Continued from here.

What’s wrong with asking God why? It focuses your thoughts on the problem rather than on the Solution. It also presumes that you have the capacity to understand God, which none of us can do. This is why God’s reaction to Job’s demand to know why was to turn the tables on Job, challenging Him to answer God’s questions, as if a human could ever understand the ways of God. There’s no answer that, in our humanity, will make us say, “Sure, God. I welcome this pain and suffering. That’s the way I want my life to go.”

And yet, we can experience peace as we transition from asking God why to inviting Him in and trusting that He’s going to take care of us. Interestingly, I have learned this lesson best through two Christian comedians. Check out this poignant testimony from Christian comedian Anthony Griffith, who lost his three-year-old daughter to cancer:

I don’t recall the name of the second Christian comedian, so I don’t know who to credit. (If you know the name, please post it in the comments.) Like Anthony Griffith, his young daughter also had cancer. He shared that the doctors drilled a hole in her chest so that medication could be administered quickly. When his daughter awoke with a high fever in the middle of the night, he drove her to the hospital, where she knew that needles and more pain awaited her. She sobbed, begging her father to explain why she must go through the pain.

The father knew in that moment that there was no way an adult could explain to a young child why she had to endure the pain necessary to save her life. All he could do was ask her to trust him. And then he understood – Just as a young child does not have the capacity to understand why she must endure the pain of a hospital to save her life from cancer, no human has the capacity to understand why we must endure the sufferings that God allows into our lives. Like the young child, we find our comfort when we stop asking why and, instead, trust that our Father loves us.

To be continued…

[Graphic: YouTube video of Anthony Griffith’s testimony.]