Love allows all things, trusts all things, embraces all things and therefore transcends all things.
lesson 1, The Way of Knowing
How many times have you asked yourself why God allowed some tragedy to happen?
We ask ourselves that question because we believe God should intervene in our world and stop some things from happening. Things like the death of a child or those events we call natural disasters. All those things that just seem so unfair.
I suspect we got the idea that God intervenes in worldly affairs from the stories the ancient Hebrews told themselves about God, stories, like the one about the Battle of Jericho, that make up a significant portion of what Christians call the Old Testament.
The ancient Hebrews told themselves those stories because they wanted to believe they were God’s chosen people, despite the fact they were an insignificant nation in the greater scheme of things in the ancient world.
The point about those stories, though, is that they are just that: stories.
You’d be hard pressed to find any evidence of God having intervened in world affairs to stop something happening – and the news is full of stories showing the exact opposite. Not very reassuring but reality, nevertheless.
What’s Jeshua telling us with his claim that love allows all things?
Could it be that God allows life to unfold so we get to experience the good, the bad, and the ugly? Maybe it’s not so much about God intervening to shield us from what we call tragedies as it is about us embracing life as it happens and working towards transcending all things.
Perhaps the death of a child isn’t the tragedy we perceive it to be. I know only too well such a death is painful to experience, but I suspect the pain comes from our refusal to embrace the experience so we can transcend it. Maybe that’s why they say time heals. It takes time to embrace what you perceive as being a painful experience – and you can’t transcend it until you do.
Tragedies on a larger scale, like wars or natural disasters, are often unfathomable to our minds, but they still happen. History tells us God doesn’t take sides in any of our wars, even in the ones we start in God’s name. If love allows all things, I guess it’s up to us to learn to trust the process of life and embrace our reality so we can take the actions that will allow us to transcend all things.
In other words, if we want a different reality, we need to stop complaining about God not doing anything about it and start embracing our current reality instead of trying to blame it on God. Perhaps then we’ll come to know what to do so we can move beyond our current reality.
Featured image from photo by Mathieu Odin used under Unsplash licence.