How do you reconcile a kind and loving God with all the bad things that happen in the world?

[Jodidi]

I am having a bit of an issue with this at the minute. I am a Catholic, and have always been quite confident that God has a plan for my life. However, I have never been personally touched by a tragedy or seemingly senseless loss before. Everyone I have lost has been older, ill for a while first and have made peace with their own death. I haven't ever had a problem dealing with a loss like that.

I recently suffered a miscarriage. That has set my faith in God's plan backwards. I can't help thinking that if this is God's plan then He is cruel and his plan is shit. I was happy enough with the 2 children I had, another baby would have been nice but I wasn't desperate for one. So it seems cruel to give me what I wanted but then take it away again, leaving me much, much sadder than I ever was before (I was happy before). I haven't been to church since it happened.

I know I am not the only person to go through a loss, and a lot of people have had much worse tragedies. If a tragedy is caused by a person I can explain it by personal choice, but the things that nobody chooses how can we explain that a kind and loving God lets them happen? How do other people keep their faith when going through a difficult time?

I am a bit buddhist about all this. I think that we choose our life before we come down here. We chose any suffering we experience and we chose to suffer as it is through suffering/caring/love that we grow closer to God. Does that make sense?

That does make sense, in that I can see why you believe it. But I don't think it will work for me. I'm not getting closer to God, I'm withdrawing from Him. Maybe in time I'll get closer again, but right now I feel like I'm just getting further and further away.

I'm afraid I don't. I used to...until a very young child in our family died from leukaemia in a lot of pain and distress. I just can't believe that it's possible that God can be omnipotent and loving...it doesn't make sense. What sort of parents would we be if we had the power to stop our children experiencing terrible suffering and did nothing about it...in order to teach them a lesson, or test their faith in us?

I came to the point, over many years, that I now believe that if God exists as a higher, male power, then I don't want to worship him anyway. As it is, I don't believe any longer in a higher, male power, and believe, instead, in a light, beautiful, loving Divine within us all, that connects us all, and is neither male nor female, but carries aspects of both, and which is not 'in charge' of us and does not 'punish us' but which guides us gently if we're willing to listen.

I don't believe in destiny as a laid-out plan, but I believe in a potential path which we can choose to follow, which we can choose to hear the signs - our higher selves, our intuition, the universal energy - whatever you want to call it. I also believe that our spirits/souls choose their paths and that your baby chose you, knowing his time with you would be far, far too short, but knowing that you , in some way, needed this to draw you further along your own path.

Rumi said that 'wounds are where the light gets in', and I really do believe that. I don't believe that a loving, omnipresent God would send vile suffering on an innocent child, but I do believe that all the awful things we live through bring us closer to the knowing we need to reach - whether you call that enlightenment, or Heaven, or whatever.

The faith we need to have is, in my opinion, not in God, but in our potential as human beings...potential to be good, to be strong, to recover, to grow, to learn - faith in our souls and their immense wisdom to guide us if we can only surrender to them and listen.

Jodidi, I'm so sorry to hear you're struggling with the religion you've lived with your whole life - I was Christian, but not strict, and I struggled when I found I couldn't love the God I'd been told to my whole life, but I've learnt so much through the suffering I've experienced - it sounds patronising and trite, but try to trust that wherever this pain takes you is the place you need to be. Don't resist it - embrace it.

xxx

Hey there. Ex Catholic here. Your religion (or any religion) should have answers to this in scripture/doctrine, or it is a trite religion. Unfortunately, most of the major religions are male based, and don't have many answers to the female experience, other than suppression. But that has nothing to do with God or spirituality, it is merely a series of lenses that may or may not have resonance for you. In ypurcreligion there are saints and there lives who you can meditatevupon and ask to intercede for you. Or, you may prefer to take your own experiences to God directly without the Church. The Syrian massacre of those children threw me a little, but I believe that the expression of God is the universe and all its aspects on including the evil ones. I hope that helps a little. God is love. However you chooae to experience that. Life is enormous, unpredictable, and we need God and love to navigate it. Hugs, I'm on my third mc and I am 42.

Jodidi, I've been thinking about this a lot, I was perfectly ok till I got badly ill at Christmas and have ended up disabled. Either God caused this, or He let it happen. It's shit!

I've had to come to the conclusion (either that or chuck my faith in, and that's unthinkable to me) that even this (me in s wheelchair, no feeling in my arms, legs and face) is also part of the plan. It's not nice, but I have so many different opportunities to serve Him now than I had before.

Not what I wanted to happen. But with God all things are possible!

(it's not been easy!! Feel free to PM)

jodidi I'm so sorry for your loss. It does seem pointless and cruel.

This may not help at all but when a Christian friend of mines child was seriously ill I asked how it had affected his faith - how could he still believe in a loving God?
He said that he felt, as he had managed to believe in God while all around him terrible things were happening to good people, he saw the absurdity of losing faith when those terrible things happened to him. If we can hold onto our faith when we are not directly affected, although it is a massive test to hold onto our faith when we are, it would be hypocritical not too.

Theoretically I understand this, but when loss is so personal and painful it is just so hard to keep faith.

I hope I don't offend anyone as I was not raised in any particular religion belief, although I do believe in a higher creator energy.

It depends on what you think God is - if this is a judging power, or if the plans are all laid out already and we just happen to find out with the loss and sorrow that we encounter as some kind of nasty shock. What would be the purpose?

When I am faced with a difficulty with someone else, I ask to be shown their 'deal' in life from a differing perspective - to help me deal with them. I have found this is helpful, and can aid in me being more understanding of what life circumstances have perhaps led them to behave in the way that they do. Does that make them bad people? It might, if I decided I would see them that way.

If I see a problem with someone else, then that is my problem, not theirs. I see the world through my own set of life circumstances - how could I see it any other way? It would be IMO very judging of me to say 'dear god, I pray that xxx gets better from their meanness or stops doing xxx', just because my own view on the world says that they need fixed because they are different to me. I do actually pray - I pray for everyone to receive love. I also pray that people receive their dreams and desires, like a wish list. However, I know that when someone has 'wronged' me I still find it hard but I do try hard to see where I have changed from them giving me that experience. Some things have served as catalysts in my own circumstances, that now - sometimes many years later, I can look back on and feel appreciative of even the most difficult things and say that I have learned a great deal and it's made me who I am today.

I believe that we are all souls, created from divine sparks and that we choose our lessons and the people who will assist us to learn those lessons. In turn, from our own behaviours and reactions we are helping them in some way. Believing this as I do - allows me to see behind the seeming negative aspects and traits of others and turn it around - to ask - what does this person teach me, and to also know that by being here together on earth at this time is particularly challenging, but - we are all one, we are all the same - even if we don't appear to be so.

The reason I have these beliefs is due to my own life experiences. I don't expect others to believe as I do - but everyone has their own point of view due to their own up-bringing, experiences etc, and this is turn shapes how we handle situations, hurts, losses, happiness etc I do also believe in angels, and I find asking them to help me deal with pain etc can be beneficial. Divine assistance comes along in the strangest of ways, we just can't always see the wood for the trees.

oh god, I'm sorry I have posted this on the wrong thread :( sorry xx

Isiah 45:7 says that God created evil. There are some people who argue that this is an incorrect translation and that it means woe/grief, or that it refers to 'moral evil' and since God can't be morally evil then we can just ignore or revise the statement to suit our own personal preference.

I posted yesterday on another thread about a Gnostic who once told me that God cannot be All Loving, All Powerful and All Knowing, but only ever two of those three things.

Personally, I don't believe in a Father God figure and just subscribe to the theory that bad shit happens to good people because that's just the way it is, not because of divine judgement, intervention or any desire to 'learn a lesson in life'.

Jodidi, i'm sorry for your loss.
Don't have a suitable answer, so will pray He gives you a decent one and soon.

I dont have the answer. I even read Kursheners 'when bad things happen to good people'
Why does God allow babies to be born brain damaged? Why will my daughter die before long? It makes no sense at all and is seriously messing with my faith.

I found faith after a personal loss, I think that shit happens and God walks with us and holds our hands and wipes away our tears during the sad times. He's also there rejoicing with us during the good times and celebrating alongside us. Life is sometimes amazing and sometimes dreadful but it certainly is a journey we're all on and God joins us for the ride and meets us when it's over. Keep praying and doing whatever feels right and take care of yourself.

So sorry for your loss. This is such a hard question, why God allows pain and loss into our lives.

For me, I went through a time of one loss after another - the death of two close family members, and my own sudden illness and hospitalisation, and gradually the thing that came to me is that we are so, so fragile as human beings, much more so than we realise much of the time. And, if we believe in God as our creator, we have to trust that God made us fragile, breakable, mortal, and that it's in that fragility that we discover our own humanity and the God in whose image our humanity is formed. The more I think / read about the environment, the more I realise that this goes for all the world, not just humanity - we are fragile beings living on a fragile planet, and the best we can do is to love and look after each other in our fragile humanity, and to find God in it.

There's a poem I really love, by a Catholic poet called Elizabeth Jennings, called 'Dust.' If you can, look it up on Youtube (sorry, can't link).

Lovely, thought provoking posts Morris and Holo.

Thank you all for taking the time to reply with such thoughtful posts. I really do appreciate it.

KalSkirata I am so sorry to hear about your daughter. It doesn't make sense at all, and that's what I have problems with too, the not making sense. My thoughts are with you.

weegiemum I'm sorry you have had such a hard time recently. You sound so strong to be getting through it with such a positive attitude. I am going to try to take you as an inspiration.

emphaticmaybe I agree in theory that it is hypocritical to lose faith only when you are affected personally, but in practice it is much much harder. I have never really been forced to accept that bad things happen to good people for no reason before and now I am experiencing it I have to face it. I've always been very sympathetic to people I know are having a tough time but I was so wound up in my own world that I didn't examine it any deeper if that makes sense. Now I know what it's like to lose something so important I find it really hard to accept it happening to anyone. I can just about explain accidents and violence (although I wish I didn't have to) as someone making a choice, but illness and sudden death is where that falls down as nobody chooses it.

flamingo I'm trying very hard to accept that this is going to take me to where I need to be, but I wish I could just get there without going through this bit first.

sciencelover thank you for your glimmer of hope. I honestly don't think it will happen for us. We have fertility issues (which is why we weren't careful and had an accidental pregnancy in the first place) and (this is the big one) dp doesn't want to try again :(

Jodidi I'm so sorry for your loss. I'm in the same situation. Completely unexpectedly pregnant with dc3, just growing used to the idea and starting to feel excited rather than terrified, only to miscarry at over 11 weeks. My feelings are very similar to yours I have to say.

Aside from the desperate 'please God stop this happening' prayers as it became obvious what was to occur, and the wailing/gnashing of teeth, raging at God immediately afterward, I haven't prayed. Feel I can't/don't want to get close to someone who can be so unutterably cruel.

And yet there I was in church yesterday morning. I have long had confidence issues and been a fake it until you make it kind of person, so guess this was similar. The worship made me cry. I wanted, needed so much for the words I was singing to be true. And I found that they were. I guess it's like the relationship with your spouse/parents/children - you can love the very bones of them and realise you despise their behaviour at certain points. So deep down I still love God, I just really really don't like Him too much at the moment!

But also we've been shown such love and support by family and dear friends, and I have absolutely no doubt God is in that too.

I dunno. It sucks and it's hard, and maybe we'll never know the reasons why. But I just feel I've lost so much already I can't let my faith go too.

Lots of love to you x