Why?

I saw a video today about a young family who had lost their three children in an automobile accident.  A few days ago there was a video posted with the caption “Why do bad things happen to good people?”  A few weeks earlier, a friend lost a loved family member and is now dealing with that grief.  I think this must be a question asked universally, anytime something happens to someone close to us.  Each, based on our faith and beliefs, must come to find an answer that makes the most sense, individually.

These events got me to thinking about this question, and I am convinced I don’t have a good answer for it, especially in light of all the deep religious and philosophical thought that has gone into trying to find THE answer.  Nonetheless I find myself sitting here with the keyboard trying to formulate my reasoning for these tragedies, sometimes large, and sometimes very small and personal.  It is a hard thing to do, for as I look at my life, I have been richly blessed and not forced to question why something happens as it does very often.

In the “Why do Bad Things Happen to Good People” video, a faith based one; it tried to rationalize this answer with an explanation of Man’s free will, and God’s allowing us to have a choice.  We, therefore, are subject to our own decisions and that is why occasionally something tragic will happen to a good person.  I am not sure I buy into this whole idea that because we are allowed free will, we will occasionally be struck down because of some decision we made in the past.  Perhaps there is some sense to it though, for I have no explanation on why when an airplane full of people crashes into the earth with two people sitting next to each other, one dies and one lives.

When confronted with the loss of close friends in tragic aircraft crashes, one in Iran the other in the Philippine Sea, I sat down to rationalize this for myself.   In the later case the sole survivor sat near the middle of the plane, strapped into an aircrew seat.  He had a radio operator next to him in an identical seat.  When the aircraft flew into the ocean it was doing about 200 knots in a gradual descent.  In flying we call this “controlled flight into terrain,” which means there was nothing mechanically wrong with the aircraft, the aircrew just allowed it to happen.  As the aircraft impacted the water it broke apart about ten feet in front of the survivor, he remembers hitting his head, then being ejected into the water.  The next thing he remembers is breaking the surface, seeing a raft next to him, and then the lights of some Pilipino fisherman.  He doesn’t remember climbing into the raft, or them pulling him from the sea.  The entirety of the aircrew and passengers, save him, were lost that day.

From those events I’ve come to accept a principle, voiced in crude aircrew language of “When your numbers up, your numbers up.”  It doesn’t depend on answering the question why did one worthy person die, while another less worthy survives.  It doesn’t require a strong belief in how God works, or most importantly why God works in a certain way.  It does depend on an acceptance we are but one small part of a grand universe, created by some force we cannot understand.  For me that force is God.

I find it necessary to accept I am not God, I can only know what God reveals for me, and what I have been taught as the right things to do with my life.  God, in infinite wisdom, has set into motion, and controls to some degree the paths of each of our lives.  We never know how long or short those paths will be.  It requires I accept that each of our lives somehow affect others, sometimes in ways we will never understand.  There is a purpose in what happens, it may be a purpose we can never grasp, but it isn’t random.  

I comfort myself with this simple view, I believe God’s plans are for a greater good, and although I am suffering and cannot understand why, God will not abandon me, it will be me who abandon’s God.  If I am to come to grips with why God allows these tragedies I must first accept there are things I can never understand, life must be committed to living with what we have, knowing nothing is assured in our future.  We must be strong for ourselves, constant for our loved ones, and honest in our grief so we may let go and move on.  It is not our right to ask God to explain why.