Faith Is a Journey

Why, God?

When a friend dies in a car accident or a parent is diagnosed with brain cancer, we ask, “Why, God?” In wrestling with faith, I didn’t discover a clear answer to that question. But I discovered an insight: the alternative to faith didn’t seem very compelling. If life was a cosmic accident, then justice didn’t exist. Goodness didn’t amount to anything. We were animals fighting to survive in a godless world. “Saying that God doesn’t exist doesn’t make the problem [of evil] any easier,” a professor once said to me. “In fact, it might make it harder; it gives suffering less meaning.”

From Faith and Other Flat Tires by Andrea Palpant Dilley, published by HarperCollins