Why?
Sometimes people who are hurting ask me difficult questions about God.
Sometimes in my own life I have asked very difficult questions too. Sometimes it can feel that there is no answer.
This poem by R S Thomas somehow helps:
” Nuclear”
It is not that he can’t speak;
who created languages
but God? Nor that he won’t;
to say that is to imply malice. It is just that
he doesn’t, or does so at times
when we are not listenting, in
ways which we have yet to recognise.
as speech. We call him the dumb
God with an affrontery beyond
pardon. Whose silence so eloquent
as his? What word so explosive
as that one Palestinian
word with the endlessness of its fall-out?
And the simple prayer of Reinhold Niebuhr:
” God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change
the courage to change the things I can
and the wisdom to know the difference.
And the words from a hymn called ” God is love: let heaven adore him”
” God is love: and he enfoldeth
all the world in one embrace;
with unfailing grasp he holdeth
ev’ry child of ev’ry race.
And when human hearts are breaking
under sorrow’s iron rod,
there they find the self-same aching
deep within the heart of God”
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Good choices, to which I’d add Vanstone’s wonderful hymn ‘ Morning glory, starlit sky’ which sadly seems to have fallen out of our most recent hymn book.Being inspired at the moment listening to Paula Gooder and Eugene Peterson.