Asking God “Why?”

“The Lord works in mysterious ways.” A phrase I know all too well and believe it. What I don’t get is why he has to be so mysterious. Things happen in life and people hardly ever know why. Now before I continue please note that I am in no way shape or form questioning my faith, the existence of God, or anything of the sort. I am simply questioning his motives.

I know that everything happens for a reason and more specifically, a good reason. But I hate the process that comes with discovering that reason. Faith is a matter of believing not seeing. And often times when we don’t see what we want to happen happen, we’re not happy. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, in my opinion, that’s just how humans are. I do it too. When something happens that I don’t expect or like, I ask God “Why?” Why would you take away this thing that I love, why would you not do what I asked and prayed for, why does this happen, why didn’t this happen, and my personal favorite, why do you take so long to tell us why?!

People say that I am a very patient person which I find surprising because I hate waiting. Its agonizing and boring and really really frustrating. Anyone else like that? Probably. When I go through a tough season in my life, it takes me months, sometimes even years to figure out why I went through it. And the pain slowly get better as time progresses but the questioning and waiting is still there. Waiting for the season to end while at the same time questioning what you did to deserve it. But often times we did nothing. God places obstacles and barriers in our lives as tests of faith because he knows that we will come out stronger. Now you might say “What if I fail the test? What if I lose faith and I don’t come out stronger?” Unless you stop believing in God altogether, I don’t think you can fail. God knows how we are going to react to the obstacles we face and even if we are at the point of losing all hope and don’t know how we are going to get through it, we still haven’t failed. Because I believe God would not give us anything HE knew we couldn’t handle. But keep in mind that sometimes what we think we can’t handle he knows we can which is why he lets it happen. Crying out to God in the midst of our pain in sorrow and asking him “why” is not failure. Even being angry with God isn’t failure because when we do those things we are still acknowledging that there is a God. If we didn’t believe that anymore we wouldn’t pray. We wouldn’t ask him to help us get through this or yell at him when we can’t figure out why he did something. We wouldn’t say anything to him at all.

I feel bad for atheists or people who don’t believe in God because that just seems like a life filled with no hope. I’ve often wondered, when an atheist goes through something tough, what do they do? Do they just keep putting one foot in front of the other because they know things will get better? If so, how do they know? How can they believe life will get better if they do not believe that there is someone looking out for them? How can they believe in the good if they don’t believe in a God who does all things for good? How do they know their life won’t just keep getting worse?

Now obviously I am not an atheist so I can’t answer that but as a Christian I can say that I ask myself similar questions. The only difference is I’ve seen the fruits of my labor. I’ve seen good things come out of bad things in my life and others so how could I NOT believe there is someone out there that cares for me and loves me and is always looking out for me? If I didn’t I would be a very very very very different person. What’s funny is I’ve met atheists who don’t seem to live a life without hope and I still wonder how can that be? I’m not claiming that you have to be miserable and depressed to be an atheist. I just genuinely want to know how the ones who are not go through life with a positive attitude if they don’t know that things will get better.

I got a little off track so lets leave that question alone for now and get back to the point. Bad things happen and everyone wants to know why. And even though we may never know why, as Christians we know that things have to get better. That God has to have a good reason for this otherwise he wouldn’t have done it. That’s the beauty of Faith. Knowing that we will be rewarded for our waiting whether it’s here on earth when we see the sun come out of our storm or if it’s in heaven when we get to meet our maker and live in a world of pure perfection. All it takes is a little bit of faith.
“And Jesus said unto them, Because of your unbelief: for verily I say unto you, If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you” (Matthew 17:20). In other words, a little bit of faith goes a long way.

Thanks for reading!