For Children: Why Bad Things Happen
Suffering is hard enough when you’re the one hurting. But when it’s a child you love? It’ll break your heart.
My family was still getting used to having me in my wheelchair at the dinner table when our family was about to be blind-sided by another disability. One day my dad noticed my 5-year old niece Kelly limping up the driveway, dragging her foot. My sister took little Kelly immediately to the doctor. We were stunned to discover she had an large cancerous tumor on her brain. In only a few months, we were saying goodbye to this sweet child. Kelly seemed to take her early graduation to heaven in stride, but the rest of us had many questions for God. Or maybe it was just one question: Why?
This was around the time I was dealing with the same question about my own disability. But over time, I learned that although God wants to hear our questions, he may never give us all the answers… if he did, we probably wouldn’t be able to take it all in. It would be like pouring million-gallon truths into our pea-sized brains. We just couldn’t grasp it all.
But God does give us something better than cut-and-dried answers: he gives us himself.
It’s something I tell the boys and girls who write me with their own questions about why God has allowed their spina bifida or their brother’s Down Syndrome. And often with my response, I tuck in this little booklet called “Why Bad Things Happen.” It’s something I wrote just for kids who are struggling with the difficult age-old questions we all ask.
Do you know a child who is groping to make sense of suffering? Take the time to share this booklet with that boy or girl. Because when you meet head-on a child’s questions with truths from God’s Word, you help their faith grow in ways you can hardly imagine!
–Joni Eareckson Tada
Let’s Talk About Suffering: What Does it Mean to “Suffer Strong?”
Now profoundly disabled, Katherine has learned to take joy in doing hard things in the good story God is writing in her life. Katherine and her husband Jay have used their second-chance lives to disrupt the myth that joy can only be found in a pain-free life.
