Tuesday, March 25
Asking ‘Why?’
“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, and your ways are not my ways.” – Isaiah 55:8
Across from me in the row of hard plastic chairs sits a small child. She can’t be much more than three, pigtails sticking out from her head, Kool-aid ring around her mouth, and big brown eyes staring up at her dad. He looks exhausted, but fights to keep the frustration out of his voice as she leans over and asks for the 37th time, “Why?” With a tight smile, he replies, “I don’t know, sweetie, but the people who know the plane are in charge.”
Like that little girl, I often find myself wondering why. My life does not look at all like I imagined it would, or like society tells me it should. I am a 43-year-old childless divorcee who lives 1,500 miles from home working a job that always felt like it was only going to be temporary. I have a degenerative autoimmune disease that interferes with my daily life sometimes, and last year I had major surgery. I’ve moved more times that the average person, and have left behind people and places that were dear to me each time. I often find myself leaning on my Heavenly Father and asking, “Why?”
It’s easy to fall into the same trap as the man in Jesus’s parable and feel like that fig tree. I haven’t produced the fruit that others expect-there is no smiling family, no big house or new car, no career accolades or even a clear path of where I’ll be in six months. “Why [do I] even use up the ground?” I might shout, but the words of God spoken through Isaiah provide comfort in not knowing. “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, and your ways are not my ways,” God says. How reassuring, because my thoughts are NOT terribly friendly when I find myself wrapped up in the cries of why? The beauty of this is that God’s thoughts and ways are so much more than mine could ever be.
Yes, those things I labeled myself as earlier are true, but in the end, they don’t matter. God has forced good from every not-so-wonderful situation in my life and brought me to a place even more full than I could have imagined. Why? Because at the end of the day, I am a child of God, and that’s where my value is. Titles and relationships and career may be impressive to the people around us, but they’re meaningless. The one who knows the bigger picture is in charge, and while I may still ask, “Why?” I can rest assured that even if I don’t have an answer, God does.
Hannah Froehlich