Faith

[tff135]

Last year was one of the worst years of my life. I lost 4 family members including my own father. I lost my faith in the lord. I began deep thinking and I realized why did God out us here just to sit there and watch us and playing a game of cheast with our lives. He'll do something good then the next he'll put us through all these obstacles and hardship,and for what. I put my faith in God and even he let me down. I've done so many good things in my life for so many but yet I suffer the most. I can't put my trust in good yet I still believe in him.. I don't necessarily put my faith in the devil either. I feel as if there is no one you can trust.

[Gingerbreadman1978]

firstly and foremost condolences for your loss I’ve been through some thing very similar but not in such a short time I think the best thing to do is put faith in yourself first not any one else or anything else

[litethatnevergoesout]

sorry for loss there’s a site on HU bereavement care & share.

[Aguila1794]

Hi, I haven’t lost as many people as you and I’m sincerely sorry for your losses. However, I did lose my grandmother 3 years ago and I loved her more than anyone else in my family. I’m struggling with trust too, especially with God. At first glance one would think He’s the easiest to trust because He is perfect and cannot lie. Do you remember Isaiah 55:8-9? God basically told Isaiah that we are incapable of understanding Him and why He does what He does. Your thoughts?

[Dolphin14]

tff135

I'm very sorry for all the loved ones you have lost.

I'm not religious so I cannot relate to anything else on your post.

The only thing I can say is some of these hardships will bring you to your knees. Use whatever tool you have to pull yourself up. Don't give up the fight

🐬

[Zhangliqun]

You mentioned having difficulty trusting God and I would like to talk to you about that.

But first, as others have said, my condolences.

Whether hearing "my condolences" from someone's mouth or seeing it on a computer screen, it seems so thin and weak up next to the huge, extremely bitter pill you have been given to swallow. General George Marshall, as portrayed in Saving Private Ryan, put it best. He quotes Abraham Lincoln from a letter to a Mrs. Bixby who lost 5 sons in the Civil War:

I feel how weak and fruitless must be any words of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming.

But, Lincoln went on to say:

...I cannot refrain from tendering to you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save.

I can't refrain from tendering to you a look at the Book of Job from the bible that I really think will help. Job, which was written for folks like Mrs. Bixby, for the mother of the five Sullivan brothers who were all killed 80 years later when the USS Juneau was torpedoed and blown to bits...and for you.

And for anyone who has been hit by a massive catastrophe that has triggered a crisis in faith in God.

I don't know if you have read Job but the first thing that comes to mind is that even though they were dead-wrong in their claim that Job was being punished by God for some wrongdoing, it must always be remembered that Job's friends had the good sense to sit on the ground in silence with him for an entire week. Where were all his other friends??? At least these friends of Job cared enough to come and see him. Everyone else apparently abandoned him as cursed by God.

Like Job, you have gotten a major punch to the solar plexus and you still haven't caught your breath, you are still in shock.

I don't know how to translate a week of silence to a computer screen but what I can do is break my reply into two parts and end this Part 1 here. Move on to read Part 2 if and when you're ready...

[Zhangliqun]

PART 2

If there is a God, why do such terrible things happen? Are they punishment? Or maybe God is aloof and indifferent to our pain and is and playing chess (as you put it) with everyone's lives out of boredom.

Or even worse -- maybe he is sadistic and this "battle of good vs evil" nonsense is a just a publicity stunt, like commercials for pro wrestling, and God and Satan are actually on the same team, playing out a friendly rivalry over who can be the most cruel, like little boys throwing frogs or lizards to the fireants.

Or...

...or maybe the universe is just a series of random events and accidents, and all our ideas about human life actually having value and the categories good vs evil are just make-believe and wishful thinking because there is no God or supernatural realm after all.

In a time of catastrophic tragedy like yours, it can be sorely tempting to take any of these scenarios to heart.

But are any of them true?

With all the mysteries inherent to the book of Job, its answer to this, at least, is very plain: absolutely not.

First, it is clear throughout that it was never punishment. In Chapter 1, God asks Satan to consider Job precisely because there really wasn't anything to punish him for. By the end of the book, Job is to pray for his friends to save them from God's wrath because they harassed Job with ideas that this disaster came about because of hidden or unconfessed sin. And several times it says that "In this Job sinned not, nor charged God foolishly." And at the end, God refers to Job as "my servant Job" four times, making it clear that he approves of Job.

What about God's indifference?

In spite of the Old Testament's reputation among unbelievers as a book of nothing but capricious anger and violence on God's part, there is a great deal of mercy and tenderness shown by God. (It also needs to be remembered that the most violent book in the bible by far is in the New Testament -- Revelation.) In providing for Hagar and Ishmael. In encouraging Elijah when he ran in fear from Jezebel. In redeeming Gomer and commiserating with her husband Hosea. In saving the Israelites from chattel slavery in Egypt. In ordering the Year of Jubilee and his command for farmers to leave the edges of their fields and orchards unharvested to allow the poor the dignity of going out and bringing home food for their families. The list goes on.

And then when you take a close look at the New Testament and see Jesus suffering for all the sins of the world and realize that all time is present to God (See John 8:58), God, like any parent, suffers with his children when they are in pain, but God far more sharply, more perfectly, if you will. He is as far removed from indifference to our suffering as zero is from infinity.

Nor is God sadistic. He just never figured out a way to give us free will without giving us free will. He could not make it possible for us to choose to love without the risk that we might choose to hate.

This opened the door to the possibility of the broken fallen world of death, catastrophe and destruction we now have. But he thought our existence and, yes, even our dignity, was worth the risk of us rejecting him. We couldn't otherwise be real, we couldn't actually exist beyond a state something like that of a robot or a potted plant.

As for whether he exists at all, the bible is obviously clear on that. I'm willing to go into it in private messages with you if you like (they won't let us do that in here) but it's a separate topic and a big one.

Yet assuming these answers satisfy you (maybe they don't), then why did God "test" Job, and why did he put Mrs. Bixby, Mrs. Sullivan, and you and all of us who suffer with mental and mood disorders, etc, through these things?

I think we'll have to make a 3-parter out of this...

[bethelbee]

I'm so sorry for all your losses...

[Zhangliqun]

PART 3

So if it wasn't punishment, indifference, boredom or sadism, why did God "test" Job? Or more to the point of this conversation, why does God cause or allow any of us to suffer?

First, I put "test" in quotes because most people tend to think of a test as something designed find out something we don't yet know. By that definition, God tests no-one. He already knows what the result will be. It's far better to describe it as training.

Second, in God's response to Job, where he appears to Job as basically an F5 tornado (a sign that he really isn't just goofing around with Job's life), he asks Job a long series of rhetorical questions along the lines of "where were you when I created the sun, the stars, the moon, all these wild animals that you have no hope of controlling", etc, etc. The point being that there are things that God does that are just far "too wonderful", which is to say incomprehensible, for us to understand.

This is not a cop-out as the cynics would insist; it stands to reason and common sense that someone with an infinite IQ is going to know things, do things and plan things that we can't possibly understand. How could it be otherwise?

But is that the end of it? We just have to throw up our hands and give up on the possibility of learning anything from Job's trial -- or ours?

Not by a long shot.

Though we can't know everything about Job's ordeal or ours, we can know some things. Here is a partial list of things I and others have thought of that explain the existence of suffering, in no particular order:

1) Learning compassion for others in your situation and how to help them. Even though Job was by earthly lights a very good, God-fearing man, shunning evil as scripture says, if someone like you had come to him for advice on how to make it through what you're dealing with, his cupboard would have been completely bare.

Whatever he said would have no effect because he would have zero credibility with you. What does this rich, popular man living in splendor and comfort know about losing four family members and the disastrous financial aftermath, you would think as he spoke.

Well, Job lost all seven of his sons and all three daughters. And all of his livestock, wealth and even the destruction of his house and property. When we next see him, he's laying on the ground where his house used to be and lancing those boils all over his body with shards from broken pots. Fun. And then, though I admit scripture is not clear on this, it's quite possible that just when he needs her most, his wife abandons him.

Job now knows the blues like few others.

But in coming out the other side of his ordeal, Job is now able to speak to you with great credibility thousands of years later.

2) Suffering is not always punishment. We covered this earlier but an even more important point about it needs to be made:

3) Suffering is necessary. Yes, you read that correctly.

What if God's paramount reason for creating man and woman is not, after all, just to provide us with perpetual comfort and pleasure, as the skeptics and cynics insist a good God "must" do, but instead to mold us into vastly greater creatures than we could ever be if were reduced to pleasure-eating robots living the empty life of a potted plant?

What if instead God wants to form great virtues in us? Can this happen without suffering?

Can grace and calm under pressure be developed without facing situations where you have no idea what you're going to do or how you're going to make it through? Can we become pursuers of justice without facing injustice? Can we become protectors of the weak if we never abused by the strong? Can we learn to resist temptation without ever being tempted? Can we ever develop endurance if there is never anything to endure?

And most important on this virtue list, can bravery and courage be developed without ever experiencing fear, even terror? CS Lewis once said that courage is the testing point for all other virtues, that they are not possible without it. Dennis Prager put it more bluntly: "Goodness minus courage equals zero".

Ask any athlete, scientist, scholar, dancer or musician or other performer about what it takes to become great at anything -- it all boils down to one thing: a willingness to suffer. Painful training, practice, study, giving up fun and play, enduring ridicule from peers and rivals, frustration at some aspect of your craft, the accomplishment of which eludes you for years and years and makes you pull your hair out and want to give up. But oh, when you finally overcome! What can a potted plant ever know of triumph???

If you have met someone who is wise and humble, chances are a look into his or her background will show significant, even profound suffering. If you have met someone who is arrogant and freaks out whenever he doesn't get his way, chances are he has experienced very little suffering.

This is yet another a clue that suffering is not merely unavoidable but absolutely necessary. Without a certain amount of it, we turn into demonic spoiled brats.

With it, we become something God can use to save and help others. And on that note:

4) Back to 1). Though it is far from God's only reason for allowing the loss of your four family members, and I'm not such a fool that I would trivialize your bereavement as just a training exercise -- or make any claim to know what any of those other reasons are, one reason is very plain: you, tff135, are being trained to be used by God to help others like you.

Very bluntly, there are people out there right now who will die by their own hand if you are not there to show the way.

Will you turn them away?

Or will you -- after grieving, recovering the breath that was so violently knocked out of you, and taking some time to ponder all this -- accept this mission? It comes straight from the top where the long-suffering king is longing to welcome you back with open arms.

Dare to be great. Dare to triumph...