Why Mommy, Why?

The news is never on in our house, except for news of the latest unemployment report or price of a barrel of oil from Shaun's MSNBC.  So when we were visiting Shaun's grandfather and the evening news was on, it really caught the girls attention.  Riots in Britain, displaced families in Africa, on and on and on.

That night they had lots to pray about.  As I was laying on Amanda's bed snuggled up with her she began to pray...and Jesus, please help those people who didn't have any food or home...and then she stopped mid-sentence, looked at me and said, Did God make those people that don't have a home?  Why did He make them poor and without any food?

Wow, what do you say to that?  The obvious answer is Yes, God made all people, but I knew what she was really asking is why did God make those people only to suffer?

My thoughts immediately went to some pages out of a book I recently read.  SUCH a good book, one of those that I will keep handy to read back through every now and then.  One of those that's all marked up.
An excerpt from One Thousand Gifts by Ann Voskamp:

All God makes is good.  Can it be that, that which seems to oppose the will of God actually is used of Him to accomplish the will of God?  That which seems evil only seems so because of perspective, the way the eyes see the shadows.  Above the clouds, light never stops shining.

But what perspective sees good in dead farm boys, good in  a little girl crushed under tires of a truck right in front of her mother's eyes, good in a brother-in-law who buries his first two sons in the space of nineteen months--and all the heinous crimes and all the weeping agony and all the scalding burn of this world?  The sun rolls across the wheat warm.  I lean against the windowsill and watch it.  I hear the echo, truth words whispering down time's cavern, words that Julian of Norwich heard:

See that I am God.  See that I am in everything.  See that I do everything.  See that I have never stopped ordering my works, nor ever shall, eternally.  See that I lead everything on to the conclusion I ordained for it before time began, by the same power, wisdom and love with which I made it.  How can anything be amiss?

Perspective--how we see.

And how should anything be amiss?  I can see her name on that stone, five letters of my little sister named "loved one", and I won't shield God from my anguish by claiming He's not involved in the ache of this world and Satan prowls but he's a lion on a leash and the God who governs all can be shouted at when I bruise, and I can cry and I can howl and He embraces the David-hearts who pound hard on His heart with their grief and I can moan deep that He did this--and He did.

I feel Him hold me--a flailing child tired in Father's arms.

And I can hear Him soothe soft, "Are your ways My ways, child?  Can you ear My manna, sustain on My mystery?  Can you believe that I tenderly, tirelessly work all for the best good of the whole world--because My flame of love for you can never, ever be quenched?"

Its just that the eyes are bad--my perspective.  "Your eye is a lamp that provides light for your body," Jesus said.  "When your eye is good, your whole body is filled with light.  But when your eye is bad, your whole body is filled with darkness.  And if the light you think you have is actually darkness, how deep that darkness is!"  (Matthew 6:22-23).  If Satan can keep my eyes from the Word, my eyesight is too poor to read light--to fill with light.  Bad eyes fill with darkness so heavy the soul aches because empty is never truly emplty; empty is only a full, deepening darkness.  So this is what it is to be.  Eve in the Garden, Satan's hiss tickling the ear, "Did God actually say...?"

No scripture glasses toread what God is trying to write through a prodigal child?  Scrawl my own qick editing on the half-finished story: failure.  Satan's tongue darts.

Not wearing a biblical lens to decipher the meaning of a doctor's ominous diagnosis?  Just read Satan's slippery interpretation: cheated.

Not using anything to bend the light of this world so I can read my own messy days?  Spray on another layer of graffiti: worthless.

So I have been ambushed.

Without God's Word as a lens, the world warps.