Why is Life Hard — Morning Devotions

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I hope that you’re OK today. Back in 2006 a good movie came out of the US called Last Holiday. Maybe you saw it when it was released. It starred the actress Queen Latifa as Georgia Bird, who sings in a church choir. The story goes that she suddenly discovers one day she’s only got 3 weeks to live, and so the decision’s made that she traveled to enjoy life as much as she could, especially eating as much nice food as she could.

But before Georgia resolves to enjoy her last days here on Earth, she goes through a predictable crisis and she wondered why God had let this terrible thing happen to her, and in one scene of the movie, she’s standing in the choir where she sings, and she starts calling out to God, Why Lord, why me? Now the choir, they didn’t know what was going on with George, so they began to join in, uh, as if she was sort of leading, leading them into a song, and soon they’re singing this rousing anthem with the why me theme.

But as the story goes on, you see it that Georgia doesn’t get the answer from the Lord, she leaves the church disappointed and downhearted, and Queen Latifa’s ability to play this role, this why me role, is not just a matter of good acting. In fact, I read that she’d had a tough life growing up in a single parent household living in New Jersey.

But the hardest of all the experience she had was when she was 22. Her singing career had just begun to take off. She’d bought a motorcycle for her brother Lancelot, who was 24. Two months later, he died in a tragic motorcycle accident, and Queen Latifa was interviewed about this. She was actually asked about her Christian faith, and uh she was asked if she’d ever had a why me moment in her life. Yes, she said, “It was my brother. Why my brother, why my dad, he died. He was such a good person”, she said. I think many people know what it’s like to face this sort of pain and to ask the why me question.

Now, maybe you’ve lost someone, and it makes no sense at all and even if you haven’t known the agony of this sort of thing, you might have gone through other hard times when you’ve cried out to God, why me? All of us have uh watched in horror as innocent people are destroyed on TV or read about in the papers, natural disasters or illness.

And if we’re at all sensitive to what’s going on around us, we can’t help but wonder why. And these questions come up, don’t they? Why is life so hard? Can we find God in the midst of a hard life? Now I think that’s a question that’s worth exploring. Now some people, in thinking about this, say, well, it just proves there’s no God. If you don’t believe in a God who created the universe, then the why question is not a particularly difficult one at all. Life is hard because, well, tough, that’s the way it is.

There’s no reason that we should expect anything better. The tsunamis or the hurricanes, earthquakes, cancer, HIV, AIDS, starvation, these are naturally occurring events that need explanation. So if you’re of that opinion, you believe that there is no God, the universe is is random, so bad things are going to happen, so why would you expect anything good to happen?

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Well, for the Christian, the atheistic answer is not satisfactory, although I think most of us have wrestled at one time with this sort of question when it seems, especially when we see the suffering that goes on, and ‘no God’ argument has many fatal flaws, and most of all, it doesn’t explain the existence of the good in our world. If there is no God, how come there are good people, good things that happen, or there is this beauty that we can enjoy? I just can’t believe these haphazard movements of particles and molecules have produced such good things. So that’s, that’s the theory about the no God. And then there’s people who say, then God must be bad.

The bad God approach, many people believe in some higher power, they don’t have a problem with life being hard because they, they don’t believe necessarily that there is a good God. Life is hard because the bad gods send famine or disease and other tragedies. They say life is hard because the good gods are not in charge, but Christianity has a different view, and it says we believe in a God of love.

Well, I want to take this a little bit further tomorrow because there is an answer, and there is something that can explain that to us.

Let’s Pray

Lord, we thank you for your promise of peace and protection, and you’ve promised, Lord, to meet us wherever we are, even in the dark times of life. So help us, Lord, as we struggle through these issues. Amen.

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