Living with the tension

This year has already brought us all a great deal of suffering, with all the uprising in the middle east and the catoshrophic events in New Zealand and Japan. With the former, we are left with the more understandable notion of human nature, and how it can only look to its own interests. But the problem of natural disasters causes a great deal more discomfort, and forces one to live with the tension of an all loving God and all the human suffering which just seems to be so unfair.

But one has to live with the tension, or risk going to the extremes to find some form of certainty, where we find both militant atheism and I'm sad to say, theism. And one could say that there is a cost to this so-called certainty (which isn't actually certainty at all) , because in my opinion, fundamentalism is only really based around egotism, or the need to have everything in order so you don't need to live with the tension.

So I will carry on in my uncomfortable place, with the following perspectives:

• My college lecturer wrote a wonderful article about suffering, with the premise being that God created us with a sense of spontaneity, with ability to be a free agent in terms of their decisions. The same principle could be applied to that of creation, where all the natural beauty is a result of spontaneity. But with that beauty, there will always be the opposite, which is the ugly truth of natural disasters.
• Suffering is one of life's given, and there is always a choice about what we do about it.
• The promise of God's redemption plan gives hope beyond reason.