Soon after touching down from my business trip, my brother rang me up to tell me that his got stolen. My heart sank because I knew how he loved his prized possession – the effort that he had put to get that car – and how he would often maintain it to the best he could. He didn’t deserve to lose that car. Why did it happen to him?
Just last night I had dinner with another sibling. It had been a while since I last saw him and I knew he was busy with work, given that he too, like me just had returned from a week long business trip in Hong Kong. “It was horrible, I felt the entire trip was a disaster” my brother confided in me as I listened helplessly. I knew what he was going though but I just didn’t know what to say. “I don’t think I am cut out for this job” he concluded toward the end of the discussion. Despite all my cajoling and my encouragement to raise both my siblings’ spirits – assuring one that he did everything he could to keep the car safe and that he couldn’t have done anything more – and encouraging the other that he’s not a total failure and using examples to illustrate my points across.
But in all that cajoling and encouragement, as I was driving back home after a long conversation with my brothers, I just couldn’t help but wonder why do bad things happen to such good people – just a few entries ago I wrote about my 2 friends who just got out of a relationship – both were dumped by their partners. And now to see my own siblings go through their struggles – it just really made me wonder why do bad things happen to good people – seriously, these are good people, they lead lives far far better than I do – they earnestly seek God, they are honest in their work, they try to follow His commands far more than I would ever be able to achieve, and yet they struggle so much more.
Is our god a mean badass type of a God who loves giving his people hardships? Why do bad things really have to happen to good people? Something is surely not right in the cosmic sense of things – losing relationships, losing your car, feeling like a failure at work despite giving your best – why do we need to suffer so much and be ridiculed with one tragic event after another? We say that these experiences are supposedly meant to make us stronger, to produce character, but to go through it over and over again? It just sometimes reach a breaking point. And then what? How much more pain to go through, how much more agony to be in, how much more difficulty to face ahead? Where is God when it hurts the most?
Sometimes…I myself, given all my positive optimisms don’t even know how to answer that…
