I get it! I get it! I understand why God watches us suffer. I understand that he doesn't just watch; he feels it all with us. I understand that he protects, at all costs, our freedom to choose. I understand that if we lost our freedom, we would loose our God because His love cannot exist without our freedom to choose it - or reject it. We wouldn't just lose our God; we would lose ourselves. What a cost! What a dilemna! What pain!
He didn't just bear our pain for a few hours on the cross. He bears it now. He bears it long ago. And he bears our anger at Him, our blame of Him. He bears it all because we must have our freedom or His creation ceases. Agape cannot exist without the freedom, everyone's freedom. And everyone's freedom brings heartache and loss and grief and suffering and emptiness and hatred......... and love.
If he stops the freedom, in order to protect us from hurting, then he hurts us eternally. We lose our existence. And so, he goes to all extremes to protect our freedom. Then, why would anyone choose to create, knowing they would be creating such pain for themselves and for us?
Perhaps the answer is in our beloved-ness. That is who we are to Him. Not just loved, but the place he chooses to deposit his own identity - his own Agape. This love must be so great to warrant experiencing this pain.
I want to fathom that love.
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3 comments:
Hi Di, I just wanted to let you know that without suffering there would be no compassion. It's what I like to think to myself when I feel like I'm going through something I don't want to.
This is why I struggle with the idea of God. How can any God let this happen? I was abused for years by my father. It's still hard to believe that little girl was me.
I too struggled as I worked through so much of the healing. The best I could do was to tell God that if he was real that I wanted to understand. In time I came to a peaceful sense of who He is. I think he suffers along with us, feeling our pain, in order to have a creation that is not robotic. As a parent we suffer in giving our children the reigns or in letting them suffer the consequences of their behavior but to choose to allow them to suffer the consequence of others behavior would be more than I could give. Is this possibly because I could never love mankind's existance as a whole in the same way God does? Regardless no one can find your answers. Looking for them is a good and important part of our journey - to a lesser degree our arrival. So struggle on. You have much company. Also know that the way we see our dads colors the way we see God. It can be a tangled mess that only our waiting with Him can untangle.
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