Why Bad Things Happen

The emotional scars our pasts leave us with are oftentimes difficult to overcome. Many hurting people turn to the church for help, searching for answers to questions that haunt them. “Why did my child have to die?” “Why was I raped?” “Why do I feel so alone?”

These questions don’t have simple answers, and yet well meaning Christians often try to help by offering one: “It was God’s will.” “The Lord knows what you are going through.” “God is in control.” And my personal favorite, “Everything happens for a reason.”

Unfortunately, these types of “kind words” often leave more questions than answers. Can you imagine your child being murdered and have it explained to you that “God is in control,” and “everything happens for a reason?”

What kind of God would want a child to be harmed? What kind of God would “allow” someone to be raped? Suddenly a loving God can appear cruel and distant.

I believe that God does know what we are going through. I also believe that “all things work together for the good” for those who are following our Lord. But this doesn’t mean that God wants bad things to happen.

The answer to these questions lay with our enemy, Satan, and his demons. Bad things happen because sin is in the world. God created a perfect place for us to live, the Garden of Eden, and gave us freedom to choose. In the midst of perfection we unbelievably chose sin, and through our choice brought evil into the world. We have made the same choice everyday since.

Bad things happen because evil rules this world. Jesus called Satan “the prince of this world.” God gave it to us, and through our choices we gave it over to the enemy.

This is so important because we can’t fight the enemy if we don’t first identify him. When people suffer, it may not be because of their specific sin, but it is because mankind’s sin gave rule of this world over to Satan.

All those things we tell hurting people are true, but if they don’t understand who the author of the problem is, then they will turn around and blame God.

It is also important for us to explain that one day God will remove evil from this place, but until then he offers us a way to make it through the pain and suffering. He offers us peace in the midst of the storms, not the promise to remove all the storms from our lives.

I can’t count the number of people who have come into my counseling office who have “tried the religious route,” but it didn’t work. They tried masking their pain with good works; throwing themselves into the work of the church believing that somehow, someway, it would ease the pain. They were taught to bury their problems instead of being taught how to deal with them.

The church is ill prepared to deal with the emotional issues that face society today. There are more rapes, homicides, assaults, and divorces than ever before, but we have not increased our abilities to deal with the emotional fallout that inevitably follows.

What we need to do goes deeper than the typical Sunday school class takes us. We need to learn more than just information about God’s word; we need to learn how to apply it to modern day problems.

Instead of requiring people to come to us and then trying to make them fit our molds, we need to be preparing to go out into society with real solutions to real problems!

We need to train our people with basic counseling techniques to meet basic emotional issues, and we need to train them to refer the larger crises to trained professionals. We need to have trained counseling professional on staff, because every church has dysfunctional marriages and families as members.

We need to offer godly financial counsel to combat the ever increasing debt that our people are enslaving themselves to. We need to offer help to widows by meeting basic needs such as cutting grass, changing the oil in their vehicles, and changing hard to reach light bulbs on a regular basis.

We are great sprinters of the faith! We think of these things on occasion and help out for a weekend or on a mission trip, but we are failing to meet these needs long term. We are not training marathon Christians! We run the race one Sunday at a time, one Bible study at a time, one mission trip at a time, instead of running it on a daily basis!

We hear about hurting people, or see a need and offer to pray for them, but we fail to act, and oftentimes we even fail to pray for them.

Ministering to hurting people takes discipleship, prayer, and time. We have to be willing to take the time to minister instead of offering pat answers and quick fixes to them so we can get back to what we want to be doing.

We need to train our people to become true disciples, true ministers. That’s what Jesus did, and that is what we are required to do!

Johnny Walker is a Christian Counselor and the founder of Family Works Counseling. You can reach him at (770) 456-5547