I know, I need to accept that God knows what He is doing, and I don’t. Somehow that explanation always seemed too simple to me.

Until now.

Ann Voskamp has written a terrific blog on the topic – the best I’ve read.  THIS IS GOOD. I couldn’t find a way to share it, so I cut and pasted it below. If you click on her name above, it should take you directly to her site.

Here we go…

Why, in the name of all things holy, do You cherry pick one person to heal and another person to die?

Why in the world does one baby get to recover and go home to laugh loud and inhale life and another baby gets covered with 6 feet a dirt and hunk of granite gravestone?

You tell us—- Why does this cancer patient get to tout that You heard their prayers and that cancer patient gets a morphine pump for the devouring pain and an unwanted visit from hospice?

When The Picked and The Healed audaciously celebrate: “God heard our prayers!” — are the unpicked and the unhealed really supposed to assume that You plugged Your ears and flat-out refused to hear their wildly begging prayers?

Or when the healed flaunt: “God heard our prayers” — are the unhealed supposed to realize that their prayers were actually flawed? Is healing only granted to the superior, spiritual elites who know the secret launch codes for prayer — and the prayers of the rest of us sorry sops somehow fell short, so our loved ones ended up dead?

Do You not have power to heal? Or do You just choose not to heal?

Is God ultimately impotent— or just plain indifferent?

And God grabs our attention and cups our faces close.

God is not impotent — He kept a young girl from death and raised a middle age man from the dead and His words gave eyes light and ears reverberation and the Wounded Healer can heal.

And God is not indifferent — He’s wept over a grave and He catches every single one of your tears in a bottle because God can’t bear to waste grief and the way Christ most moves, is to be moved with compassion. (Matt. 9:36) The One who stretched out His hands on a Cross, stretches out His arms to touch us. (Mark 1:41)

God is not impotent. And God is not indifferent. And God hates injury, infirmity and injustice. Jesus came to heal and relieve from suffering, and God calls us to alleviate and decimate suffering. So if God allows suffering — it must be to allow something He loves even more than He hates suffering?

Sometimes God allows what He can hardly stand — to accomplish more than we understand.

“It is what it is” — isn’t the whole story. All is not what it is — it is always more. What seems like your story — is but a line in the wholestory.

In every one happening — Christ is happening to do one million other things.

What if: God’s purposes are not so much for me to understand His plans: His plan is for me to understand Who He is. And He is my Peace.

What if: Prayer isn’t about getting what you desperately want, but about getting more of the One Who desperately wants you.

What if: You discover Jesus is really enough — when you discover Jesus is really all you have left.

Jesus was the only man of perfection — and He was a man of sorrows. He perfectly understands your heartbreaking sorrow — and stands heartbroken with you in it. No one can truly withstand suffering unless they know God truly stands with them.

And — The Wounded Healer always writes a story that offers healing: the healing here or the healing of heaven.

When God gives healing here — all He’s giving is more time here. Healing only gives time.And we already have all of time, because of Jesus. We’re given forever, time without end. Love heals us all — with love that breaks the bonds of time.

Whether we get less time or more time, to receive all time as a love gift. What if we didn’t always want the gift of more time — but appreciated more of time as a gift?

What if instead of asking: “Why did God take her already?” — the awed question was: “Why did we get the grace of her at all?”

What if we bravely lived what we humbly pray:

Your kingdom come —-
not our kingdom.

Your will be done —
not ours.

Your story be written —
not our way, but Your way, because You alone are The Way.

Because you alone are God — and we are not. And when we say we could write the Story better than God — we are saying that we are better than God.

We are always loved with the gift of a tender choice:

We can live bitter — or we can live Beloved.

We can walk away — or we can walk The Way — and let Him who is The Way show us the way through.

We can trust our changing feelings alone — or trust in the unchanging love of God alone.

We can feel abandoned — or we can abandon ourselves to God.

And the kindest truth is: When you feel most abandoned by God, is when you most can just abandon yourself to God.

You can feel nothing and still be held through everything.

And in everything there is this:

We only think we might write the story different because we don’t know the same things the Storyteller knows.

Who knows why the Storyteller allows heartbreak, but the answer must be important enough, because the Storyteller allows His heart to break too.

And this heals a bit of our hearts:

There is a Storyteller who writes Himself into the story and makes our souls well, because He walks with us until the story is finished in His perfect time, and His perfect way, for His perfect glory — so our souls are always well.