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Our island community grieved deeply (and is still grieving) when a tree fell on a car driven by a family on the way to a relative's house on Christmas Day, causing death and injury. Could God not have stopped that tragedy? Could have but wouldn't? Would have but couldn't?
When I was about four, I was happily walking through a field of clover when a bee stung me. I had unknowingly stepped on the bee, and the bee reacted as bees were supposed to, but I had not willfully done wrong, any more than the family had done wrong by driving down a road. Nursing my bee sting, I sought my mother's comfort. Because she loved me, I could overcome a world in which bees sting small children.
Bad things happen that we cannot prevent, even by our best efforts. Such things are evidence, whatever else they are, that we need a relationship outside ourselves to whom we can go for comfort when those things happen.
The Holocaust surely is a tragedy as evil as ever envisioned. It caused some to disavow the idea of a loving God. I see it as evidence, neither of God's impotence nor of his lack of caring, but as evidence of human failing. The Holocaust was not sent by God. It happened because we sinned, chose hatred. Directly caused by Hitler and the Nazis, yes, but it also may be traced to choices as far back as the religious wars of the 1600's, which left Germany a devastated nation and led eventually to more wars and ethnic cleansing. The Holocaust came, not from God, but from humans. It is evidence of our choices, for which we need repentance and confession and forgiveness, the only actions that will prevent more Holocausts.
Why should we blame God for a problem that we ourselves have created? Nor should we expect God to change the rules of nature, the reaction of a bee to a threat or the natural fall of a tree when its time has come.
Ann Gaylia O'Barr, author of Singing in Babylon, Searching for Home and Quiet Deception (all OakTara), was a Foreign Service Officer in the United States Department of State from 1990 to 2004. Assignments included tours in U.S. embassies and consulates in Saudi Arabia (Jeddah and Dhahran), Algeria, Canada, Tunisia, and Washington, D.C. (Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration and Bureau of Intelligence and Research).
