Why do good people get hurt?
It seems that if you are good or bad people deal with illness, problems, success, richness, poor, etc. If you believe or not it seems that life is the same. In fact I see some people that call themselves “Christians” doing the same things as people that don’t say they are Christians. What are your thoughts on this?
It’s all true, most of people living in western civilization don’t really know about that. The problem of most of us is a problem of lifestyle, and with discipline.
As to the question of why Christians have to deal with pain, I think Rick Warren had a great comment for that. “God never wastes a hurt.” That has been true in my life. I wasted a cumulative 3 years hiding in an anxiety and depression induced “coma”. I regret that waste of time and the pain it caused my family. I don’t want to ever replay it but I am glad for the way it changed my life. It has given me so much:
1. I’m no longer afraid to share the gospel.
2. I have a renewed value for relationships.
3. I have a driving passion to help hurting people.
4. I understand what it means to want to “blow your brains out”, to be in the “insane asylum”, to have panic attacks, dry mouth, extreme weight loss, and on and on.
5. And finally, I KNOW what David meant when he said “you lifted me out of the pit of despair, out of the mud and the mire.” Psalm 40:2-3
Praise God for your mercy and your grace. If God’s grace is big enough to forgive me for loading a shotgun and stretching my arm to the trigger with the full intention of leaving a mess for my family to clean up then his grace is big enough for ANYBODY. Thank you God for reminding me on that horrible day that only you have the right to choose when I live and when I die. God speaks in a still small voice if we will only listen.
One reason that good people hurt because God has granted true freedom to His creation. Freedom to do great good and great evil, freedom for the creation to fall into sin, and freedom for man (with God’s assistance) to work to restore a rightful order to things.
If God ran around fixing everything for the ‘good’ people so that they never got hurt or had immediate relief when something bad befell them, then the world would follow God for no other reason than to get the ‘good stuff’. This is not how God want’s free souls to chose Him. We must come willingly in honest repentance and surrender; not so we can get all the good stuff.