Friday night’s benefit for Karen got me thinking about the 1981 book When Bad Things Happen to Good People. Very powerful book written by a Jewish Rabbi whose son died from a rare disease at the age of 14, Bad Things deals with the question of how could a benevolent God allow such terrible things to happen to people.
The answer/explanation gets very involved very quickly. Bottom line though, according to the author of Bad Things is that while God is here to assist us through pain, suffering and life’s hardships, God is not able to prevent bad things from occurring (click here.)
There is a fancy name for this explanation known as theodicy. It is defined as “a theological construct that attempts to vindicate God in response to the evidential problem of evil that mitigates against the existence of an omnipotent and omnibenevolent deity.”(from click here.)
As I said, the explanation is complicated. The word conundrum gets thrown around a lot which means “We don’t really know.”
Having tried to mush my way through all this hokey pokey however, it still leaves me wondering about the initial question of why? God can do all things right? However evidently either He can’t, won’t nor doesn’t want to. It makes me want to offer God a petition/prayer as follows “Come on dude, do your job.” (I also found this article that parses all this a little more and much better than I have just explained it (click here.)
Actor John Dye played the role of Andrew the Angel of Death on Touched by an Angel. His angel came calling for him as he died of a heart attack at the young age of 47. Momma Angel Tess aka Della Reese passed away last month at the age of 86. Roma seems to be doing ok.