What if God’s plan doesn’t want something important to me to go right?

Question: The Bible always says that God will make everything all right in the end, and if something doesn’t go right, it’s because God’s plan says it’s not supposed to go right. I know that’s supposed to make you feel better, but it does the opposite for me. What if God’s plan doesn’t want something important to me to go right? Please help, because this is one of the main reasons why I feel my faith is weak. For some reason, just “trusting the plan” doesn’t make me feel any better.

Answer:  There is an entire book in the Bible devoted to the search for some guarantee that our lives will go right.  It is the book of Ecclesiastes.  The author sought to “gain” a bright future through various means including wisdom and folly.  He discovered that folly is sure to bring pain and misery, but that even wisdom and behaving wisely cannot keep things going right.  And the ultimate proof of that is death.  We’re all going to die.  God will not rescue us from that negative future.  What he finally counsels is to enjoy the happy moments of life but prepare for the unhappy ones, especially death.  And above all, keep God’s commands.

How can God love us if He allows us to suffer?

Question: Why does God allow his children to suffer in this life when He says that He has only the best intentions for you and will open the floodgates of heaven upon you?

Answer: You are ultimately asking something that only God Himself can answer. But let me tell you a parable to help you with the overall issue.

A mom took her 1yr old son to the doctor for his inoculations. The boy had been to the doctor already and felt a little nervous, but when he learned that he was going to be stuck by a needle he became outright scared and began clinging to his mother. In essence he was pleading with her to protect him from the doctor and his instrument of torture, the hypodermic needle.

Instead of protecting him his mother held him while the doctor stuck him. The look in his eyes conveyed what his words could not. “How could you have been complicit in this pain?” “Why would you let me hurt this way, aren’t you supposed to love me?” “I will never trust you fully again.”

His mother knew, of course, that her act was an act of love, no matter how hard it was to see her son suffer. She knew that without this shot he might experience an even worse pain or death. But there was no way to explain this to her one-year old in any terms he could possibly understand. All she could do was comfort him and hope that one day he would understand and would continue to trust in her love for him.

We know God loves us. Sending His Son Jesus to die for us proves that. If He could tell us in terms we could understand why He allows the suffering He allows in the world, I’m sure He would. But there is a bigger picture that only He can see at this point. Perhaps one day it will become more clear to us.

I hate to admit it, but knowing that human beings are basically about ourselves and our own comfort and that internally we rebel against submitting to our Creator, it seems the only thing that moves us to seek Him at all is pain. The Apostle Paul tells us in Romans 8:18 and following that God has subjected the world to futility. Things don’t work the way they were intended to originally before we rebelled against God. If things continued to be a Garden of Eden for us I don’t believe we would ever turn to Him. We would be content with His good gifts and unmotivated to see how much we need more than His good gifts. We need a rescue from our rebellious hearts.