It’s easier in moments of pain, when the questions invade your reality, to direct your sorrow, disappointment, and anger at Satan or a broken world or a random occurrence. It’s easier to let the blame lie there, but if we do, we are robbing God of His power and control and cheating ourselves out of fully processing the magnitude of who He is. Some would argue that God causes hardship. Others would say He simply fails to prevent tragedies from occurring. Pragmatically, though, the result is the same – we suffer, and whether God acts or doesn’t act, He still at the bottom of it. That means our true conflict is with God.

If we really want to start down the road of asking “why,” let’s not sell ourselves short of following it all the way to the end. At the end there’s God. He’s the One in control. He’s the only being in the universe that is sovereign. He’s the beginning and the end of all things, including our laments. And that’s probably why we don’t want to follow it all the way to the end because if God is at the end of that trail, then we aren’t just asking why about the cancer. we are asking about the foundations of what we think—what we hope—is true. We are asking about the nature of good and evil. We are wondering about the validity of the love of God. We are pondering the extent of His compassion and wisdom. And in that kind of questioning, the basis of our whole existence is at stake.

That’s why we don’t follow the trial all the way to the end—we’re afraid of what we might find there. So we medicate, dripping spiritual and emotional morphine into ourselves so we don’t have to face the ultimate reality of an uncomfortable conversation with an uncomfortable God.

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Excerpt taken from my book, Wednesdays Were Pretty Normal: A Boy, Cancer, and God.