You've heard people say it.
"God never gives us more than we can handle."
And you know that's not true.
He gives us more than we can handle all the time.
Or it feels like it anyway.
The bills we can't pay. The illness that won't go away. Betrayal. Accident. Death. As beautiful as it sometimes is, life sometimes sucks, too. And we can't do anything about it.
I swear, the objection to faith in God I hear most often is wondering why He permits so much evil in the world - why children die in horrible wars, why planes crash with whole skating teams on them, why neighbors thinks it's necessary to shoot the guy next door. And I don't blame the people who do the wondering.
The Right Question
The problem is that they're asking the wrong question.
The rotten things in life aren't separate from the wonderful ones. They are all part of one thing, and that thing is life.
Even Jesus said we would always have poverty. (Matt 26:11). God causes the sun to rise on the evil and the good (Matt 5:45).
Get it?
The right question is not why God allows evil and struggle.
It's why we aren't taking a harder look and trying to understand the world that God actuallty made. He didn't make a Disney world, with dragons and prince charmings duking it out to see who wins. He made a world where the horrible exists side by side with the wonderful.
The One
That's why our Asian friends use the yin/yang comparison. One life. One thing, With evil and good existing side by side in exquisite tension and in beautiful pain.
We have one God and He made one life for us, one that includes both blooms and death, and we are to love Him and one another through it.
It's actually quite a beautiful thing, when you think about it. Not treating trouble and pain as adverseries but as teachers that have their place.
Something will eventally kill us all, after all. It will be good to understand that whatever does is part of the plan.
Image: Woo-Han, Substack
