is God good?
“How can you possibly say that God is good when _________(insert horrible trauma) happened to me 3 years ago?!?”
I was sitting in a circle with eight young women all around fifteen years old. Our topic for this circle conversation was identity, and we had strayed into the tangential topic of gender and body image. The stories shared are often heartbreaking and today was no different. Most of the circle was in long term foster care. Many had suffered abuse. None of them attended church.
It’s an incredible privilege to sit with teens at camp, both male and female, and delve into subjects they don’t often have space to sit in. Stories get shared, lives open up and opinions are often heated, confused, and emotional.
But all of it is being discussed in order to help point campers towards the good news that the God of the universe loves them, is reaching towards them, and sees all of their pain, grief and loss. We spend time sitting daily talking about identity, family, race, sexuality, and fatherlessness in order to clear the way for the gospel to be heard. Hence the opening question.
It is genuinely hard to believe that God is good when most of your life has been filled with pain, betrayal, abuse, and neglect.
Is God good? All the time? No matter what happens? How do you answer this question when life seems to scream out , “no!”
And how does this intersect with the gender discussion we've been having ?
Throughout the spring we’ve been discussing gender, or beginning to discuss. There has been a lot of groundwork laid in Genesis- both in the creation of two gendered beings, and in their fall into sin and disunity with their creator.
And though we defined gender dysphoria and discussed some other terms, it seemed good to take a step back.
Out step back involves two questions:
Is God good?
To me, these two questions either become our starting point in the discussion of our sexual and gender ethic.
Or they get answered secondly when we form our sexual ethics without considering them.
A few weeks back we looked at authority, and today we will zoom in on God’s goodness.
As we read the scriptures we are often afforded the benefit of hindsight to see how God’s goodness works into the various lives and situations throughout the bible.
With hindsight, we see the brothers of Joseph being a part of God’s plan to save His family.
With hindsight, we see incredible pain in the life of Moses turned into salvation for an entire nation.
Painful exile for the Jews produced the circumstances for Daniel to glorify God before the Babylonians.
Even the excruciating, wrongful, death of Jesus produces an explosive release of salvation and the Spirit- God’s ultimate goodness to us.
Looking backwards, it’s often easier to put the pieces together of the brokenness around us.
But for us, and for the campers sitting around me, we are still in the middle of the story. And it can seem all broken, dysfunctional, and marred beyond redemption.
Is God good?
I asked those same young women that question on Friday after our week of discussions together. Their answers (paraphrased by me):
“He brought me here to get to know Him.”
“He gave me this house to live in and people that knew to send me here.”
“My gramma told me this story years ago, and now you are saying the same thing.”
I can share with them (and you) how God has been good in my life. I can share with them (and you) stories from the scriptures that display God’s goodness. I can read them scriptures that define the characteristics of God’s goodness.
And slowly, over time, seeds of hope grow inside of them, and inside of us.
You can see it in their eyes. The desire to hope and trust in a God who created them, who knows them, and who is reaching out.
Do they all come to believe- no.
But most leave with a little more hope in God’s goodness.
As I live through the situations, stories, pain, and trauma of life, it matters how I frame the story. My starting point is that:
God is good and that He has a rightful authority over me because He created me.
That changes the way the story gets seen and told by me.
This framing did not come naturally or accidentally. It took work.
It will take work for you to settle those two questions:
Is God good?
Does God have authority in your life?
I challenge you to begin using that as the lens through which you see your circumstances- whatever they are.
It has particular bearing as we look at the gender conversation, but that’s for another day!
If you enjoy thinking through these with me, consider sharing them on your social media platform.
We as the church must wrestle with these topics of our generation. We cannot hide or sink our heads into the sand. Young men and women are seeking truth and we have the truth- let us be equipped to talk.