God is good all the time. Or is He?

These days, I seem to come across desperate souls everywhere I turn. Yesterday, they found the bodies of three Israeli kids who were kidnapped and shot by the terrorist organisation, Hamas. I prayed for days that they will return home safe. They never will...

A Romanian friend of mine, who is away from home, wrote on her Facebook wall yesterday “PLEASEEEE GOOODDD DON’T TAKE MY MUM!” She posted today that her mum is out of surgery and stable.

I went through a whole scale of human emotions yesterday varying from sadness and helplessness to anger and fury and culminating with confidence and faith. What you will read below is my muddy way of finding my own answers.

I ended up writing on my Facebook wall “I don't know why God chooses to answer some prayers and not others. I don't know why the mother of Gilad Shalit got to hold her son again and the mothers of these boys never will. But one thing I know, God does not stop being good just because this world is mad and evil”

We want to be independent and have the freedom to choose but we are not so willing to take responsibility for our choices. When things go wrong, we are not to be blamed, God is, because He is All Powerful and He should have stopped that. Pain and suffering pushes humans to unfairness and when we blame God, we are first and foremost unfair to Him.

But He is Almighty, right? So if He is Almighty than He is also to be blamed for everything.

I’ve seen people yesterday blaming God for what not and I got angry. Not because I never blamed God in my life for anything, quite the opposite, He was to blame for everything wrong in my life, including the fact that I was alive “since I haven’t asked to be born.” Yesterday, I got angry because I tried for one second to understand how I would feel if I got the blame for everything going wrong in this world.

 The mother of one of the boys killed, said two days before she found out her son was dead “God does not owe me anything.”  What a thing to say when you don’t know if your son is still alive and you pray with all your heart for him to be. Throughout these 18 days, the mothers of these boys taught me nothing else but dignity, faith, trust and what it means to know your God when disaster strikes. They were beautiful to me as only a trusting Jewish soul knows how to be.

God does not owe us anything at the best of times. He most certainly does not owe us anything if we decide to go our way and completely dismiss Him from our society. If He is not good enough to be followed He should not be the target practice for our blame game either. Luckily for us, He is not easily offended hence we’re still here.

Why am I writing all this? Because, I noticed a similar trend among Christians, whereby He is to be blamed rather than trusted. We pray and put all our faith in our prayer and then when things don’t happen, He is to be blamed. ”I mean I invested time and energy and faith and there’s no result, God. Where’s my answer?” I don’t know if this is the best question. Perhaps a better question would be-what is the point in getting an answer to whatever we ask for, if we miss the only thing that truly matters in our relationship with Him, and that is the confidence that "“the LORD is good and his love endures forever; his faithfulness continues through all generations.” Psalm 100:5