Many people find their faith in God challenged when they open their daily newspaper. "How can God permit so much suffering?" they ask. I teared up listening to a grandmother talk about holding her little grandson in her arms while he died, the victim of a tree toppled by a windstorm. "I wish I could go to sleep," sobbed the granny, "and wake up to find my little Billy still here."

What's worse is that God doesn't just permit such tragedies. He causes them, at least indirectly by creating a world where pointless suffering and tragedy is part of the equation. Rationalizing that something good will come of such things is really a stretch. I can imagine nothing good coming to little Billy by being crushed in front of his granny.

Given the many things that cause me to question my faith in God, his hand in such tragedies is strangely not one of them. This cavalier attitude may be the result of having passed through life without too much personal tragedy of my own, at least compared to others, at least so far.

My reason is that I don't hold God to the same standards of behavior as I do myself and my fellow humans. If I pushed the tree on little Billy, I would be evil or at least misguided. All humans know this, more importantly, they feel it. Something inside each of us alerts us to morality in a way unknown in animals. This universal feeling about good and evil is offered as evidence for the existence of God and our special place among creation. The problem is that feelings without logical support can be as wrong as the universal feeling among all humans a thousand years ago that the earth was flat.

One line of reasoning says it is wrong for humans to take life because it isn't ours to take, whereas since God produced life, he also has the right to take it. Certainly worth an argument, but so is the counterpoint that if we are God's children, he shouldn't go around torturing his children.

We may gain a fresh perspective to that conundrum if we imagine ourselves having a conversation with God the day before we were conceived. Imagine if God gave us a choice. He would give us life, but only if suffering and death were part of the deal, perhaps as some cosmic balance, or just to keep us from overrunning the place. We could always decline and simply not be born. Which way would you go? The jury is of course still out, but I would have asked for life, if for no other reason than to see what life is all about.

When faced with a conundrum I can't resolve, I sometimes retreat to the mystery-of-faith position. Since I base my faith on other factors, I don't expect everything else to support my faith, just to avoid refuting it. I pursue my enlightenment, hoping I may get an insight into the mystery, or that it will be sorted out by someone above my pay grade.

Another misunderstanding I have with the crowd that holds God responsible for the world's ills is that they sometimes seek to excuse him on the basis that maybe bad people deserve God's retribution. Terrorizing bad people to be good doesn't seem like God's style. It also cheapens the integrity of those who choose to be righteous without God's flogging.

Just as illogical is the idea that personal tragedy can be avoided through prayer, and that our luck sometimes runs out when we don't pray well enough. Praying has so many wondrous aspects, but using it to beg for stuff isn't one of them. Pestering God to fill our cup and to keep away the bad stuff is to demote him to a magician and us to an audience clamoring for tricks. Worth remembering is the prayer Jesus made in the Garden of Gethsemane. Jesus was looking for wiggle room regarding the crucifixion (wouldn't you?), but he ended with, "but let your will be done."

To trust God with that final personal tragedy, our death, seems like asking a lot. But that is the only logical conclusion to true faith. What sense is there to trust him to give us our daily bread, which is no big feat in America, but not to trust him with the big stuff? If we believe he exists, then he has the power to deal with our big deals as easily as our incidentals.

There's a passage in the bible that reminds us that God causes the rain to fall on the just and the unjust. Hidden in that is the premise that happiness and tragedy, the ying and yang of the world, are just part of the stage on which we, not God, are to perform.

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