O Lord, Why??

We all know and love many people who could be, and often are, asking this question:

"O Lord, why?"

This month we had two funerals at our little church - exactly a week apart. One followed the tragic death of a husband and father the age of my sister. He leaves behind a grieving wife who has dealt with far too many tragic deaths in her family recently. They also have four young, hurting children.

This week I spoke and cried and prayed on the phone with another deeply hurting friend. Her decades of chronic illness and pain have escalated to eleven weeks of extra misery which would cause any less faithful soul to give up. And yet she keeps pointing me to Christ.

As I ache and pray for friends, for my family, and for myself the question sometimes surfaces. "Why, Lord?!"

Amy Carmichael deals with this with such personal understanding in her book Rose from Brier.

I have read many answers, but none satisfy me. One often given is our Lord's to St. Peter: "What I do thou knowest not now; but thou shalt know hereafter." And yet it is not an answer. He is speaking there of something which He Himself is doing; He is not doing this. He went about undoing it. "Ought not this woman whom Satan hath bound be loosed?" That was always His attitude to suffering, and so that blessed word is not an answer to this question, and was not meant to be.

There are many poetical answers; one of these satisfied me for a time...
But, though, indeed, we know that pain nobly borne strengthens the soul, knits hearts together, leads to unselfish sacrifice (and we could not spare from our lives the Christ on the Cross), yet when the raw nerve in our own flesh is touched, we know, with a knowledge that penetrates to a place which these words cannot reach, that our question is not answered. It is only pushed farther back, for why should that be the way of strength, and why need hearts be knit together by such sharp knitting needles, and who would not willingly choose relief rather than the pity of the pitiful?

No, beautiful words do not satisfy the soul that is confined in the cell whose very substance is pain....

What, then, is the answer? I do not know.

I believe that it is one of the secret things of the Lord, which will not be opened to us till we see Him who endured the Cross, see the scars in His hands and feet and side, see Him, our Beloved, face to face. I believe that in that revelation of love, which is far past our understanding now, we shall "understand even as all along we have been understood."

And till then? What does a child do whose mother or father allows something to be done which it cannot understand? There is only one way of peace. It is the child's way. The loving child trusts.

I believe that we who know our God, and have proved Him good past telling, will find rest there. The faith of the child rests on the character it knows. So may ours; so shall ours.

There is only one place where we can receive, not an answer to our question, but peace - that place is Calvary. An hour at the foot of the Cross steadies the soul as nothing else can. "O Christ beloved, Thy Calvary stills all our questions." 
Love that loves like that can be trusted in this.