hannah the human

“Why does God let bad things happen to good people?”

This is, for me, one of the most annoyingly simplistic questions people tend to ask.  You see, being raised Methodist, I’ve had an answer to this since I was quite young. It’s as ingrained in me as are the ten commandments and that Jesus loves me, this I know.  God “lets” bad things happen to ‘good’ people because people have the freedom to make the choices they are going to make.  

So, today, when the president of my university stood in front of us at chapel asking this question, I think I audibly sighed (I mean I’m not sure if it was audible, after all, as I generally cannot hear those sorts of sounds anymore).  I’m so tired of this question.  Now, I love discussing this with my youth.  But in my head, the fact that a grown adult asks this question just seems ludicrous… Until I started thinking.

Just like I need to remind myself about other “basics” of my faith, I need to be reminded of this, too.

You see, though I don’t love to put this out there for everyone, my faith over the last month has been really rough.  Why? Primarily because of choices that other people have made. And while my question to God hasn’t been “why do you let bad things happen to good people?” It’s been, “WHY, GOD.  Why did you let this person hurt me? Why did you let me let these people into my life?”  To sum up the general idea of what I’ve been fighting with God about, I’d say that I’m struggling with why these people have hurt me, and what I could be doing. 

These people have the freedom to make their choices.  These choices impact me, but I cannot let them dictate how I feel.

Recently, I have been really struggling with some of my friends.  And honestly, I don’t understand what happened between us.  But instead of being my friends, they dropped me out of their lives.  This was the start of weeks of things that have really made me struggle with my faith.  I don’t understand, and gaps in my understanding is one of my least favorite things.  I’m a person that is used to being armed with information, but in this case, I had none. 

All I knew was that I was no longer friends with these people.  I’d believed we were close, but that was not the case.  One of them decided I wasn’t trustworthy, though I’d never done anything to show her I wasn’t.  In fact, honesty is one of the things I value most in life, so it showed that perhaps she didn’t know me at all. This was almost more painful, that a person I’d thought to be my friend actually knew so little about me.  And during that time, I leaned on another friend.  But the next thing I knew, she stopped talking to me as well.  And it seems that every time I log into social media now, there’s another post of the two of them, with the caption always somehow including “best friends,” and I’m just so confused about happened, and what I possibly could have done to them.

That was the start of my confusion in my faith recently.  It seems that the closer I get to God, the more I get walked on.  For much of my life, I’ve kept strong walls up around me to protect myself.  After losing my father at a young age, that was just a coping method I’d developed to keep myself from feeling that kind of pain again.  And that protected me.  But as I’ve grown to try to follow Jesus more, I have tried to knock these walls down.  As each wall comes down though, all that seems to be happening is that I’m getting hurt.  And I don’t know how that would possibly be God’s design for me. 

I recently tried to be more forgiving, and it ended up hurting me.  I was trying to be forgiving of a specific person in my life; but I’m learning that forgiveness does not mean I have to become friends with someone who deeply hurt me, especially if they do not allow me to feel that pain.  This one is even more recent, and though for a while I thought by being so forgiving, I was being closer to God, I’ve learned that God does not wish for me to be hurt over and over again by the same person.  (After all, Michael Scott, forgiveness isn’t next to Godliness.) 

It seems like, since I’ve become a youth pastor, people tend to think I have faith “all figured out,” and it’s quite uncommon for me to have a time or a person to talk through where I’m struggling in my faith.  One friend actually told me this summer, “Oh Hannah, she just doesn’t talk to you about those struggles because you’re so close to God.” Well, that’s just great.  If my friends won’t communicate with me, how is that a real friendship?

I don’t have every answer about faith.  Guess what? Somedays, I yell at God.  I’ve screamed and yelled and cussed at God.  I’ve thrown my Bible across the room before, and called God a liar.  Faith isn’t always perfect.  Faith isn’t always this pretty image of a life going right.  (In fact, it’s often quite the opposite.)  Faith is sometimes fighting with God.  Faith is for humans, and I am a human.  It seems that since a young age, being called an “old soul” and having gone through tragedy in my life, people, especially my peers, think I’m too mature or “too far along in my faith” to be relatable.  They’ve pigeon-holed me to be something other than human.  Honestly, I’m calling BS.  My faith is not more superior than anyone else’s faith of my age.  God’s grace will not extend to be deeper than anyone else.  Nor do I believe that to be the case.

So, I’m struggling with my faith right now, but nobody tends to really want to hear that from a person that’s working in ministry.  I love God.  I know Jesus died for me.  I know the Holy Spirit is working within me.  I know big, nerdy theological stuff.  But do I know how that applies to the tough situations I’m going through right now? Nope.

Oddly enough, my hearing loss is a place I connect with God the MOST right now.  In this whole journey, in the days where I can barely hear anything, in the times where people don’t understand, God’s helping me through it, and I’ve not given up faith in Him. Sure, it’s not always easy… it’s actually really, really tough.  But it’s not making me struggle in my faith.

However, in these problems I’m having with some of my peers, I just don’t know where God is.  And I hate to ask the “God where are you in this?” typical question, but it’s in my head and on my heart.  Has been for a few weeks now.  I just don’t understand why God would allow people into my life who were only going to cause me pain. I don’t understand why God would urge me to kick down my walls if I was only going to get hurt again.  I don’t know why God allows other people to make decisions for me, or to try to tell me how I feel is wrong.  But what I do know?  God is much bigger than my understanding.  And when I struggle, He’s in it somewhere, even if I don’t understand where. 

Because nothing, neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate me from the love of God that is in Jesus Christ our Lord (Romans 8:38-39).

-       Han