There is a story on the Internet that details a conversation a college chemistry professor had with his three-year-old daughter (you can see the whole thing HERE). It starts our simple enough: little Sarah asked her Daddy if he was in the shower. When he said he was, she rejoined with the inevitable “Why?” that is the favorite of very young, inquisitive children. Dad very patiently answers her questions, and each answer evokes yet another “Why?” from the little girl. At first, his answers are simple enough for a three-year-old, but gradually, as they range from “Why does the shower get you clean?” to “Why does soap grab the dirt?”, he starts to get a technical. He never seems to be impatient with her, but the answers become more and more opaque until they are a lecture on the differences between Pauling and Mulliken electronegativity scales … and at last Sarah is quiet for a few seconds, and says, “I don’t get it.” And Dad’s answer is, “That’s OK. Neither do most of my students.”
It seems to me that Christians are a lot like young Sarah when things happen in our lives that we don’t immediately understand. We don’t have much trouble with good and happy events; right away we praise our Heavenly Father, rejoice in His goodness, and move on. But when it’s not so good, from our perspective, right away we start with the, “Why?” He’s always patient and gentle with our questions, but sooner or later, if we press at it, we come to a place where we just don’t get it.
I think there are three basic types of answers we get from the Lord. And one is, “it’s for our correction.” Proverb 3:11-12 says, “My son, do not despise the chastening of the LORD, Nor detest His correction; For whom the LORD loves He corrects, Just as a father the son in whom he delights.” We have a tendency to get hung up on that word, “chastens,” and immediately think of it as being rebuked for sin. But the Hebrew word actually used there has a broader meaning than that … it can mean instruction and teaching as well as our English sense of chastening. But the implication is you are drifting (or striding boldly) in a direction the Lord doesn’t want you to go in, and He’s going to steer you away from it. Sin doesn’t need be a part of it, it could as well be simple ignorance or being mistaken, and the correction is a gentle nudge in the right direction. But the most important thing to take away from it is that God is not looking to call you into account for your sins and misdeeds (as a Christian, that was dealt with on the cross), it is your own good that He is planning. Job 5:17 says, “Behold, happy is the man whom God corrects; Therefore do not despise the chastening of the Almighty.” It may not seem like a happy time to you, but that is the goal: Psalm 30:5, “For His anger is but for a moment, His favor is for life; Weeping may endure for a night, But joy comes in the morning.” And one more point I would like to make about correction, is that there is no point to it if it’s not clear what you are trying to correct. That would be like randomly punishing a child a week after their misdeed with no explanation; you would not be correcting that child at all, only confusing them. Likewise, if the Lord is correcting you, there is no mystery about it. If He wants you moving in a different direction, and you are being open and honest with Him, you will know what He is trying to correct in your life.
The second answer is that God is granting you an experience that you will one day be able to help others with. 2 Corinthians 1:3-5 says, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort those who are in any trouble, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. For as the sufferings of Christ abound in us, so our consolation also abounds through Christ.” We can hardly comfort others in areas in which we have no experience. We can sympathize, we can pray, and we can just plain be there for a suffering friend, but to offer any substantive help to them to get through a bad time, we have to have gone through something like it ourselves. I can well imagine the grief a parent might have at the loss of a child, and I could say many things to them … but a lot would be mere sympathy. I have never had a child of my own, much less lost one. I cannot know what it really feels like, nor could I offer anything but very general advice on how to cope with it. But someone else who has gone through such an experience might be of real help, the kind I could never give.
Now I want to pause on that thought and add something I consider very important. I do not think it wise or good or in any way beneficial to “blame” traumatic experiences on God merely prepping us to help others with similar bad experiences. God may very well use what He teaches you that way in the future, but He never does just one thing at a time in our lives. There will be other reasons intertwined with your bad experiences, and trying to sort out the labyrinthine orchestrations God sets His hand to, and reduce them to something simple and easy to understand, is bound to be incorrect. After all Job went through, when God finally got through to him, his response was, “You asked, ‘Who is this who hides counsel without knowledge?’ Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand, Things too wonderful for me, which I did not know,” (Job 42:3).
Which leads to what I think is God’s most frequent response to our “why?”’s. The stock answer is, “for God’s glory.” When the disciples asked Jesus whose sin cause a man to be born blind, Jesus’ answer was, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned, but that the works of God should be revealed in him,” (John 9:3). But everything, on the bottom line, is to God’s glory. Yes, we can and we should praise and glorify God in bad situations when we are trusting in His love and power. But that’s not an answer; it’s accurate, but doesn’t speak to the question in our heart. And that is when we have to remember our college professor and his little daughter. His final answer to her was so far beyond her ability to comprehend, it was really no answer at all. And like her, sometimes all we can say in response is, “I don’t get it.” We have to trust that a God who loves us does not randomly afflict us. We have to recognize that if He tried to answer us fully in all things, we would only be be bewildered. We must content ourselves with the knowledge that He will tell us “why” when He can, and when it profits us … and when He does not, that it is all to the good all the same.