. It wasn’t until I was in my early twenties, after experiencing life with and without Jesus as my "co-pilot", that the foundation of everything I held true began to shake. My grandmother had been living with my parents for a little over a year when my mom noticed the lump. Phone calls were followed by doctors appointments which were followed by tests which were followed by waiting. A lot of waiting. And then the results came back. It’s malignant. And rare. Because of her age chemo and radiation are out of the question.

WHAT!!! This isn’t really happening. This is a bad dream. I have watched so many sappy lifetime movies that I am dreaming about them. This can’t be happening. She’s a Christian.

Suddenly in the midst of the shock I was angry. I was very angry. I was surprised I was so angry. My one constant was, Why? WHY?!? Of all the people on the whole earth both dead and living why my grandmother? You’re telling me Hitler died a seemingly quick, somewhat painless death and my grandmother who has been a Christian for 60+ years and raised 10 children in a Godly home is going to die...and slowly. WHY??!

On top of being angry I was also feeling very guilty. I am a Christian. Jesus died on the cross to save me from hell. I am deeply indebted to Him. How dare I be mad at Him. That’s sick and twisted. I should know better. That attitude reeks of heathenism…. Though I was dealing with guilt it didn’t change the fact that deep down I was mad, and disappointed. My solution: give God the silent treatment. I came to the conclusion that in the midst of the suffering and sickness in Africa, and all of the global warming and all of the problems in all of the world, me not praying would get God’s attention….

That didn’t last very long. Talking to God gives me hope. Hope was what I needed right then more than anything else. So even though I was mad and would have loved to give God a piece of my mind, I prayed. I begged.

God has a plan. Okay, I need to keep in mind that God has a plan…. So in allowing my grandmother to get Alzheimer’s and also breast cancer, he obviously plans to heal her in a dynamically miraculous way. …. Right? God? You have a plan right? Your plan is to put us through all of this and then make it all better like Job, right?

Nothing changed. I began to feel depressed. And subsequently more guilty. I am a Christian if anyone should be glowing with joy and glad tidings it’s me, I have the good news of the gospel... good news. Hey, “become a Christian and if someone you love gets a terminal illness just pray and they may or may not be healed”. I am not really sure how that is good news.

I wrestled secretly with depression for almost a year. I went through periods of praying and feeling encouraged to feeling hopeless and angry. One day I had a revelation. It was more like a declaration. I was sobbing sitting in my bed praying for God to do something about my nephew who had just been arrested for being in the wrong place and the wrong time and having stupid friends.

I know You’re there. I can’t see you, but I know You’re there. You know how I know you’re there because all I have to do is open my eyes and I can see the impact of evil. Polar opposites are not figurative, they’re literal. So if evil is real, then You are real. And You will fix this. Maybe not today, or tomorrow, or even in my life time, but I can sleep at night because I know someday Jesus, You are going to come back and kick butt. If You aren’t real then I am royally pissed. What’s the point? Why get out of bed? If the bad guy is going to win at the end of the story why bother. I know I’m not perfect. I’m no Mother Teresa. I don’t deserve rescuing. But you know what, my grandmother doesn’t deserve to die slowly. She’s never done anything that would justify that. And if something that horrible can happen to a good person like her then by God -there’s hope for all of us.

Yes, there is a God. And this story does have a happy ending. It better. We all have to face the reality of the world we live in. On the news every day are details of innocent lives that are devastated in mere seconds. As a Christian teenager I thought I was invincible and my family super human and nothing bad could ever happen to us. I thought all the heartache was “their” problem, because they were not like me, Christian. As I have grown up and experienced disappointments and heartaches of my own I have learned that none of us are immune to this thing called life. But that doesn't mean we have to go at it alone. I can sleep at night because I believe there is a God. The hero of this story will come and save the day.


"When the Tears Fall" by Tim Hughes (a well written song that really spoke to me)

I highly recommend you hear the sermon on the book of Ecclesiastes by Pastor Matt Chandler. Listen to part 15 of the "Beyond the Sun" series A Life Well Lived This series was completely amazing. You can hear the rest of the series and other sermons on itunes.

Find out more about The Village Church


"It happens so regularly that it's predictable. The moment I decide to do good, sin is there to trip me up. I truly delight in God's commands, but it's pretty obvious that not all of me joins in that delight. Parts of me covertly rebel, and just when I least expect it, they take charge.
I've tried everything and nothing helps. I'm at the end of my rope. Is there no one who can do anything for me? Isn't that the real question?

The answer, thank God, is that Jesus Christ can and does. He acted to set things right in this life of contradictions where I want to serve God with all my heart and mind, but am pulled by the influence of sin to do something totally different.

With the arrival of Jesus, the Messiah, that fateful dilemma is resolved. Those who enter into Christ's being-here-for-us no longer have to live under a continuous, low-lying black cloud. A new power is in operation. The Spirit of life in Christ, like a strong wind, has magnificently cleared the air, freeing you from a fated lifetime of brutal tyranny at the hands of sin and death.

God went for the jugular when he sent his own Son. He didn't deal with the problem as something remote and unimportant. In his Son, Jesus, he personally took on the human condition, entered the disordered mess of struggling humanity in order to set it right once and for all. The law code, weakened as it always was by fractured human nature, could never have done that.

The law always ended up being used as a Band-Aid on sin instead of a deep healing of it. And now what the law code asked for but we couldn't deliver is accomplished as we, instead of redoubling our own efforts, simply embrace what the Spirit is doing in us."- Paul the Apostle

Be the change...

There are people who believe that human beings are inherently evil. And others believe that human beings are inherently good.

No matter what you believe you must admit that to a certain degree every human being has a capacity to give and receive love on some level. With that capacity comes a certain sense of caring. Once any human being has experienced love there is on a subconscious level the belief that others should experience love as well. The desire to make the lives of others better so that they too can experience love transcends religions, denominations, ethnicity, age, gender and socio-economic background.

Take for example, Debbie Dortzbach. She is not a celebrity. She is not famous. She is a human being who has a heart and she has dedicated her life to improving life for those living with AIDS.


This is an excerpt from a Relevant Magazine article.




For decades, Debbie Dortzbach and her husband, Karl, have had a passion for world missions. On their first trip to Eritrea in 1973, they survived an abduction by the Eritrean Liberation Front and later wrote a book about the experience called Kidnapped. Since then, her passion for international missions, AIDS awareness, orphan support and sex education for youth has only grown. She now serves as World Relief's international director for HIV/AIDS programs and travels the world developing strategic leadership plans to help fight AIDS and promote its awareness. Her new book, The AIDS Crisis (InterVarsity), looks at the problem of AIDS and what role we can have in helping those affected by it.

How did you first get involved in the fight against AIDS?
For years I had been working in urban and rural poor communities in Kenya. When symptoms of AIDS surfaced in the mid '90s, it was disconcerting. Young adults were dying. Always before it was the children we were concerned about. Now we were terribly concerned as children were left vulnerable without their parents. Obviously, something very drastic was surfacing, and to learn more I returned to graduate school not only to educate myself, but to develop skills to know how to approach such a vast, community-wide problem. I discovered that the community-based work I had done all my life was a rich starting place for helping develop a church-based movement of God's people addressing the growing AIDS crisis.

How has the anti-AIDS and international relief efforts changed in recent years?
There has been much progress—from addressing issues of denial and human rights geared toward high-risk groups to admitting that AIDS knows no boundaries—and we all are vulnerable and responsible to protect ourselves and to care for those affected. Initially, responses were painstakingly slow with few committed Christians involved. Today, a movement has erupted of Christians eager to see God change the face of AIDS in the world and begin with them. It's exciting.

Do you think that celebrity involvement in global AIDS relief has made a major difference?
It depends on which celebrity. If the celebrity uses it to leverage self-examination and committed action that actually benefits people who are affected, it's wonderful. Some are very helpful—pushing individual and corporate or community responsibility. Others appear self-serving in the long run—thinking of image and construing other agendas. By and large, high-profile individuals or organizations have a very big responsibility—to mobilize, to mobilize, to mobilize. It is organizations like World Relief and the local church that need to show those mobilized how to get active and what works. That also is a huge responsibility. God has much for all of us to do.

What regions of the world are doing the best job in combating AIDS, and what have their strategies been?
Thankfully, several are emerging. First of all, much of Latin America has escaped the large numbers Africa has faced. I believe in part the important role of religion has influenced this. Other regions like Kenya, Uganda and Burkina Faso have had large rates which are now beginning to decline. That is very encouraging and is a mark of effective prevention efforts—notably abstinence and life skills for youth, marital faithfulness among men and women, and clear political endorsement.
Is it difficult to identify the root of the problem?
Not to identify—behavior is the root. The struggle comes in trying to change behavior—dealing with relationships and self.

How can a passionate Westerner join the effort and really make a difference?
The degree to which we make a difference depends on how we transform passion into godly behavior and action. This means subjecting to deeper understanding of issues, cultures, strategies and approaches. This means self-examination about our own fears, expectations and sexual practices as well as thoughts. This means getting out of our comfort zones to meet people where they are and invest in them over the long term to guide changing behavior and to care for the long illnesses relating to AIDS. AIDS gives new definition to sustained commitment in ministry.

What steps can twentysomethings take to fight cultural and political indifference?
Discover role models—study them, follow them, learn from them. Get informed—there is a ton of information, not just about AIDS but about what is working in AIDS. Get involved—examine your own behaviors, attitudes, prejudices, reluctance to touch the issue of AIDS. Get involved in reaching out to people with AIDS in your own community. It will change your perspective and make the problem real, enabling a more informed and cross-cultural response in other places. It will tear down walls of self-righteousness and stigma.

Tell us about your new book.
It is trove of people's stories—affected by AIDS and loved by God. It is a guide to getting into the nitty-gritty and saying no to indifference through identifying practical steps of engagement. It is a basic primer, telling God's story of intervention through His church and people, meant to be sanctuary from the harsh realities of global AIDS.

Debbie Dortzbach is the author of The AIDS Crisis (InterVarsity).