My family just returned from a short spring break vacation full of what every family road trip usually ends up entailing: Kids fighting, parental frustration, too much money spent, a lot of laughter, and about a million moments that can teach us a lot about ourselves if we let them.
Here's one. At an amusement park, the five of us waited on the magnetic tram ride that takes you on a slow, pleasant tour above and through several of the surrounding attractions. There are about five or six cars connected to one another, then a break, and then another group of connected cars, and so on. For some reason that I still don't fully understand, my son desperately wanted to be in a car that got separated from the rest of us. He thought it would be cool to be off on his own, I guess.
But each time we rode it, the spacing never worked out for him. In what was clearly the most devastating moment of his young life, on his last attempt to pick the right grouping, he ended up with his parents and watched his two sisters get whisked away separated as he wanted to be. As we departed the ride, the grief was too much for him and he broke down. Tears streaming down his face, he cried out to me in anguish, "Why doesn't it ever work out for me? Does God not like me? All I asked was for this one thing and He didn't even care enough to let it happen for me. I thought He loved me."
Since I'm confident he won't be reading this column, let me just say that I love that kid dearly, but that's about the silliest thing I've ever heard.
Every single adult reading this knows that's about the most asinine argument against a loving God one could muster. What does it matter, after all? Why would a God who speaks galaxies and star clusters into existence, who carves canyons and caves with His finger, be concerned about an 11-year-old's desperate desire to ride a separate tram from his parents? Not to seem callous, but surely God has bigger fish to fry.
My wife and I laughed about the whole situation together later, after our son had calmed down and returned to rationality. We did so because we had the proper perspective - one that told us that in the grand scheme of our boy's life, this would prove to be a pretty insignificant blip on the radar.
Funny how I thought that was to be a lesson for him, when in actuality, conviction was staring me in the face. Like every other adult reading this right now, my life is currently consumed with about 1,500 various worries, concerns, stresses, and frustrations: bills to be paid, relationship strains to work through, occupational disappointments, economic uncertainties, and health anxieties.
Plenty of those things have caused me on more than one occasion to ask myself, others, and even God Himself, why He doesn't seem to care. "Why haven't you let this work out for me," I pray with a not-so-subtle accusatorial tone, "I thought you loved me?"
Notice the exact same reasoning as my son. My son that I just got done shaking my head at for his childish and immature lack of self-awareness.
Don't get me wrong, I'm always ready to justify my own silliness. I can easily convince myself and a great number of you that concerns over a family member's cancer diagnosis, a job loss, or a looming house foreclosure is a lot more important than the seating arrangement on a tram ride at a Florida amusement park. But I can't deny, and neither can you, that such a conclusion is entirely dependent upon perspective.
Earthly sorrow caused by the scourge of cancer will no more be remembered in a land where there is no sorrow…
The sting of losing an earthly job will no more be lamented in a place of perpetual joy…
Losing the right to eat and sleep in a temporary wooden box on this planet will no more be considered in a world of divinely designed mansions of glory…
...than not getting that solo trip aboard the people-mover tram.
It's not that God doesn't care when His children hurt. It's not that He's indifferent when they struggle. It's not that He's deaf to their cries of living in a place racked by the consequences of sin they brought on themselves. In actuality, He cares so much that He ensured that suffering would be a split-second of time in comparison to the eternity He designed them to live. He guaranteed that their tears would be wiped away forever, and their frustrations would last only as a vapor, here one second and gone permanently the next.
Whatever struggle we currently face, whatever it is that's tempting us to question the love and faithfulness of our Creator because of His apparent indifferent silence, remember He has not been indifferent, nor has He been silent. He confronted it directly on the cross of His Son, terminating its consequence, and confining it to an eternity of irrelevance where you, I, and no one else will ever remember it existed.
That's love.
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Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Not the Bee or any of its affiliates.
