Evil

In my devotions, this caught my eye. Frederick Buechner writes,

"God is all- powerful.
God is all-good.
Terrible things happen.
Yuo can reconcile any two of these prepositions with each other, but you can't reconcile all three. The promble of evil is perhaps the greatest single problem for religious faith." He goes on to describe how various religions attempt to resolve it; by denying the actual reality of evil as an illusion of the mind, or by creating a system of cyclical cause and effect perpetrated through 'reincarnation'.
He continues, "Christianity, on the other hand, ultimately offers no theoretical solution at all. It merely points to the cross and says that, practically speaking, there is no evil so dark and so obscene---not even this---but that God can turn it to good."

Is that not the gift of Christianity? To walk with the suffering, indeed to suffer with the world, in order that the world might know the deeper truth---that suffering is not the last word, but is the penultimate word to God's ultimate Word, which is always and forever LIFE. Should we not affect an end to suffering? By all means. But we also should realize that God himself is deeply intimate with suffering. he knows and feels it, as if it has become part of created reality for some holy purpose. At least, from this side of the cross we can make divine meaning from suffering that points to God's love and life. So when you watch the news and you see innocents suffering today, declare the truth of what you see or who you see. (with the eyes of faith) You see Christ and so you see hope.