Questioning God

Guest post by Michael Kelley. The following is taken from my book, Wednesdays Were Pretty Normal: A Boy, Cancer, and God, a book chronicling out 2 year old son's cancer diagnosis and the impact to our faith as a family:

"It’s easier in moments of pain, when the questions invade your reality, to direct your sorrow, disappointment, and anger at Satan or a broken world or random occurrence. It’s easier to let the blame lie there, but if we do, we are robbing God of His power and control and cheating ourselves out of fully processing the magnitude of who He is. Some would argue that God causes hardship. Others would say He simply fails to prevent tragedies from occurring. Pragmatically, though, the result is the same— we suffer, and whether God acts or doesn’t act, He’s still at the bottom of it. That means our true conflict is with God.

If we really want to start down the road of asking “why,” let’s not sell ourselves short of following it all the way to the end. At the end there’s God. He’s the one in control. He’s the only being in the universe that is sovereign. He’s the beginning and the end of all things, including our laments. And that’s probably why we don’t want to follow it all the way to the end because if God is at the end of that trail, then we aren’t just asking why about the cancer. We are asking about the foundations of what we think—what we hope—is true. We are asking about the nature of good and evil. We are wondering about the validity of the love of God. We are pondering the extent of His compassion and wisdom. And in that kind of questioning, the basis of our whole existence is at stake. That’s why we don’t follow the trail all the way to the end—we’re afraid of what we might find there. So we medicate, dripping spiritual and emotional morphine into ourselves so we don’t have to face the ultimate reality of an uncomfortable conversation with an uncomfortable God.

That’s a hard situation to be in for a nice, Christian boy like me. Sure, I had asked questions of God before, but they were raised in a sterile, academic environment. Those questions had the ring of queries like, “Could God make a rock so big He wasn’t strong enough to move it?” or some such foolishness like it. But not now. These were questions from the waiting room. They were as regular as my two-year-old’s need for morphine. But I took comfort that I wasn’t the first one to ask such questions."

Find the book here.