musings on Evil

I can remember it as if it were yesterday. I can remember standing ankle-deep in the snow, clutching the razor blade tightly between two fingers. I remember feeling the numbing cold against my skin, and I remember the feeling of watching the steaming blood crawl between the deep canyons I carved in my own forearm. I remember how the slashing at my own flesh grew quicker and quicker, and I remember how the tears, crawling down from my eyes, froze upon my cold-blotched cheeks. I can remember raising my hands to Heaven, staring up into the giant snowflakes falling all around me, and I remember a torrent of words escaping my lips, a torrent of words that I dare not repeat even in closed settings, words that were directed at God…

The words I spoke paralyzed me, and when the suffering passed (if only for a season), I wondered if God would ever forgive me for the words I spoke in my pain. It was then that I read the Book of Job and the Book of Jeremiah. Both of these men cried out to God, both of these men said things better left unsaid. Jeremiah called God a thief and a rapist. But yet God forgave these men. Why? I think it is because their words were born out of suffering, and God forgives even the cruelest words that find their root in our agonizing pain. The event that I described happened many years ago, but it lives fresh in my mind.

“Why is there suffering in the world? Why does Evil exist, and why does it prosper?”

This is a big question, a question that deserves no easy, pat, or “Christianized” answer. I have wrestled and struggled with this question for many, many months, even several years. I am not the only one who has suffered—from the days of the ancient Near East, all through Judaism, all through Christianity, this question has been bit into and fought with. And no one seems to have a perfect answer. Perhaps the best answer is, “It’s a mystery?” But I’m not content with that.