I am slowly, ever so slowly, making my way through this book, One Thousand Gifts by Ann Voskamp, a farmer's wife and mother from Canada. She is such an interesting writer. If her book was a painting, it'd be like a Monet...zoomed up it just looks like random brush strokes of color, but from far away, its a masterpiece.
Any who.... Here's a excerpt I wanted to share because it deals with a question that most of the world asks: If God is good, then why do bad things happen to good people? We all ask that question, if we are honest with ourselves. Some go looking for the answer and find it in Christ, and others never find what they are a looking for, and thus, God either becomes non-exsistent or He becomes an unfeeling being in the sky that doesn't care about humanity. I think Ann Voskamp takes an interesting approach to this dilemma.
"Does disaster come to a city unless the Lord has planned it?" (Amos 3:6). And I feel it again today and I breathe: A good God plans everything. Everything. So a good God can only...make plans for good? He only gives good gifts? A thing of evil cannot be created by a good God?
From the bedroom window, I watch a shadow move across the lawn, move out long across our wheat fields. That is what a shadow is, an empty space, a hole in the light. Evil is that -- a hole in the goodness of God. Evil is all that lacks the goodness of God, a willful choice to turn away from the full goodness of God to that empty of His goodness. I watch the grey shadows slink away over the hill, the sun driving them east.
All God makes is good. Can it be that, that which seems to oppose the will of God actually is used of Him to accomplish the will of God? That which seems evil only seems so because of perspective, the way the eyes see the sahdows. Above the clouds, light never stops shining.
But what perspective sees good in dead farm boys, good in a little girl crushed under tires of a truck right in front of her mother's eyes, good in a brother-in-law who buries his first two sons in the space of nineteen months -- and all the heinous crimes and all the weeping agony and all the scalding burn of this world? ... I hear the echo, truth words whispering down time's cavern, words that Julian of Norwich heard:
See that I am God. See that I am in everything. See that I do everything. See that I have never stopped ordering my works, nor ever shall, eternally. See that I lead everything on to the conclusion I ordained for it before time began, by the same power, wisdom and love with which I made it. How can anything be amiss?
Perspective -- how we see.
And how should anything be amiss? I can see her name on that stone, five letters of my little sister named "loved one," and I won't shield God from my anguish by claiming He's not involved in the ache of this world and Satan prowls but he's a lion on a leash and the God who governs all can be shouted at when I bruise, and I can cry and I can howl and He embraces the David-hearts who pound hard on His heart with their grief and I can moan deep that He did this -- and He did.
I feel Him hold me -- a flailing child tired in Father's arms.
And I can hear Him soothe soft, "Are your ways My ways, child? Can you eat My manna, sustain on My mystery? Can you believe that I tenderly, tirelessly work all for the best good of the whole world -- because My flame of love for you can never, ever be quenched?"
pages 88-89
No comments:
Post a Comment