Why???

I had this response from a friend to a post on the situation in Gaza: "Why don't you ask God to protect the children of Gaza, who are being burnt alive? Surely He can handle that tiny thing, in the scheme of things, unless He's getting a kick out of it, it shouldn't be a problem."

After reflection and tears, I want to submit this to all of us who are weeping and not understanding: 

Your question is deeply felt and painfully honest. It's the kind of question that has echoed through history—especially from those who witness unimaginable suffering and feel the crushing silence of heaven.

There is no easy answer to this. If there were, it wouldn't be worthy of the grief behind your words.

I am reminded of this portion from the one book in the Bible that was named after an emotion; Lamentations: "“He ground my face into the gravel. He pounded me into the mud. I gave up on life altogether. I’ve forgotten what the good life is like. I said to myself, “This is it. I’m finished. GOD is a lost cause.”

I’ll never forget the trouble, the utter lostness, the taste of ashes, the poison I’ve swallowed. I remember it all—oh, how well I remember— the feeling of hitting the bottom. Lamentations 3:16-24 MSG 

I was there - I remember when my Dad was on his own last journey, just before he passed on, I vowed: "This is it. I'm finished. God is a lost cause". I did not say those words - they were raw emotion, much too raw to repeat here. And I got there again a couple of times in similar circumstances.

To ask why God doesn’t intervene—to stop bombs, to spare children, to prevent injustice—is to stand where so many have stood: bewildered, heartbroken, even furious. 

The prophets cried out in this way. The Psalms are full of these questions. Jesus himself cried, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

And yet, the question remains: if God is all-powerful and all-good, why this?

Some find meaning in the idea of human freedom—that God does not override human will, even when it turns monstrous. Others suggest that God suffers with the suffering, refusing to dominate by force but working through love, solidarity, and awakening. Still others see divine action not in the stopping of evil, but in the hidden, stubborn persistence of good—in the hands that cradle the dying, the voices that call for justice, the hearts that will not grow numb.

But these are answers from the outside. When a child burns, or your father is dying in extreme pain, they are not enough.

If you’re asking this not as a theological exercise but as a cry of anguish, then perhaps what is needed is not an explanation, but a lament. A way to hold that grief with God—or at God—until something deeper speaks. 

Richard Rohr helped me with my own grief: ""Lament is the cry of the psalmists of Israel in exile who, feeling abandoned by God, demanded, “Where are you, Lord?” Or the psalmists who were bothered by God’s remarkably bad sense of timing: “Why are you taking so long?” 

“The poor are being crushed. The wicked are winning. Don’t you see it?”"

"Lament is not despair. It is not whining. It is not a cry into a void. Lament is a cry directed to God. It is the cry of those who see the truth of the world’s deep wounds and the cost of seeking peace. It is the prayer of those who are deeply disturbed by the way things are. We are enjoined to learn to see and feel what the psalmists see and feel and to join our prayer with theirs. 

The journey of reconciliation is grounded in the practice of lament."

The easier path was to reject the idea of God altogether—to reason Him out of the equation. I did that too. But eventually, I had to admit that I was worse off without Him. Denying the existence of a higher power left me with nothing to turn to—no sense of greater meaning, no possibility of purpose beyond my own pain. I have never felt so completely alone. The suffering during that time was unlike anything I’d known, before or since.

When you believe there’s no audience, your cry is no longer lament—it becomes a bitter protest against life itself. That bitterness can grow so deep it tempts you to escape into the nothingness you assume is all that’s left.

I was fighting to control life, trying to protect myself from the inevitable losses woven into its very fabric—but that strategy unraveled. It didn’t work. It left me exhausted, angry, and alone.

So I had to begin seeking again. But this time, everything had to shift. God could no longer be the version I had inherited from religion or tradition. I had come face to face with the paradoxes of life—the beauty and the brutality, interwoven—and any God worth seeking would have to meet me in that tension, not above it or beyond it.

And in that raw, unguarded space, I began to find what may be the real God—not an object to be grasped or defined, but a presence. The unseen. The indefinable. Not a distant being, but the subject who moved within me—even in my place of angry rebellion. Who was crucified to demonstrate his solidarity in our suffering.

Like Jeremiah, I discovered something unexpected in the middle of desolation:

“But there’s one other thing I remember, and remembering, I keep a grip on hope: GOD’s loyal love couldn’t have run out, his merciful love couldn’t have dried up. They’re created new every morning. How great your faithfulness! I’m sticking with GOD (I say it over and over). He’s all I’ve got left.” —Lamentations 3:21–24 (MSG)

Sometimes hope doesn’t rise from certainty—it rises from remembering, and from refusing to let go.

Simone Weil once said, "Affliction is not explained. It is something to be carried." 

And carried, maybe, in the arms of a God who does not watch from a distance but who is crucified again and again in every child, every mother, every broken heart.

If you're still asking, still raging, still hoping—then you’re still alive in the mystery. And perhaps that, too, is part of prayer.