Good Questions

My 3-year-old SJ is a living paradox. She is both wonderfully gentle and extraordinarily rough. One moment she is delightfully happy, the next she's a brewing storm. One of her nicknames is Pickle, because she is both so sweet and so sour. She is a comedian and a serious thinker.

The other day, we were driving along and she asked me, "Mama, why God never gets tired of healing?" I began to tell her about God's infinite capacity to love and how He just never gets tired of healing because that's who He is. But I started to see her little brow furrow and I stopped...

"Then why He didn't choose to heal Matthew, Mama?"

I had no idea what to say. My 3-year-old had just tapped into two very potent truths--that God never tires of healing *and* He didn't choose to heal her baby brother. And reconciling those two things has made my brain itch and heart ache since August, too.

As I watched her try to make sense of this, I just wanted to make it go away for her. I wanted to shield her from the reality of a broken world, a world where God's best isn't always what happens. I want to protect her from the doubt that is intertwined with a life of faith. But I can't shelter her from that doubt any more than I can shelter her from the reality that Matthew is gone. All I could say is, "that's a good question, baby. That's a very good question."