When Bad Things Happen to Good People

I recently read a book by Harold Kushner called When Bad Things Happen to Good People. My world has kind of been turned on its head since reading it. I wasn't raised with religion and have just recently (within the last year) been seriously exploring my faith and have actually ENJOYED going to church. Much of that has to do with our infertility struggles. I constantly asked myself things like

• Why me?
• What have I done to deserve this?
• Does God think I would be that horrible of a mother?
• Is God punishing me for not being more faithful to Him?

Friends that knew much more about faith than I did assured me that God LOVES me, not that He is punishing me.

I had finally come to a place where I felt like God has a plan for us. Although we can't understand it now, we will come to see and it will be for the best. It will work out the way it is supposed to. I am usually a believer that "things happen for a reason." I guess I just needed to feel there was purpose to what I was experiencing.

This book throws all of that out the window.

I enjoyed many aspects of Kushner's book, which offered the view that there is randomness in the world and that God is as outraged as we are about the injustice that occurs. It provided some comfort in knowing that Sh!t does happen and it's not God that is punishing us, but rather that God is actually there with us when we are grieving. He is the one that helps us to keep going even when we have hit rock bottom and don't think we have anything left to give. Where else do we get that strength from?

However, I am feeling fairly unsettled after reading the book. I feel like God has been stripped of His power, that He is so limited and I guess I always just thought of an all-powerful God. I would like to just write-off Kushner's viewpoint; however, I can't reconcile between an all-powerful God that could stop cancer, hurricanes, infertility and chooses not to with this limited God that Kushner portrays.

God seems less tangible than before I read the book and I feel further from Him. And that makes me mad.

Much of this probably has to do with the fact that my faith is still very new and developing. It kind of makes me sad that I am rocked so easily and shows just how weak my beliefs are. I wanted to believe I was further along than this.

I enjoy books like this one that offer new perspective and make me think, but I don't like feeling so unsettled about things after reading them. I am making my hubby read it so we can discuss! He usually helps me clear things up!