“What about when a tsunami wipes out massive amounts of people in a second?”

“What about when an innocent child is abused?”

“What about when the worst things happen?’

“Where is God?”

I’m a nurse in a pediatric intensive care unit. I have seen the worst of the worst.

I’ve seen children cold, still, and as blue as the water they drowned in. I’ve seen babies with bandaged heads and blank eyes who will never speak or walk or laugh because they were abused. I’ve seen big, strong teenagers waste away in a matter of months from the cancer that doesn’t care that they wanted to be president. I’ve watched grown men lose control as they kneel at the bedside of their child and beg for forgiveness for crashing the car. I’ve cared for children with brains damaged beyond repair, with the pictures of them laughing and riding their bike just a few days before, surrounding me on the walls of their hospital room.

When bad things happen, it is tempting to despair, and questions arise such as:

Where is God in this mess? Does He really love us? If He loves us, why do these bad things happen?

God is here in our chaos. He’s so much here a part of our mess that He sent His only Son to our world to save us.

Alright, you say (forgive me for putting words in your mouth, dear reader, but bear with me for the sake of a point), so God sent His Son Jesus to save us from our sin, aka our “messiness,” why are there still bad things in the world?

The Thing About Free Will

So here’s the thing, friend (we are having a pretty deep heart to heart, I hope you don’t mind me assuming we are friends by this point), God in His omniscience (it means “infinite wisdom”), created us with free will. Free will means that we have the power to choose. God could have made us creatures without will, or creatures whose only will was to choose Him.

Imagine that you put a nice bone in front of a dog. The dog is not capable of thinking, “Oh hey, my buddy Skip the terrier next door would love this bone, I’m going to forgo my own ravenous stomach and save it for him,” he’s going to go at that bone like it’s his job. We as humans, however, possess the power of choice.

With this power of choice comes our ability to do beautiful and selfless things. Like turning off that T-swift jam because your brother is about to throw a chair through the window if he has to listen to “Style” one more time.

Choice can also be dangerous. People choose to kill, abuse, hurt, lie, break down, and destroy. The gift of free will given to us by God can be misused for evil. Evil is not a separate force that is competing with God on the same level. Evil is the absence of God, just as darkness is the absence of light.

God does not ever will a person to do evil, but He allows it. If we were only capable of choosing good, it would be the same as having no choice at all. He knows the magnitude of the gift of choice that He has given us, and He knows that some will abuse it.

Furthermore, in our post-Eden world, in addition to battling sin, we also face sickness and disease. These were never willed by God, but with the fall of mankind (when Adam and Eve chose to sin) God allowed sickness and death to enter the world. So we face sickness and disease, and it oftentimes seems senseless. There is some truth to that. Sickness on its own is just an unfortunate and unpleasant occurrence to be avoided. God allows sickness in the same way He allows bad things to happen, it’s a consequence of our sin and fallen nature, but it is also an opportunity for powerful sacrifice.

There is a plan

I never signed up for the job of being omniscient. You know who is? God. He has perfect 3D vision of the whole world’s past, present, and future because He created it. When tsunamis and forest fires and freak accidents happen it’s not because He hates China or California, it’s because… well I don’t know why.

God has the master plan. We are all going to (spoiler alert) die someday, and it’s not up to me to pick the when and where. I don’t know why things happen, but I know who I want if I am ever in the middle of burning forest or a wave the size of New York City. I want God.

Suffering and Sacrifice

Bad things are going to happen. You will rip a hangnail off your toe before an 18 mile hike and ask yourself why, oh, why couldn’t you just leave it alone. You will run up to the Coldstone doors just as they are closing for the night and be left ice cream-less. You will lose friends, you will cry, there will be moments when you wonder why life has to hurt. Suffering is real. But you know what else is real? Sacrifice.

The difference between suffering and sacrifice is monumental. Suffering is the bad thing that is happening, but sacrifice is when we choose to do something good with it. Sacrifice changes everything, because bad things will happen constantly, and they are out of our control, but with sacrifice we can choose to put things back into God’s hands. Suffering without the lens of sacrifice is just something to avoid, something to hate, something to disregard. This is how the world sees suffering, but I would like you to take a minute to take a Hulk size bite out of this:

“Another reason to love the cross is that it was the lot of your Savior, and therefore you choose it as your own lot. Must we not find good what He chose for Himself and for His Mother? Can we desire that He choose something else for us? He does not want us to consider something as an evil the means by which He saved us. Do two people love one another if one regards with horror what the other regards with love? When people love one another they have the same tastes — and Jesus wants us to share with Him His taste for the Cross.” (Fr. Jean C.J. d’Elbee, I Believe in Love)

Christ suffered more than any man ever has or will because He was both God and man and therefore took on a divine size dose of suffering that we are incapable of. When He chose, yes, chose to suffer and die on the cross for the sins of every person who had and would ever exist, He felt more physical pain, rejection, hatred, and despair that than we ever will. This makes Him the perfect one to come to when you are suffering. When your heart is breaking, He is opening up compassionate arms to you. He is holding you and saying gently, “I understand, my child, I have suffered too.”

By the merits of His suffering and death, Christ opened the gates of heaven, and thus showed us the power of redemptive suffering. Redemptive suffering means that our suffering does not have to go to waste. It’s a holy exchange, or trade.

This means that say I am suffering from the abandonment of a close friend, I can take that abandonment, and offer it to God, saying “”Hey God, this hurts, I am going to offering up this suffering to you for the my aunt who is trying and can’t get pregnant.” Do you realize how huge this is? This means we don’t have to suffer in vain. Every thorn is a gift, every rejection a prize, every tear a drop of precious gold. Obviously, like with every prayer, it is not a guarantee of getting what we want, but God grants enormous amount of graces and favors to those who give Him their pain. St. Paul says,

“A thorn in the flesh was given to me…three times I begged the Lord about this, that it might leave me, but He said to me, ‘my grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.’ I will rather boast most gladly of my weaknesses, in order that the power of Christ may dwell with me. Therefore I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and constraints, for the sake of Christ; for when I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Corinthians 12: 7-10).

Furthermore, sacrificing changes us for the better. When we get into the habit of taking our sufferings and offering them up to God, it completely changes the way we view the things that happen to us. A difficult soccer practice becomes an opportunity to offer up your sweat for your test next week. Your cold is offered up for the end to abortion. Humiliation becomes the prayer for your friend who is depressed.

Do Not Be Afraid

I wish there was no pain. I wish that I was out of job because all the children were alright. I wish people did not chose to reject God and spread evil with their free will.

I also wish that every man, rale thin, hungry, and homeless, knew that there was a God who loves Him intensely and incomprehensibly. I wish that I could look into the sad and broken eyes of every child who was abused and tell them that it’s not their fault, and their Father in heaven is infinite gentleness and compassion.

The worst things will happen. So when you see them, encounter them, feel them, or have them happen to you, know that this is not a reason to dismiss God. He is there.

There’s an image burned into my memory of a mother, 8 months pregnant, sitting in a chair, bent over the body of her two year old. He had fallen into a pool and been found and pulled out too late. He was on a ventilator and heart stimulating medications, but he was not going to make it. He was gone.

I remember closing my eyes and asking God to be there with this mother, and do you know what? He was. Not because I asked, although He does love it when we invite Him, but He was there with her, giving her strength because He loves her. In all of the worst moments of our life, He is there to hold us and love us through it. I know that sometimes it doesn’t feel like it. Sometimes He seems so far away. But He is there, and this is where faith comes in — faith that believes despite what we can see, hear, or feel.

“…’I do not fear any cross, because I know that when a cross comes, you always come too.’ The Crucified is never found without the cross, and neither is the cross found without the Crucified. It always bears Jesus. I press it to my breast to press Him at the same time to my heart. So tell Him “With You I do not fear any cross” (Fr. Jean C.J. d’Elbee, I Believe in Love)