Unfathomable

Two things I find absolutely incomprehensible: another horrific disaster in Indonesia, and this.

I used to be a news junkie, before my little Bug was born. In the last seven (almost eight) months It's been hard just getting a free moment to read news headlines, much less actually read top stories. But beyond that I've found that emotionally it's a lot harder for me to read some of the horrible things that go on in the world.

It is beyond comprehension how any one could physically pick up their own children and throw them to their deaths. People ask, "what could drive someone to do this?" And yet so many people deny the idea that there is any supremely evil force operating in the world. They can believe in God, but not a devil. I say, you want evidence that there is a devil and a hell designed expressly for him, well then look no further than some of the things he has wrought - like driving a man to kill his innocent children and then himself to spite his wife.

Before anyone tries to correct me and say "Oh but the devil didn't make him do it, he chose to do this himself!" Yes, he did mentally accept the idea and physically put it into motion. But I find it hard to believe that an individual just wakes up one day, fine as wine and decides to murder his family. Something has to provide the spark, the urge, the motivation.

The same people who have a hard time accepting the existence of a devil will also tell you that they believe people are "basically good". To that I say, then whence comes a monster like this? Was he defective from birth? Obviously this is a man who once fell in love with a woman and married her, who started a family, who must have felt something the first time he glimpsed his son emerging from the womb. It had to have affected him to hold those babies, to be smiled at by them, to be kissed by them and hugged. How does a man, a father, get to the point where he can destroy something so precious? How could he not have been moved by the sight of fear in his children's' eyes? Where was the pity?

It is this kind of perversion and evil that God tries so hard to save us from. This was a man that God loved and Jesus died for, with children who God loved and Jesus died for. And yet it happened. The free will of the man brought about the killing of his children.

This small-scale incident I find as inexplicable and unfathomable as the deaths of more than five thousand people in the Indonesian earthquake. How can God stand it? I honestly don't know. What must His heart suffer? It is beyond imagining. I don't even know what to say about such things anymore. I know what the Bible says. I know theology. I know doctrine, dogma, and countless ways to argue in defense of my faith. Yet I try to make sense of these tragedies and my mind just sputters. I must be honest about this.

The headlines make my stomach lurch, my throat tightens and my eyes well up. When I saw the story about the man tossing his children off a balcony I just about stopped breathing from the hurt. I turn off the TV and shut down the computer screen. I look away. Not long after I'd given birth a friend who works at a nursing home remarked how difficult it is for women to work there after they have a child.

"They've just brought forth life into the world; and now they absolutely cannot stomach or handle the thought of death. It's just too close, too devastating."

That would explain why I just can't handle the news anymore.