Suffering Children
Perhaps the greatest conundrum for a thinking, believing, person is, and always has been, the attempt to understand why people, especially children, who are without moral blemish, are visited with catastrophic illness and other great tragedies.
Roman Catholics such as I have always been taught that God is omnipotent and just. Therein lies the conundrum: how can a just God, if He is also an omnipotent God, permit such undeserved suffering? If He is indeed just, He must be unable to prevent it; and if He is indeed omnipotent (and therefore able to prevent it), He must be unjust. The answer to all this, we are told, will be learned in the next life, and we Christians are totally unashamed to admit that we believe that. God is omnipotent and just, and we are simply incapable of understanding why He permits certain things to happen in our lives.
In The Book of Deuteronomy, in a formula that recurs throughout, the people are promised they will receive blessings for obedience to God and punishment for disobedience. Belief in the Deuteronomistic Theology is the reason that Job’s friends, who attend him after he has been visited with the greatest personal tragedies imaginable, are trying to determine from him what wrong he has done to incur the wrath of God, so sure are they that he would not have suffered such tragedies had he not brought them on by his own actions (some friends!).
Then along came the New Testament, and Jesus made “all things new.” We Christians do not believe (as did those friends of Job and their contemporaries) that personal tragedies, such as cancer in children, are the result of our (and certainly not their) actions. This, of course, is why we are faced with the mystery, and why we must take it on faith that God permits such things for reasons that we will not understand in this life. Contemplating problems that simply cannot be resolved to one’s satisfaction, without the benefit of deep faith, can make one’s mind race faster than one’s body can paddle a kayak in the ocean.
(On such things does one ruminate while paddling a one-person kayak miles out in the ocean - closer to God.)
