Yesterday was a horrible day. With a mentally ill young man killing 30 people including 20 kindergartners in an elementary school, many people may be asking the question that gets asked anytime something terrible happens: Why did God let this happen?
Many people, thinking that no loving God could sit back and let this horrible thing happen to such an innocent person/people that surely there is no God at all. They use this point of view as a reason to not have or look for faith.
Let me share with you the first gift he ever gave us. It was the gift of free agency. The gift of choice. This mortal existence was given to us as a chance to exercise that very gift.
To try to answer the question of "how can God let terrible things happen to good people?" in my feeble way I will tell you this. You can not ask God to take over and be in control of only part of your life or someone elses either. Either you let him have control of all of it, with no chance for making any mistakes (which He will not do) or He gives you all of it. He is hoping instead that you will strive to offer yourself to Him as His vessel for good, exercising the Atonement when you don't quite achieve perfection. He is a God of Perfection. Perfect Love. He wants us to be perfect, but he knows we can not. by giving us the freedom to make our own choices we risk making some bad ones. (That is where He gave us the Atonement to help us overcome those mistakes).
How will you use that gift of Agency/Choice? Like many gifts we receive in our life in which, sometimes we squander them, sometimes we cherish them and hide them away, sometimes we use them till they can't be used anymore. The gift of making our own choices is just like that. Sometimes we make good choices, sometimes we don't. But the one thing we can't do, is ask God to intervene on someone else taking away their freedom to choose, while asking him to sit back and let you make your own choices both for good and for bad.
There are so many times everyday I am sure that God watches us in our little lives, and thinks, why did you say that, why did you do that, why didn't you help him/her, why didn't you smile at that stranger on the street? A million choices we didn't make the way God may have wanted us to.
We all know that from a very young age, humans don't like to be told what to do. The first thing a toddler says is NO! and looks right at his mother and breaks her heart. NO, Mama! I do it! and even though we know a better way, a faster way, we sit back and let them struggle to do it. Resisting the urge to step in and take over requires near super human strength.
Don't you think that is just a small, tiny bit of how God must feel watching us: NO, I DO IT, and then we don't or we fall short. By demanding to make our own choices: To be happy, to take offence, to forgive or to hold a grudge, to have this career, or go after this goal, to apologize, or to justify, to come closer to God, or to turn away; we are really asking God to let us ALL make our own choices.
He loves us all, and even though it pains him more than we know to watch as we hurt each other (all brothers and sister in God) He lets us exercise that most important, first gift from God, the gift of choice.
