There are days when the world weighs so heavily on my heart.

It’s an ugly place, this world. Looking at the news or social media is enough to make me want to leave it. It seems that every moment, someone is shooting up a church or school in the U.S., a terrorist is plowing into a crowd in Europe with a truck, and of course children are truly starving in Africa and in many other places in the world, or perhaps dying of leukemia. If it’s not that, it’s nature itself: a hurricane or mudslide wiping out whole communities. And if it’s not some catastrophic thing like these, it’s the smaller things: people are prideful and petty and cruel to each other. People are selfish and abusive.

So, what the ****, God, right? Why would you create such a place? How are people supposed to believe in your divine beneficence in such a world?

And how dare anyone believe in such a cruel God, right?

Right. I agree. Believing in such a God would be… heartless. But I don’t believe in a God like that. I believe God is good.

So… God created everything, and I believe in God, but I don’t believe God is cruel? How do I reconcile that?

I reconcile it by realizing this world is actually what we — what people — created after we threw out what God created. I reconcile it by agreeing that God had to give us true free will, and these are the results.

This isn’t the world God created. It’s the fallen version of that world. God created a lovely world with none of those catastrophic threats. We rejected Him and the world He created. We wanted instead to live by our own moral compass, our own ideas of what is wrong and right. The knowledge of good and evil sounded better to us than living in relationship with, and dependency on, God.

You see in this world the results of our decision to live without Him.

So why did He give us that option? Why did He give us free will and the opportunity to use it? Because He didn’t want a relationship with a bunch of slaves or robots. He wanted us to freely choose a relationship with Him. For that, He had to give us another choice, a real choice, and the real ability to turn away from Him.

We chose poorly. And, in our pride, most of us continue making that choice over and over again.

But believers can shine a light, be a beacon in the dark.  The horrible things in the world can also be pathways to good. We can build relationships and lift others up.

Building relationships is perhaps one of the most important things we can do, in fact. So much of the ugliness of this world stems from disconnectedness. People NEED relationships. And those relationships need to start with feeling safe in the other person’s company, so please, don’t start pointing your finger. Reach out to others with the love of Christ.

It’s so rare in this world to find someone who will come alongside you instead of setting themselves against you. It’s startling in a good way. Through this, perhaps we can point others toward the grace of God and help them realize the incredible second chance He gave us to have a relationship with Him. And if it doesn’t turn out that way for the people we reach out to, at least we can provide one pinprick of light in a very dark world.