Why, God?

Yesterday, a terrible, terrible tragedy occurred. A disturbed man, armed with a couple of guns, entered an elementary school in Connecticut and shot and killed 27 innocent people, many of them young children.

When horrendous things like this occur nowadays, everyone is compelled to run to their Facebook account and posts their feelings about what happened.  Although I believe that it is healthy to vent strong emotions in order to attempt to shine light on them and attempt to make sense of them, it was with a great deal of despair that I watched comment after comment after comment pop up on my Facebook feed. 

The despair I felt was mostly centered on two topics related to the massacre that were inappropriate and illogical.  One topic was political, which I thought was dumb and in incredibly poor taste to bring up while emotions were high and folks were still reeling from shock, but which I suppose was an understandable topic in light of the horrendous and unexpected attack.  The other topic was just shocking and stupid and completely illogical, and it's one I've been mulling over for the past 24 hours or so while I'm trying to wrap my brain around the senselessness of the situation.

I will never understand why folks, particularly Christians, will say things like:

"Well, what do you expect?  God is no longer allowed in schools."

"Why did God allow this to happen?"

The first question is one of the more ludicrous, and indeed, hurtful, things I've ever heard from folks who profess to be Christians.  The inference of this statement is that God's power is limited. That man, in his pathetic attempts to control his world, can actually keep God out of schools and away from the people inside those schools.  That just because man has decided to officially remove prayer from the school day, God is for some reason no longer able to have an effect on what happens inside school walls.

If, as a Christian, you truly believe that God is infinite, that He is omniscient and omnipresent, you must accept that God was inside that school when the gunman entered. He was there with those poor, innocent babies as they were slaughtered in front of their classmates and their teachers. If you accept that God was there in that school at that time because you know that man cannot possibly contain God, no matter how much legislation is passed regarding the separation of church and state, then the second question is the more reasonable and natural question to ask.

Why did God allow this tragedy to occur?  Why did God allow folks, who innocently awakened one morning on a cold December day, bathed, dressed, ate their cereal and went off to that school, to be slaughtered randomly by a madman for no reason? The answer is that He didn't.  He didn't allow this tragedy to occur.  God doesn't work that way. When He created human beings, He gave them free will.  Men and women are free to choose whether they will do evil or good. 

God is not some magical, mythical being who flits around with a wand and say, "Uh uh uh, oh no no, you can't do that."  Because if He did do that, if He did prevent these sorts of awful things from happening, then we wouldn't have free will and we couldn't make a conscious decision to love and follow Him.  This darkest day occurred because a man woke up on December 14, 2012 and made a decision to do evil, to consciously choose to exercise his free will and to wantonly kill other human beings before he took his own life. 

That's it in a nutshell. 

God didn't choose for or allow those students and teachers to be slaughtered.

Man did.