My thoughts and emotions have run the gamut in the last 48 hours. God's will or not, mad, angry, buy a gun, don’t buy a gun, oppose owning guns, mourn, don’t mourn, cry, forget, remember, yell at the media hype, etc... Tonight after seeing several Facebook conversations and posts I decided to dig up a message to my students I presented a few years ago.

Either God is not all that good, or else He is not powerful enough to do anything about it. This question presents a very real problem to many of us. I’m not sure what happened a few years ago to spur this on... But apparently we were dealing with emotions that everyone has been dealing with the last few days. It was and is my best answer to what happened and was inspired by author Phillip Yancey, one of my favorite authors. If you want more help on this subject please pick up one of his books on suffering and death. If anything let this be a conversation jump off point, disagree? I would love to hear your thoughts...  In my High School years I had a 20 gallon aquarium. I didn't have many expensive or exotic fish I only had some Gold Fish and ton of guppies! Some were sporting attitudes, they thought they were better than all the other fish. Some of the fish had spots, some stripes, some were black, some wear orange, some grey, some shy, some friendly and some just down right demented.  But they were special to me no matter what they looked like, no matter how they acted.  It made me wonder if God ever felt like that towards us? 

One day I noticed that one of my big bad fish had gotten sick, and the others started to turn on it, tormenting it without mercy, they brutally attacked his eye! It made me so mad when they did that, I just wanted to stick my hand in the tank and thump them on the head and say, “Hey quit that! Can’t you-all just get along?” Made me wonder if God ever felt like doing that?  I remember spending much of my time fighting off bacteria and fungi that invaded the tank. I had this little chemical lab or at least one that looked like it on my night stand. I would use it to test the waters acidity, or bacteria, or nitrite levels or make sure the fish were getting enough oxygen. It was times like this I was glad I was not a fish. I mean could you imagine floating around a tank with no privacy? A long turd stuck to your butt that took hours to release. Because of that stuff, I would constantly clean out the filter and clean out the dung that had settled at the bottom of the tank, so that my little friends would have a clean place to live. I used to tell my friend that it was cool to have a tank but it was a pain in the butt to take care of because all the fish ever did was eat, sleep and die. It made me sad when a fish would die but I guess that’s part of life. I wonder if God ever felt like that? I wonder if He gets sad when we die? Whenever I had to treat an infection I had to agonize over what to do. Ideally I should move the infected fish to a quarantine tank in order to keep the others from pestering it and to protect the other fish from getting it. But the mere chasing of the infected fish would cause more damage than the infection. Stress resulting from the treatment itself may actually cause death.

I wonder if God ever wanted to intervene in our lives but did not because it would have caused more damage? 

I would often long to communicate to those small-brained water dwellers. Out of ignorance they saw me as a constant threat. I could not convince them of my true concern. I was too large for them, my actions to incomprehensible. My acts of mercy they saw as cruelty;  my attempts at healing they viewed as destruction. To change how they saw me I would have had to become like them. 

I’m sure glad that’s what God did.

Two thousand years ago he came down from the heavens and pitched his tent among us. The almighty God wrapped himself in flesh and blood and dwelt among us, felt our pain, suffering and showed us the ways of eternal life. 

That aquarium taught me a deep, yet small appreciation for what is involved in taking care of the universe. To my fish I was God, and one who did not hesitate to intervene, the one who kept everything in harmony. No food entered the tank unless I put it there, they would have never lived more than a day if I did not keep the pump operating. I learned that God is not unfair and He has a big job to do. I learned that suffering is not caused by God it’s caused by the evil in us. God does try to help us, sometimes we just don’t notice. 

Yet as much as that helped me understand, Why? I could not understand if I wanted to... Because I'm just a fish sometimes cowering in the corner, wondering... Why?