“Oh, God, Why?”

by Curtis Shelburne

WE MAY NEVER fully understand why some trouble comes. Does that bother you? It does me!

When my now-thirteen-year-old son was three, his favorite utterance was the plaintive syllable, “Why?” Children’s inquisitiveness may occasionally be bothersome to Mom and Dad, but it is very normal. God designed three-year-olds to ask questions. They learn that way.

So, I’m convinced, do we. Asking questions is part and parcel of thinking. And since Jesus often asked his disciples, “What do you think?”, I assume that he meant for them to! When we modern-day disciples quit asking God questions, it does not mean that we’ve reached spiritual maturity; it may very well mean that we’ve quit growing.

If that is true, the next truth becomes all the more difficult: most of us will face in life some pain, some trouble, some tragedy for which all the questioning in the world can never yield satisfactory answers.

Don’t misunderstand. For the question, “Why pain?”, Christianity has very substantial answers. But when pain combines itself with these questions—“Why me?” “Why mine?” “Why now?”—we sometimes face a very ominous silence.

Outside of Canyon, Texas, there is a cemetery. In that cemetery is the gravestone for a 17-year-old girl who died in the 1930s. Etched in that stone is the stark, still-unanswered question, “Oh, God, why?”

A man named Job once asked that question. Job was a man of extraordinary patience, but even Job had his limits. Read far enough in the book and you’ll see Job shaking an angry fist at Heaven demanding an explanation for the tragedy that had befallen him.

He never gets it. Look for yourself. God never answers Job’s impassioned, “Why?” He simply says, basically,    “I am God. Trust me.”

May the Lord make us wise enough to know the times when our questioning is faith- building from the times when it is faithless, so that even in the midst of deep perplexity, we may affirm with Paul that, though we hurt, we are not driven to despair” (2 Corinthians 4:8).