I Don't Understand

There are some days when nothing in life seems fair, and there are a lot of things I will never understand.

There's a small child with NAT. Non-Accidental Trauma. Child abuse. We don't know exactly what happened, but this latest insult caused a massive stroke. Given that there is not a whole lot of healthy tissue left (according to the MRI), I think it's a good bet that even a mildly normal childhood will be out of the question.

There's a small child who was admitted for ataxia. The ataxia wasn't really ataxia at all - there was a reactive arthritis and the hip hurt too badly for the patient to walk. Urinalysis indicates some sort of nasty infection. It's looking very much like sexual abuse with resultant Gonorrhea/Chlamydia infection.

There's another small child who apparently (don't ask me how) wandered out into the middle of one of the busy freeways and was smashed. I don't honestly know all the details, but I know that they were in bad enough shape that they were being operated on by surgery on the ICU floor. Nurses stood around outside the room, shaking their heads.

Family members sit there and cry when bad things happen. They moan. Sometimes, they scream in agony. They cry out, "Where was God?" or "Why did He let this happen?" Sometimes, I can understand that question - and during the instances where I understand the anguish, I find I have no good answer for that question. I know that He is always there, that He never leaves us even when we feel forsaken. Sometimes it's hard to verbalize that - harder than it should be, anyway.

But the situations above? Those were preventable. It wasn't strangers that abused those children or let them wander into the freeway. The perpetrators were the people who should have loved and cared for these young lives more than anyone else on this planet. Somehow, these perpetrators have the audacity to ask, "Where was God?"

But it's not, "Where was God?" God was where He's always been - right here, right now. He never left. He was standing right there, crying and holding your child after they were abused/molested/hit by cars on the freeway. He never, not for one minute, let them go. So the question, then, is not "where was God?" but "where were YOU?" Why did YOU raise your hand against them? Why did YOU let go of their little hand and let them dash out of your front yard?

Where were YOU?