How can a good God?

For a long time in my own life I wrestled with attempting to make sense of the pain of my own life with a God who has control. I felt bitterness over the life I had experienced in contrast to others I saw around me. I questioned what I had done to “earn” the suffering I had experienced. After all, I was pretty “good”.

We so deeply fail to understand the depravity and total suffering that we deserve as sinners that we create a sense of entitlement within our own perspectives to think we deserve a life free from pain.

Our choices to sin immediately sever our relationship with God and access to His goodness. Every single experience we have that is free from pain is a testimony to His mercy.

While I struggled to accept my own failures and sin I continued to expect different for my life. I was angry at how “good” I was and what I still continued to endure. I questioned the justice of God in my own sufferings.

This is not to excuse the abuse I have endured. I rest assuredly now in the confidence that my abusers will one day answer for their actions to God himself.

But it took realizing just how desperately in need of God I was before I recognized just how good He truly was.

As long as you are unwilling to face the ugly reality of your own wickedness, you will miss just how lavishly the Lord has poured His mercy out on you.

I can now face the wrongs that have been committed against me with an understanding that aside from Christ that is where the brokenness of my life would lead, an understanding that because of Christ I am freed from that pit, and an understanding that there will be justice for the harm that has been done to me.